"I say to you, were there no God to bargain with, then all the more awful need that each man constitute himself a god of justice, pity, and mercy--until the world's wounds are healed and each human thing can stand erect and claim the joy of life which is his own." The people went away after the lecture, murmuring among themselves. Some of them carried away awakening in their eyes. They all spoke of the man himself; of his compelling power, the fire of meaning in his face, and the musical, far-reaching voice, which carried to the remotest corner of the most crowded buildings. "It is not only his words one is reached by," it was said. "It is the man's self. Truly, he cries out from the depths of his soul." This was true. It was the man himself. Nature had armed him well--with strength, with magnetic force, with a tragic sense of the anguish of things, and with that brain which labours far in advance of the thought of the hour. Men with such brains--brains which work fiercely and unceasingly even in their own despite--reach conclusions not yet arrived at by their world, and are called iconoclasts. Some are madly overpraised, some have been made martyrs, but their spoken word passes onward, and if not in their own day, in that to-morrow which is the to-day of other men, the truth of their harvest is garnered and bound into sheaves. At the closing of his lectures, men and women crowded about him to speak to him, to grasp his hand. When they were hysterical in their laudations, his grace and readiness controlled them; when they were direct and earnest, he found words to say which they could draw aid from later. "Am I developing--or degenerating--into a popular preacher?" he said once, with a half restless laugh, to his shadow. "You are not popular," was Latimer's answer. "Popular is not the word. You are proclaiming too new and bold a creed." "That is true," said Baird. "The pioneer is not popular. When he forces his way into new countries he encounters the natives. Sometimes they eat him--sometimes they drive him back with poisoned arrows. The country is their own; they have their own gods, their own language. Why should a stranger enter in?" "But there is no record yet of a pioneer who lived--or died--in vain," said Latimer. "Some day--some day----"