“Brethren and sisters: Squire Tomple hit the nail exactly on the head when he said that hollerin’ an’ singin’ makes a hypocrite of a man if he don’t open his pocket-book. If you don’t believe it, remember me. If anybody ever liked his own more’n I did, he’s a curiosity. I don’t _hate_ money a bit now, an’ I’m not goin’ to try to; but the hardest case I ever got acquainted with was me, Zedekiah Baguss, when I couldn’t dodge it any longer that I ought to spend money for a feller-critter. I won’t name no names, brethren an’ sisters; but if you’re huntin’ for any such game, don’t go to lookin’ up drunkards until you smell around near home fust.” “Reputation be blowed higher than a kite!” exclaimed Captain Crayme, springing to his feet; “but I’ve got to say just a word here. Gentlemen, I’m off my whiskey, and I’m going to stay off; but I might be drinking yet, and have kept on forever, for all that any of you that’s so pious and temperate ever cared. But one man thought enough of me to come and talk to me--talk like a man, and not preach a sermon; more than that, he not only talked--which the biggest idiot here might have done just as well--but he stuck by me, and he brought me through. Any of you might have done it, but none of you cared enough for me, and yet I’m a business man, and I’ve got some property. How any _poor_ fellow down in the mud is ever to get up again, in such a place, I don’t see; and yet Barton’s as good a town as I ever touch at.” The interest of the meeting was departing, so were the attendants; but the Reverend Timotheus Brown limped forward and exclaimed: “Hear, then, the conclusion of the whole matter: ‘Not every one that sayeth Lord, Lord, shall inherit the kingdom of heaven, but him that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.’ There has been a blessed change wrought in this town within a year, and work has done it all. He who taught us to say ‘Our Father,’ made of every man his brother’s keeper, and no amount of talk can undo what He did. A few men in our midst have recognized their duty and have done it, or are doing it; most of them, among them him who addresses you, have learned that the beginning is the hardest part of the work, and that the laborer receives his hire, though never in the way in which he expects it. Much remains to be done, not only in raising the fallen, but in reforming the upright; and, to get a full and fair view of the latter, there is no way so successful as to go to work for others.”