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"Well," said Stairs, "it seems to me your view of our pilgrimage is a very kindly, and perhaps flattering one; and as I have said, your aims as a citizen of the Empire and a lover of the Old Country could not have warmer sympathizers than Reynolds and myself; but " "Mind, I'm not trying to turn your religious teaching to any ignoble purpose," said Crondall, quickly.
I am only quoting the best observers of the time in this description of public feeling when John Crondall made his great recruiting speech for The Citizens. The event proved my chief to have been absolutely right in his reckoning, absolutely sound in his judgment. He had urged from the beginning that The Citizens and the Canadian preachers had a common aim.
From that afternoon I date the beginning of the end of my Daily Gazette engagement. Some men in my shoes would have moved to success from this point; gaining from it either complete unscrupulousness, or the bold decision which would have made them important as friends or enemies. For my part I was simply slackened by the episode. I met John Crondall several times again.
But John Crondall had relinquished nothing of his activity as a lieutenant, and continued to spend a good share of his time in South Africa, while, wherever he was, continuing to devote his energies to the same cause. As for his material interests, Crewe assured me that Crondall knew no more of business, South African or otherwise, than a schoolboy.
I was often tempted to speak to Constance of the change I saw in John Crondall, and one day in Carlisle I yielded to the temptation. At one and the same time I both craved and dreaded definite news of the understanding between the woman I loved and the man I liked and respected more than any other.
I wanted Constance's confidence; yet I felt as though my life would be stripped bare by definite knowledge that she was betrothed. So, moth-like, I hovered about the perilous subject, with a nervous endeavour to lend natural composure to my voice. "Do you notice any particular change in John Crondall of late?" I asked.
Crondall bowed to that, and added a line from his favourite poet: "Then it's the grace of God in those 'Who are neither children nor gods, but men in a world of men!" he said. No wise man has ever doubted, so far as I know, that simple piety, simple religion, "British Christianity," was the motive force at work behind the whole of the revival movement.
"Well," said the latter, smiling, first at Crondall, and then at me, "our plans are simplicity itself. In Canada we have not risen yet to the cultivation of much diplomacy. We don't understand anything of your high politics, and we don't believe in roundabout methods.
Van Homrey, Constance, Crondall, myself, Sir Herbert Tate, and Forbes Thompson, joined the preachers that evening, quite informally, at their very modest supper board.
But, as John Crondall said in the course of the Guildhall speech of his which, as has often been said, brought the Disciplinary Regiments into being, "We cannot expect to cure in a year ills that we have studiously fostered through the better part of a century."
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