The best organisation would have been of little avail but for the spirit and life communicated to the workers by their chief. They were sustained and quickened by his personal influence, which was at once paternal and commanding, by his catching enthusiasm, by the example of his own intense and unsparing activity, and, above all, by the power of his pulpit ministrations. His church was crowded; and here was no organ, no stained glass, no mystical ceremony. Preaching has in these days fallen into discredit, insomuch that it is blamed for the emptiness of churches; and the foolishness of preaching is obvious enough, since with some ministers Christianity is lost in idolatry of the Church, and some are more zealous for orthodoxy than for religion, and others have no creed at all. There would be no outcry against preaching if the clergy had anything to say. Half a century ago, before the age of evolution had set in with its irony and sadness, it was possible to be a great preacher, and yet have nothing to tell but that ‘old, old story’ which has reconciled millions to their lot on earth these eighteen hundred years. ‘There is a Father in Heaven who loves,’ so ran Norman Macleod’s confession of faith, ‘a Brother Saviour who died for us, a Spirit that helps us to be good, and a Home where we will all meet at last.’ See him in the pulpit, a man of majestic presence, and entirely without airs and graces; intense in look and voice; as natural in his utterance as one conversing with friends; not an orator conscious of his periods and tones, but an envoy too full of thrilling tidings to have a thought for self. The effect was great, sometimes tremendous. Many a man and woman, reaching the open after a sermon by Norman, found themselves as it were in a different world, so changed was their moral vision. I have in my eye a certain youth who, one Sunday, the bells ceasing when he was in the High Street, and yet a long way from his usual place of worship, strayed into the Barony. The Doctor himself was in the pulpit--bearded, bronzed, and dilated to a giant’s girth. The sermon was on God’s love to man; it was simple, and delivered for the most part in the tones of talk, yet when that accidental hearer came out upon the streets, the face of things wore ‘the light that never was on sea or land,’ and at his heart there was a vague uplifting joy. Not long afterwards, in another church, that youth heard Macleod again. The preacher had been somewhat suddenly called upon, and the congregation did not know, till the afternoon, that the evening service was to be conducted by the minister of the Barony. Yet the church was crowded in every part, even to the topmost steps of the pulpit stairs. When the Doctor (emerging from a door behind) faced the throng, it was with a roving glance, in which there was something of alarm. For a while he read his sermon, and here and there you might see some flagging of attention. Suddenly he