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 pain that I dare
not tell you of; in 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 trace of failure,
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 sun shone down, as it had done for six thousand years; it
shone on open problems in the lives of these men and women, of
these dogs and horses 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 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.
There was another light by which the world was seen that day,
rarer than the sunshine, and purer. It fell on the dense
crowds,--upon the just and the unjust. It went into the fogs of
the fetid dens from which the coarser light was barred, into the
deepest mires of body where a soul could wallow, and made them
clear.
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