This indignant concern for the reputation of All People’s was rather a surprising revelation to Hampstead. He had fallen into the way of thinking that he had made All People’s; that he and All People’s were one. That the congregation could have any purpose that did not include his purpose was not thinkable. He had never conceived of it as a social organism, with self-consciousness, with pride, with a head to be held up and a reputation to be sustained. To him All People’s was not a society of persons with a pose. It was an association of individuals, each more or less weak, more or less dependent in their spiritual nature upon each other and upon him; the whole banded together to help each other and to help others like themselves. He had thought of himself as the instrument of All People’s in its work of human salvage. But he now discovered that in these four years All People’s had suffered from an over extension of the ego. It had been spoiled by prosperity and public approbation, just as other congregations, or individuals, might be or have been. The admiration of the members for him as their pastor, their humble obedience to his will, was in part due, not to his spiritual ascendancy, not to his conspicuously successful labors as a helper of humankind in so many different ways, but to the fact that these activities of the minister won him that public admiration and approval which shed a glamour also upon the congregation and upon the individual members of the congregation. Because of this, they worshipped him, honored him, and palavered over him to a point where Hampstead, no doubt as unconsciously as the congregation and as dangerously, had suffered an over-extension of his own ego. But deflation of spirit had come to him swiftly. Now his own pride and his own self-sufficiency had all been shot away. If any remained, the effect of this Sunday morning service was quite sufficient to perform the final operation of removal. He was to preach that night from the text: "If God is for us, who is against us." He gave up the idea. It sounded egotistical. He preached instead his farewell sermon, though without a word of farewell in it, from the text: "Brethren, even if a man be overtaken in any trespass, ye who are spiritual restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; looking to thyself lest thou also be tempted." That was what the pastor of All People’s was trying to do,—to restore a man. In preaching this sermon, he forgot that this was his valedictory, forgot himself, forgot everything but the great mission of spiritual reconstruction upon which he had labored and proposed to labor as long as life was in him, no matter what yokes and scars were put upon him. In it he reached the oratorical height of his career, which was not necessarily lofty.