His haggard face, the stern solemnity of his voice, the sweep of his long arms, the gleam of his deep-set eyes, and the vigor of his inexorable logic, drove that sermon home to the listeners.

He was the keenest of critics, and often merciless.  He was present at a camp-meeting near San Jose, but too feeble to preach.  I was there, and disabled from, the effects of the California poison-oak.  That deceitful shrub!  Its pink leaves smile at you as pleasantly as sin, and, like sin, it leaves its sting.  The “preachers’ tent” was immediately in the rear of “the stand,” and Sanders and I lay inside and listened to the sermons.  He was in one of his caustic moods, and his comments were racy enough, though not helpful to devotion.

“There! he yelled, clapped his hands, stamped, and—­said nothing!”

The criticism was just:  the brother in the stand was making a great noise, but there was not much meaning in what he said.

“He made one point only—­a pretty good apology for Lazarus’s poverty.”

This was said at the close of an elaborate discourse on “The Rich Man and Lazarus,” by a brother who sometimes got “in the brush.”

“He isn’t touching his text—­he knows no more theology than a guinea-pig.  Words, words, words!”

This last criticism was directed against a timid young divine, who was badly frightened, but who has since shown that there was good metal in him.  If he had known what was going on just behind him, he would have collapsed entirely in that tentative effort at preaching the gospel.

Sanders kept up this running fire of criticism at every service, cutting to the bone, at every blow, and giving me new light on homiletics, if he did not promote my enjoyment of the preaching.  He had read largely and thought deeply, and his incisive intellect had no patience with what was feeble or pointless.

Disease settled upon his lungs, and he rapidly declined.  His strong frame grew thinner and thinner, and his mind alternated between moods of morbid bitterness and transient buoyancy.  As the end approached, his bitter moods were less frequent, and an unwonted tenderness came into his words and tones.  He went to the Lokonoma Springs, in the hills of Napa county, and in their solitudes he adjusted himself to the great change that was drawing near.  The capacious blue sky that arched above him, the sighing of the gentle breeze through the solemn pines, the repose of the encircling mountains, bright with sunrise, or purpling in the twilight, distilled the soothing influences of nature into his spirit, and there was a great calm within.  Beyond those California hills the hills of God rose in their supernal beauty before the vision of his faith, and when the summons came for him one midnight, his soul leaped to meet it in a ready and joyous response.  On a white marble slab, at the “Stone Church,” in Suisun Valley, is this inscription: 

Rev. John Sanders.