And yet every now and then he would be arresting. In his prime, Joan
felt, he must have been a great preacher. Even now, decrepit and wheezy,
he was capable of flashes of magnetism, of eloquence. The passage where
he pictured the Garden of Gethsemane. The fair Jerusalem, only hidden
from us by the shadows. So easy to return to. Its soft lights shining
through the trees, beckoning to us; its mingled voices stealing to us
through the silence, whispering to us of its well-remembered ways, its
pleasant places, its open doorways, friends and loved ones waiting for
us. And above, the rock-strewn Calvary: and crowning its summit, clear
against the starlit sky, the cold, dark cross. "Not perhaps to us the
bleeding hands and feet, but to all the bitter tears. Our Calvary may be
a very little hill compared with the mountains where Prometheus suffered,
but to us it is steep and lonely."

There he should have stopped. It would have been a good note on which to
finish. But it seemed there was another point he wished to make. Even
to the sinner Calvary calls. To Judas--even to him the gates of the life-
giving Garden of Gethsemane had not been closed. "With his thirty pieces
of silver he could have stolen away. In some distant crowded city of the
Roman Empire have lived unknown, forgotten. Life still had its
pleasures, its rewards. To him also had been given the choice. The
thirty pieces of silver that had meant so much to him! He flings them at
the feet of his tempters. They would not take them back. He rushes out
and hangs himself. Shame and death. With his own hands he will build
his own cross, none to help him. He, too--even Judas, climbs his
Calvary. Enters into the fellowship of those who through all ages have
trod its stony pathway."

Joan waited till the last of the congregation had disappeared, and then