"The world needs a new standard of appraisal. It honors the man whose success bulks to the eye. It needs to be a little more discriminating; to find out why some men failed, and to honor them because they are failures. Some of the greatest men in America and in history were failures. Socrates with his cup was a failure. Jesus was a failure. It was written on his back in lines of blistering welts. It was nailed into his palms, stabbed into his brow, hissed into his ear as he died. "Re-reading at this midnight hour what I have written, I perceive that it sounds slightly frenzied. But my soul just now is slightly frenzied. If I wrote calmly, unegoistically, it would be a lie. What is written is what I feel. "Here and there some will approve this document. More will sneer at it. But it is mine. It is I. I sign it. It is my last will and testament in this community where once—daring to boast again—I have been a power. "Friends—and enemies alike!—this final word. "I have not grasped much, but this: To be true. When somebody trusts you worthily, make good. Be true, children, to the plans and to the hopes of parents. Be true, lad, to the impetuous girl who has trusted you with more than she should have trusted you. Be true, women, to your lovers and your husbands; men to your wives, your partners, your fellow men, your patrons; to your talents, your opportunities, your country, your age, your world! Be true to God! If you have no God, be true to your highest conception of what God ought to be. "It sounds like a homily. It is a principle. You can multiply it indefinitely. It runs like a scarlet thread through religion, and it will go all around the borders of life. "Eternal Loyalty is the Price of true Success. "To this conviction I subscribe my name, myself and everything that still remains to me. "JOHN HAMPSTEAD, "Pastor of All People’s Church." John felt that he wrote this and that he signed it in the presence of the Presence. The address and not the sermon was his valedictory. *CHAPTER XXXIX* *THE CUP TOO FULL* While the Monday morning papers played up the "Address to the People", in the evening John noticed that his name had slipped off the front page. This was at once a relief and a bitterness. It told him that he was done for; that, as a matter of news, he was only a corpse waiting for the funeral pyre. That pyre was a matter to which Elder Burbeck was attending, assisted by a committee of fellow zealots—male and female—who were industriously conducting a house-to-house canvass of the entire membership of All People’s during the hours between Sunday at one and Monday night at eight. Despite the lofty mood of self-sacrifice into which the man had worked himself, the knowledge of all this busy bell-ringing and its sinister purpose operated irritatingly on the skin of Hampstead. It made his flesh creep with annoyance that grew toward anger.