And perhaps we, too, do not need to be literal-minded about a prayer that we may hear, or that we may overhear, roaring its way up past our smooth, beautiful lives rudely to Heaven.

What is the gist of the prayer to God, and to us?

What is it that the men are trying to say in this awful, flaming, blackening metaphor of wishing Lord Devonport dead?

The gist of it is that they mean to say, whether they are right or wrong (like us, as we would say, whether we were right or wrong), they mean to say that they have a right to live.

In other words, the gist of it is that we are like them, and that they are like us.

I, too, in my hour of deepest trial, with no silk hat, with no gloves, with no gilt prayer-book, as I should, have flashed out my will upon my God.  I, too, have cried with Paul, with Job, across my sin—­my sin that very moment heaped up upon my lips—­have broken wildly in upon that still, white floor of Heaven!

And when the dockers break up through, fling themselves upon their God, what is it, after all, but another way of saying, “I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God....”

It may have been wicked in the dockers to address God in this way, but it would have been more wicked in them not to think He could understand.

I believe, for one, that when Jacob wrestled with the angel, God looked on and liked it.

The angel was a mere representative at best, and Jacob was really wrestling with God.

And God knew it and liked it.

Praying to strike Lord Devonport dead was the dockers’ way of saying to God that there was something on their minds that simply could not be said.

I can imagine that this would interest a God, a prayer like the dockers’ prayer, so spent, so desperate, so unreasonable, breaking through to that still, white floor of Heaven!

And it does seem as if, in our more humble, homely, and useful capacity as fellow human beings, it might interest us.

It seems as if, possibly, we might stop criticising people who pray harder than we do, pointing out that wrestling with God is really rather rude—­as if we might stop and see what it means to God and what it means to us, and what there is that we might do, you and I, oh, Gentle Reader, to make it possible for the dockers on Tower Hill to be more polite, perhaps, more polished, as it were, when they speak to God next time.

Perhaps nothing the dockers could do in the way of being violent could be more stupid and wicked than having all these sleek, beautiful, perfect people, twenty-six million of them, all expecting them not to be violent.

In my own quiet, gentle, implacable beauty of spirit, in my own ruthless wisdom on a full stomach, I do not deny that I do most sternly disapprove of the dockers and their violence.