sombre woods of Palestine.  The voice of the pine helps us to interpret the Hebrew genius.  Its range of expression is not so great as that of the oak or the elm or the willow or the beech, but how much richer it is and more welcome in its monotony!  How much more profoundly our souls echo it!  How much more deeply does it seem to be in harmony with the spirit of the air!  What grandeur, what tenderness, what pathos, what heart-searchingness in the swells and cadences of its ’Andante Maestoso,’ when the wind wrestles with it and brings out all its soul.”

To the graces and gifts we have mentioned it is but necessary to add that King’s gospel of religion was in itself a veritable glad tidings to the people.  Not a mere deliverance of doubt, or morality veneered with icy culture, but faith clear, strong and radiantly beautiful.  His thought of God, of Man, of Immortality, was full of comfort and inspiration.  “God is the infinite Christ,” he was wont to say.  “Jesus revealed under human limitations the mercy and love of the Father.”

King rivalled Theodore Parker in the strength and tenderness of his faith that “man is the child of God.”  Saint and sinner, master and slave, learned and ignorant, rich and poor, all are children of the Infinite God, — born of His love ere the world was, certain of His love when the world shall have passed away.  He felt that if this is not true, there is not enough left of religion to so much as interest an earnest soul.  Religion is everything, — the sun in the heavens, — or it is a star too distant, faint and cold, to cast upon our path a single ray of light.

And the unseen world!  How very real it was to this man of faith and prayer.  The immortal life is the life.  These earthly years but lead us thither.  Such was his faith.  In excess of world-wisdom we say, “Eternity is here and now.”  Well and good.  But if we lose for a kind of technicality the dear old trust in a higher and nobler life beyond the swift-coming night of death, what have we gained?  Said our beloved preacher, our “Saint of the Pacific Coast,” as he lay dying, “I see a great future before me.”  Without that vision he would not have been Starr King.

Part V In Retrospect

Above that of all other men the fame of the orator is transient.  Eloquence may be “logic on fire” as Dr. Lyman Beecher defined it.  Oratory may be, as Emerson said, “the noblest expression of purely personal energy.”  But it is so far personal, so allied to grace of gesture, to charm of manner, to melody of voice, to perfection of speech, to a commanding presence, that it carries to the future but a fraction of its power.  The cold type and the insentiate page constitute at best only the record of nature’s rarest gift.