4. It was the _Absence of Technicality_. '_Call!_'--that is all. '_Call upon Me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify Me!_' _Call!_--as a little child calls for his mother. _Call!_--as a drowning man calls for help. _Call!_--as a frenzied woman calls wildly for succor. There are great emergencies in which we do not fastidiously choose our words. It is not the mind but the heart that, at such moments, gives to the tongue its noblest eloquence. The prayer that moves Omnipotence to pity, and summons all the hosts of heaven to help, is not the prayer of nicely rounded periods--Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null--but the prayer of passionate entreaty. It is a _call_--a call such as a doctor receives at dead of night; a call such as the fireman receives when all the alarms are clanging; a call such as the ships receive in mid-ocean, when, hurtling through the darkness and the void, there comes the wireless message, 'S.O.S.' '_Call upon Me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify Me._' Had the text demanded a tinge of technicality it would have been useless to Robinson Crusoe; it would have mocked the simple soul of poor Mary Avenel. But a call! Robinson Crusoe can call! Mary Avenel can call! Anybody can call! Wherefore, '_call_,' says the text, '_just call, and He will deliver_!' IV But I need not have resorted to fiction for a testimony to the value and efficacy of the text--striking and significant as that testimony is. I need have summoned neither Daniel Defoe nor Sir Walter Scott. I could have dispensed with both Robinson Crusoe and Mary Avenel. I could have called a King and Queen to bear all the witness that I wanted. King Edward the Seventh! And Queen Alexandra! For Robinson Crusoe's text is King Edward's text; and Mary Avenel's text is Queen Alexandra's text. There are men and women still living who remember those dark and dreadful days of December, 1871, when it seemed as if the life of King Edward--then Prince of Wales--hung by a single thread. Nobody thought of anything else; the whole world seemed to surround that royal sickbed; the Empire was in a state of breathless suspense. Sunday, the tenth of December, was set aside as a Day of Solemn Intercession, and the strained intensity of the public anxiety reflected itself in crowded but hushed congregations.