e not lost all courage for the dockers who made it.

They still want something! They still are men! They still stand up when
they speak to Heaven! There is some stuff in them yet! They make heaven
and earth ring to get a word with God!

This all means something to God, probably.

Perhaps it might mean something to us.

We are superior persons, it is true. We do not pray the way they pray.

We believe in being more self-controlled. We take our breakfasts
quietly, and with high collars and silk hats, and with gilt prayer-books
we go into the presence of our Maker. We believe in being calm and
reasonable.

But if men who have not enough to eat are so half-dead and so worthless
that they can feel calm and reasonable about it, and can always be
precisely right and always say precisely the right thing--if, with their
wives fainting in their arms and their babies crying for food, all that
those dockers had character enough to do, up on Tower Hill, was to make
a polite, smooth, Anglican prayer to God--a prayer like a kind of
blessing before not having any meat, and not that awful, fateful, husky
cry to Heaven, a roar or rending of their hearts up to the black and
empty sky--what would such men have been good for? What hope or courage
could any one have for them, for such men at such a time, if they would
not, if they could not, come thundering and breaking into His presence,
fifty thousand strong, to get what they want?

I may not know God, but whatever else He is, I feel sure that He is not
a precise stickler-god, that He is not pompous about spiritual manners,
a huge, literal-minded, Proper Person, who cannot make allowances for
human nature, who cannot hear what humble, rough men like these, hewing
their vast desires for Him out of darkness, and out of little foolish
words, are trying to say to Him.

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.