He had been standing as awkwardly as a new patient in a doctor’s waiting-room. Would They resent him; ask him to get out? But the usher who tiptoed toward him, a man black-silk black, with a flat nose and heavy lips, smiled at him as though in the House of God they were friends. He was wearing a blue-gray herring-bone suit exactly like the newest pride of Neil’s father. He touched Neil’s arm politely, led him halfway down, gravely motioned, and Neil had another First in his career as a Negro. He sat down between two colored people and they seemed to him very much like people.

On his left was a small woman who ignored him, as her lips moved in rapid silent prayer; on the other side was a large man, black as a cellar, who was probably a carpenter or a painter and who bowed good-naturedly in answer to Neil’s flustered nod.

He looked over the mimeographed church bulletin, and wondered about the title of the pastor’s sermon: “Delivered from Corruption.” Would it be something funny and inferior and Negroid, for all that doubtful pastoral Ph.D. degree, or would it be just another of the Baptist sermons that all these years (once a month or so) he had been chewing without tasting?

Then, through a narrow side door to the chancel, the Reverend Dr. Evan Brewster made entrance. For a moment he seemed to be showing off, as he halted to look over his flock, to stare doubtfully at Neil. But the theatricality, if it was such, lasted only a moment; then Dr. Brewster chatted with the choir, muttered something to an usher—Neil was afraid that it might be a scurrility about himself—and to the reading stand, a priest in his temple, confident and serene.

Evan Brewster was a large man, black as a japanned deed-box, with the shoulders of a roustabout and just the kinks of hair, the pushed-in nose, bulbous mouth, sloping forehead, thin legs that Neil had seen in every picture of a black dock-walloper, every primeval brute who regularly assaults fatherly white policemen. He was everything that would give a petal-pale white lady a shock, and if Neil was less delicate, still he was disapproving that this bruiser should mock the holy Baptist pulpit by wearing, over his rather shiny blue suit, the canonical primness of a Geneva gown.

Dr. Brewster was silent, looking at them, and Neil slowly permitted himself to see that never, in any human face, had he known such gentleness, such kindness, such honest and manly sweetness, such outpouring love for all living beings and all life. And when he spoke, his voice was that of any vigorous and scholarly man who had gone from a literate family to a shrewd university, the voice of a man who could also be intolerably eloquent.

“Friends—and especially the new friends whom we welcome here this morning—may we start with singing How Firm a Foundation, Ye Saints of the Lord? It is a Battle Hymn of the Republic for these days of battle.”