to my career have only shown me the baseness of human nature, and the pettiness of human ambition.  There are men who will fill these places and do this work, and who want and will choose nothing better.  Let them have all the good they can get out of such things.  But the minister of the gospel who comes down from the height of his high calling to engage in this scramble, does that which makes devils laugh and angels weep.”

This was the substance of what he said on this point.  I have never forgotten it.  I am glad he came to my room that night.  What else he said I cannot write, but the remembrance of it is like to that of a melody that lingers in my soul when the music has ceased.

“I thank you for your sermon today—­you never told a single lie.”

This was his remark at the close of a service in Minna street one Sunday.

“What is the meaning of that remark?”

That the exaggerations of the pulpit repel thousands from the truth.  Moderation of statement is a rare excellence.  A deep spiritual insight enables a religious teacher to shade his meanings where it is required.  Deep piety is genius for the pulpit.  Mediocrity in native endowments, conjoined with spiritual stolidity in the pulpit, does more harm than all the open apostles of infidelity combined.  They take the divinity out of religion and kill the faith of those who hear them.  None but inspired men should stand in the pulpit.  Religion is not in the intellect merely.  The world by wisdom cannot know God.  The attempt to find out God by the intellect has always been, and always must be, the completest of failures.  Religion is the sphere of the supernatural, and stands not in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.  It has often happened that men of the first order of talent and the highest culture have been converted by the preaching of men of weak intellect and limited education, but who were directly taught of God, and had drunk deep from the fount of living truth in personal experience of the blessed power of Christian faith.  It was through the intellect that the devil seduced the first pair.  When we rest in the intellect only, we miss God.  With the heart only can man believe unto righteousness.  The evidence that satisfies is based on consciousness.  Consciousness is the satisfying demonstration.

“Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.  But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit.  They can be revealed in no other way.”

Here was the secret he had learned, and that had brought a new joy and glory into his life as it neared the sunset.  The great change dated from a dark and rainy night as he walked home in Sacramento City.  Not more tangible to Saul of Tarsus was the vision, or more distinctly audible the voice that spoke to him on the way to Damascus, than was the revelation of Jesus Christ to this lawyer of penetrating intellect,