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But there are times when politics, blown to white-heat by the Bethels, will drive even religion from the minds of the fisher-folk, as we may judge by a story told by Mr. Hudson. It was after the visit of a lady missioner, who usually reaped a rich harvest of converts; some one asked the minister how many souls had been won on this occasion.
The neighboring Bethels were announcing their evening performance, and the sound penetrated into my cell. True believers were wending their way to church, while the heretic, who had dared to deride their creed and denounce their hypocrisy, was regaling himself on dry bread in one of their dungeons. The bells rang out against each other with a wild glee as I paced my narrow floor.
How could he be so rude to the light and leading of Fallacy Street? It could only have been through ignorance; it could only have been because he really did not know how truly great the Miss Ponsonbys were. But then, to spend all his time with the Bethels, strange, odd people, with the queerest manners and an uncertain history, whom Fallacy Street had decided to cut!
Indeed the shadow of Randal lurked in the room in a manner that would have pleased that young gentleman intensely had he known it. Clare had it continually before her, urging her, advising her, commanding her. At the mention of the Bethels, Harry looked up sharply. "I think we had better leave them out of the discussion." His voice trembled a little. "Why? Are they so much to you?
The establishment of Bethels in most of our own seaports, and in many foreign ports frequented by our vessels, where the gospel is regularly preached and the opening of "Sailors' Homes," which I have before mentioned, where there are usually religious services and other good influences, are doing a vast deal in this cause. But it is to be remembered that the sailor's home is on the deep.
To leave the melancholy and futuristic atmosphere of seminaries and bethels where the ghosts and penalties of millions of sins cast down their hearts, where few baths and drab clothes, dark homes and poor food, made all conscious of dwelling in a vale of tears, and after half a year or more of hard, ship fare and the rough discipline of a tossing windjammer, to find themselves in the most magnificent scenes on the globe, and amid the richest bounty, was trial enough of the unstable soul of man.
Paul's, the old Dutch Church in Fulton street, and a few seamen's bethels along the river, are the only places of worship left to the dwellers in the lower part of the city, who are chiefly the poor and needy. Little or no care is taken of this part of the population, and yet it would seem good missionary ground.
Yet the correct and conventional Browning could also fire up for lawlessness "frenetic to be free." He was hail-fellow well-met, we are told but is this part of a Browning legend? with tramps and gipsies, and he wandered gladly, whether through devout sympathy or curiosity of mood we know not, into Little Bethels and other tents of spiritual Ishmael.
Miss Ponsonby told me this afternoon it has become common talk the things he does, I mean. She did not want to say anything, but I made her. He goes down continually to some low public-house in the Cove; he is with those Bethels all day, and will see nothing of any of the decent people in the place he is becoming a common byword."
The sacred emblem of the Heliopolitan Sun-god reminds us forcibly of the Semitic bethels or baetyli, the sacred stones of Palestine, and may give yet another hint of the Semitic origin of the Heliopolitan cult.
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