The entomologist was the last of our pew-full to give heed to the pulpit. When the preacher said that because it was a year of state elections, for which we ought already to be preparing, he had in his first discourse touched upon political purity--cleanness of citizenship--the Baron showed no interest. He still showed none when the speaker said again, that because the pestilence was once more with us--that was in the terrible visitation of 1878--he had devoted his second discourse to the hideous crime of a great city whose voters and tax-payers do not enable and compel it to keep the precept, "Be thou clean." I thought of the clean little home from whose master beside me came no evidence that he thought at all. But the moment the preacher declared his purpose to consider now the application of this great command to the individual life and character of man and woman as simply man and woman, the entomologist became the closest listener in the crowded throng. The sermon was a daring one. I was struck by the shrewd concessions with which the speaker defined personal purity and the various false conceptions of it that pass current; abandoning the entrenched hills, so to speak, of his church's traditional rigor and of many conventional rules, and drawing after him into the unfortified plain his least persuadable hearers of whatever churchly or unchurchly prejudice, to surround them finally at one wide sweep and receive their unconditional surrender. His periods were not as embarrassing to a mixed audience as my citations would indicate. Those that I bring together were wisely subordinated and kept apart in the discourse, and ran together only in minds like my own, eager for one or two other hearers to be specially impressed by them. And one, at least, was. Before the third sentence of the main discourse was finished the fierceness of the Baron's attention was provoking me to ask myself whether a conscience also was not coming to birth in him. In a spiritual-material being, said the speaker, the spirit has a rightful, happy share in every physical delight, and no physical delight need be unclean in which the spirit can freely enjoy its just share as senior member in the partnership of soul and body. Without this spiritual participation it could not be clean, though church, state, and society should jointly approve and command it. Mark, I do not answer for the truth of these things; I believe them, but that is quite outside of our story. The commonest error, he said, of those who covet spiritual cleanness is to seek a purification of self for self-purification's sake. The Baron grunted. He was drinking in the words; had forgotten his surroundings.