“The Day of the Lord is at hand, at hand,
      His storms roll up the sky;
    The nations sleep starving on heaps of gold,
      The dreamers toss and sigh. 
    The night is darkest before the morn,
    When the pain is sorest the child is born,
      And the Day of the Lord is at hand.

    “Gather you, gather you, hounds of hell,
      Famine, and Plague, and War,
    Idleness, Bigotry, Cant and Misrule,
      Gather, and fall in the snare. 
    Hireling and Mammonite, Bigot and Knave,
    Crawl to the battlefield, sneak to your grave,
      In the Day of the Lord at hand.”

John did not hear Greenwood’s voice among the singers, but at the close of the second verse it rose above all others.  “Lads and lasses of the chapel singing-pew,” he cried, “we will better that kind of stuff.  Sing up to the tune of Olivet,” and to this majestic melody he started in a clarion-like voice Toplady’s splendid hymn,

    “Lo!  He comes with clouds descending,
      Once for favored sinners slain,
    Thousand, thousand saints attending,
      Swell the triumph of his train. 
        Hallelujah! 
      God appears on earth to reign.”

The words were as familiar as their mother tongue, and Greenwood’s authoritative voice in chapel, mill, and trade meetings, was quite as intimate and potential.  They answered his request almost as automatically as the looms answered the signal for their movement or stoppage; for music quickly fires a Yorkshire heart and a hymn led by Jonathan Greenwood was a temptation no man or woman present could resist.  Very soon he gave them the word “Home,” and they scattered in every direction, singing the last verse.  Then Greenwood’s voice rose higher and higher, jubilant, triumphant in its closing lines,

    “Yea, amen!  Let all adore Thee,
      High on thy eternal throne;
    Saviour, take the power and glory,
      Claim the kingdom for thine own. 
        Jah Jehovah! 
      Everlasting God come down.”

Greenwood’s joyful enthusiasm was more than John could encounter at that hour.  He did not stop to speak with him, but rode swiftly home.  He saw and felt the brooding trouble and knew the question of more wage and shorter hours, though now a smoldering one, might at any hour become a burning one, only there was the coming war.  If the men went on strike, he could then reasonably lock his factory gates.  No, he could not.  The inner John Hatton would not permit the outer man to do such a thing.  His looms must work while he had a pound of cotton to feed them.

This resolution, warm and strong in his heart, cheered him, and he hastened home.  Then he wondered how it would be with him there, and a feeling of unhappiness conquered for a moment.  But John’s mental bravery was the salt to all his other virtues, and mental bravery does not quail before an uncertainty.