His face looked to me like that of a lion and his long gray locks, reaching almost to his shoulders, supported this illusion. The church provided a setting worthy of his striking appearance. The grand organ behind and above the pulpit supplied a harmonious musical background to the magnificent singing of the large choir. I felt that the thrilling music was tuning me up for the sermon which the great orator was about to preach, and I was right. The sermon was free from involved theological analysis; it dealt with simple questions of human life and its determination by human habits. It was a dramatic and poetic presentation of the little sermons which Jim preached in the Cortlandt Street boiler-room, but in a very plain form of statement. The fact, however, that I found many spiritual bonds between great Plymouth Church and Jim’s humble boiler-room shows me to-day why Beecher touched the heart-strings of the plain people. He helped them to solve some of their problems of life just as Jim tried to help me solve mine. But Jim was not a cultured man and he delivered his chunks of practical wisdom in the same offhand manner in which he fed shovelfuls of coal to the busy fires under his boilers. Beecher, on the other hand, was a great orator and a great poet, and every little grain of wisdom stored up in human life was placed before his congregation with all the force of his overpowering personality and with all the embellishments with which the imagination of a poetical nature could clothe it. I felt thrills creeping over my whole body as I listened, and the effect was not only mental and spiritual, but also physical, undoubtedly because of the quickening of the blood’s circulation produced by the mental exhilaration. Bilharz, although a rigid Roman Catholic, admitted, after hearing Beecher several times, that great sermons are possible even without any theological flavoring. “But,” said he in his usual dramatic way, “everything is possible to a poetic soul which is propelled by the wings of a genius.” A remarkable concession from a man of Bilharz’s training and mental attitude!