"I failed to-night," he said, once, at the superintendent's fire. "It was awfully kind of the boys to listen to me so patiently. Did you notice how attentive they were? I tell you, the boys are _good_ to me! Maybe I was a little rough on them to-night. But somehow all this unnecessary and terrible wickedness enrages me. And nobody else much seems to care about it. And I'm their minister. And I yearn to have the souls of these boys awakened. I've just _got_ to stand up and tell them the truth about themselves and give them the same old Message that I heard when I was a boy. I don't know, but it's kind of queer about ministers of the gospel," he went on. "We've got two Creations now, and three Genesises. But take a minister. It wouldn't matter to me if a brother minister fell from grace. I'd pick him out of the mud and never think of it again. It wouldn't cost _me_ much to forgive him. I know that we're all human and liable to sin. But when an ordained minister gets up in his pulpit and dodges his duty--when he gets up and dodges the truth--why, bah! _I've got no time for him!_" XV CAUSE AND EFFECT This sort of preaching--this genuine and practical ministry consistently and unremittingly carried on for love of the men, and without prospect of gain--wins respect and loyal affection. The dogged and courageous method will be sufficiently illustrated in the tale of the Big Scotchman of White Pine--to Higgins almost a forgotten incident of fourteen years' service. The Big Scotchman was discovered drunk and shivering with apprehension--he was in the first stage of _delirium tremens_--in a low saloon of White Pine, some remote and God-forsaken settlement off the railroad, into which the Pilot had chanced on his rounds. The man was a homesteader, living alone in a log-cabin on his grant of land, some miles from the village. "Well," thought the Pilot, quite familiar with the situation, "first of all I've got to get him home." There was only one way of accomplishing this, and the Pilot employed it; he carried the Big Scotchman. "Well," thought the Pilot, "what next?" The next thing was to wrestle with the Big Scotchman, upon whom the "whiskey sickness" had by that time fallen--to wrestle with him in the lonely little cabin in the woods, and to get him down, and to hold him down. There was no congregation to listen to the eloquent sermon which the Pilot was engaged in preaching; there was no choir, there was no report in the newspapers. But the sermon went on just the same. The Pilot got the Big Scotchman down, and kept him down, and at last got him into his bunk. For two days and nights he sat there ministering--hearing, all the time, the ravings of a horrible delirium. There was an interval of relief then, and during this the Pilot gathered up every shred of the Big Scotchman's clothing and safely hid it. There was not a garment left in the cabin to cover his nakedness. The Big Scotchman presently wanted whiskey.