CHAPTER X

A MINISTERIAL CRISIS

If any parishioner of Christ Church comforted himself with the thought that the Reverend Robert Farrar had wisely decided to forego his animadversions on the self-constituted privileges of wealth in the Church, or his appeals for social equality in the House of God, he was destined to experience a rude awakening. For, not only did the rector resume his protests and appeals from the pulpit, but he inaugurated and carried on a personal campaign among his people for the adoption of his revolutionary ideas. They were revolutionary indeed. He preached social justice, and Christian socialism. And while a critical analysis of his sermons would doubtless have failed to unearth a single unorthodox phrase, nevertheless he advocated a doctrine which learned commentators had hitherto failed to discover in the written Word of God, and which the pious and profound compilers of the Book of Common Prayer had certainly never contemplated. He dwelt much, as had been his custom, on the lowly origin and humble environment of the Saviour of mankind. He did not minimize the spiritual significance of His mission, as have some professed followers of the Nazarene in order that they might magnify Him as a social prophet. Nor had he great sympathy with those materialistic adherents of the Master who hold that the purpose of His teaching was not so much to point the way to spiritual regeneration as to arouse the Galilean peasants, by parable and precept, to a sense of their economic wrongs, and to instill into their minds a hearty desire