impossible to give any account of the preacher's gestures or dramatic
pauses, or of the modulations and inflections of his voice, which now
seemed to be freighted with passionate earnestness, now quivered in
pathetic appeal, and now grew musical in the dying fall of some poetic
phrase. The effect was astonishing. While he was speaking simply of the
text as embodying the very spirit of the Glad Tidings which Christ first
delivered to the world, not a few women were quietly weeping. It was
impossible, they felt, to listen unmoved to that voice.

But when he went on to show the necessity of renunciation as the first
step towards the perfecting of character, even the hard, keen faces of
the men before him began to relax and change expression. He dwelt, in
turn, upon the startling novelty of Christ's teaching and its singular
success. He spoke of the shortness of human life, the vanity of human
effort, and the ultimate reward of those who sacrifice themselves for
others, as Jesus did, and out of the same divine spirit of love. He thus
came to the peroration. He began it in the manner of serious
conversation.

All over the United States the besetting sin of the people was the
desire of wealth. He traced the effects of the ignoble struggle for gain
in the degradation of character, in the debased tone of public and
private life. The main current of existence being defiled, his duty was
clear. Even more than other men he was pledged to resist the evil
tendency of the time. In some ways, no doubt, he was as frail and faulty
as the weakest of his hearers, but to fail in this respect would be, he
thought, to prove himself unworthy of his position. That a servant of
Christ in the nineteenth century should seek wealth, or allow it in any
way to influence his conduct, appeared to him to be much the same
unpardonable sin as cowardice in a soldier or dishonesty in a man of