Vulgar American life? He thought it a life more potent, more tragic in
its history and prophecy, than any that has gone before. People called
him a fanatic. It may be that he was one: yet the uncouth old man, sick
in soul from some gnawing pain of his own life, looked into the depths
of human loss with a mad desire to set it right. On the very faces
of those who sneered at him he found some traces of failure or pain,
something that his heart carried up to God with a loud and exceeding
bitter cry. The voice of the world, he thought, went up to heaven a
discord, unintelligible, hopeless,--the great blind world, astray since
the first ages! Was there no hope, no help?
The hot sun shone down, as it had done for six thousand years; it shone
on open problems in the lives of these men and women who walked the
streets, problems whose end and beginning no eye could read. There were
places where it did not shine: down in the fetid cellars, in the slimy
cells of the prison yonder: what riddles of human life lay there he
dared not think of. God knows how the man groped for the light,--for any
voice to make earth and heaven clear to him.
So the hot, long day wore on, for all of them. There was another light
by which the world was seen that day, rarer than the sunshine, purer.
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