For an hour Paul talked, foretelling the new heaven and the new earth illuminated by a unified religion, impelled forward by the concerted energies of a unified race. He suggested, in imaginative flights, ways and means of making it feasible, appealed for support, speculating, affirming, convincing. Through it all he was exultingly conscious that this, at last, was the essence of his famous message. A message neither startling nor original, but grand, with a grandeur that could only be measured by the intensity with which it was projected, the zeal with which it inspired those who were destined to carry it into the highways and by-ways. His ego was not delivering the message; the message was being delivered through it, by a power as much greater than himself as winds are greater than the ships they drive across the ocean. He was free from self-consciousness now as he had never been—not even on the far-distant occasion when, as a precocious cabin-boy, he had evoked the spirit of Beethoven and caused it to speak, through him, to a roomful of seamen. The difference between the two occasions was that to-night he was able to bring the force of experience, reason, spiritual exaltation, moral fervour, and impassioned words to bear on his audience—an audience, moreover, of virtual disciples, predisposed to accept the message which was being transmitted through him.
Of all the faces that crowded about him, Paul was conscious of only one steeled against his appeal. The Italian-American vagabond, a man who, born perverse, had let his mind become distorted still more by disease and hard-usage, and then become enamoured of his own distortions, had from the outset of their acquaintance shown a personal antipathy, an antipathy which Paul, loath to argue with an insincere man whom he had aided, had taken no pains to break down. When Paul brought his impromptu speech to an end, the anarchist waited for
