Suddenly the speaker said:  “The secret of that man’s power lies, first, in his study of the Bible.”  Ruth started and came down like a bomb-shell from her wondrous height.  The Bible! copies of which lay carelessly on every table of her father’s elegantly furnished house unstudied and unthought of.  How very strange to ascribe the power of the great intellect to the study of one book that was more or less familiar to every Sunday-school boy.  “Second, in short, simple, homely language.”  Ruth smiled now.  Dr. Cuyler was growing absurd, as if it were not the most common thing in the world to use simple, homely language!  No Spurgeons could be manufactured in that way, she was sure.  “Third, mighty earnestness to save souls.”  Here was a point concerning which Ruth knew nothing.

Dr. Cuyler’s manner put tremendous force into the forceful words, and carried conviction with them.  She wondered how a really mighty earnestness to save souls made a man appear?  She wondered whether she had ever seen such a one; she went rapidly over the list of her acquaintances in the church.  She smiled to herself a sarcastic, contemptuous smile; she had met them all at parties, concerts, festivals, and the like; she had seen them on occasions when nothing seemed to possess them but to have a good time like the rest of the world.

Like the rest of the world, Ruth reasoned and decided from her chance meetings with the outside life of these Christians, forgetting that she had never seen one of them in their closets before God; rather, she knew nothing about these closets, nor the experiences learned there, and could only reason from outside life.  This being the case, what a pity that her verdict of those lives should have called forth only that contemptuous smile!  Wandering off in this train of thought, she lost the speaker’s next point, but was called back by his solemn, ringing close.

“Put these together, melt them down with the love of Christ, and you have a Spurgeon.  God be thanked for such a piece of hand work as he!”

Another start and another retrospect. Did she know any people who put these together; who made a real, earnest, constant study of the Bible as school girls studied their Latin grammars, and who were really eager to save souls because they had the love of Christ in their hearts, and who said so in plain simple language?  “Does he, I wonder?” she said to herself.  “I wonder if his sermons sound like that?  I should like to hear him preach just once.  Oh, dear! if he isn’t running off to Moody and Sankey.  It is a sermon after all!”

On the whole, Ruth was disgusted.  Her brain was in a whirl; she was being compelled to hear sermons on every hand.  She was sick of it.  They had been great men of whom she had heard, and she admired them all; she wanted the secret of their power, but she didn’t want it to be made out of such commonplace material as was in the hands of every child.  She did not know what she wanted—­only that she had come out to be entertained and to revel in her love of heroes, and she had been pinned down to the one thought that real men were made of those who found their power in their Bible and on their knees.