On the third Sunday night of his denunciation I was there in that Kensington chapel, and I heard him.  And the wild talk he talked!  He seemed like a man delirious with inspiration.

The people sat quite spell-bound, while Mackay’s prophesying voice ranged up and down through all the modulations of thunder, from the hurrying mutter to the reverberant shock and climax:  and those who came to scoff remained to wonder.

Put simply, what he said was this:  That there was undoubtedly some sort of Fate, or Doom, connected with the Poles of the earth in reference to the human race:  that man’s continued failure, in spite of continual efforts, to reach them, abundantly and super-abundantly proved this; and that this failure constituted a lesson—­and a warning—­which the race disregarded at its peril.

The North Pole, he said, was not so very far away, and the difficulties in the way of reaching it were not, on the face of them, so very great:  human ingenuity had achieved a thousand things a thousand times more difficult; yet in spite of over half-a-dozen well-planned efforts in the nineteenth century, and thirty-one in the twentieth, man had never reached:  always he had been baulked, baulked, by some seeming chance—­some restraining Hand:  and herein lay the lesson—­herein the warning.  Wonderfully—­really wonderfully—­like the Tree of Knowledge in Eden, he said, was that Pole:  all the rest of earth lying open and offered to man—­but That persistently veiled and ‘forbidden.’  It was as when a father lays a hand upon his son, with:  ’Not here, my child; wheresoever you will—­but not here.’

But human beings, he said, were free agents, with power to stop their ears, and turn a callous consciousness to the whispers and warning indications of Heaven; and he believed, he said, that the time was now come when man would find it absolutely in his power to stand on that 90th of latitude, and plant an impious right foot on the head of the earth—­just as it had been given into the absolute power of Adam to stretch an impious right hand, and pluck of the Fruit of Knowledge; but, said he—­his voice pealing now into one long proclamation of awful augury—­just as the abuse of that power had been followed in the one case by catastrophe swift and universal, so, in the other, he warned the entire race to look out thenceforth for nothing from God but a lowering sky, and thundery weather.

The man’s frantic earnestness, authoritative voice, and savage gestures, could not but have their effect upon all; as for me, I declare, I sat as though a messenger from Heaven addressed me.  But I believe that I had not yet reached home, when the whole impression of the discourse had passed from me like water from a duck’s back.  The Prophet in the twentieth century was not a success.  John Baptist himself, camel-skin and all, would, have met with only tolerant shrugs.  I dismissed Mackay from my mind with the thought:  ‘He is behind his age, I suppose.’