King rivalled Theodore Parker in the strength and tenderness of his faith that "man is the child of God." Saint and sinner, master and slave, learned and ignorant, rich and poor, all are children of the Infinite God,--born of His love ere the world was, certain of His love when the world shall have passed away. He felt that if this is not true, there is not enough left of religion to so much as interest an earnest soul. Religion is everything,--the sun in the heavens,--or it is a star too distant, faint and cold, to cast upon our path a single ray of light. And the unseen world! How very real it was to this man of faith and prayer. The immortal life is the life. These earthly years but lead us thither. Such was his faith. In excess of world-wisdom we say, "Eternity is here and now." Well and good. But if we lose for a kind of technicality the dear old trust in a higher and nobler life beyond the swift-coming night of death, what have we gained? Said our beloved preacher, our "Saint of the Pacific Coast," as he lay dying, "I see a great future before me." Without that vision he would not have been Starr King. Part V. In Retrospect Above that of all other men the fame of the orator is transient. Eloquence may be "logic on fire" as Dr. Lyman Beecher defined it. Oratory may be, as Emerson said, "the noblest expression of purely personal energy." But it is so far personal, so allied to grace of gesture, to charm of manner, to melody of voice, to perfection of speech, to a commanding presence, that it carries to the future but a fraction of its power. The cold type and the insentiate page constitute at best only the record of nature's rarest gift. Moreover oratory today is at its ebb, as it has been a hundred times before, and with us the man of eloquence passes to quick oblivion. It would be futile to deny that the common fate of orators has overtaken Starr King. Even in California the present generation knows painfully little of his great services to the State. This is the first serious attempt, let us hope it will not be the last, accurately to measure the extent and value of that service so nobly rendered. It is gratifying, however, to recall that Californians of his own time, and the years immediately following, paid ample tribute to his work and his memory. Extraordinary honors, such as never have been given to any private citizen, were freely and lovingly accorded the patriot-preacher. On the evening of March 4, 1864, the day of King's death, the San Francisco Bulletin, then, as now, one of the leading papers of the city, contained the following tribute: "The announcement of the death of Rev. Thomas Starr King startles the community, and shocks it like the loss of a great battle or tidings of a sudden and undreamed of public calamity. Certainly no other man on the Pacific Coast would be missed so much. San Francisco has lost one of her chief attractions; the State, its noblest orator; the country one of her ablest defenders."