The Reverend William Williams had held their loyalty by virtue of vehemence and fire, and in that the visitor matched and surpassed him. The intensity was there, but much besides--and yet in all else this was a man as opposite to the aged veteran of the pulpit as east is far across from west. In all the fire of his words was no mention of the fires of hell. He seemed to know nothing of the avenging God, whose name had rung terribly from that rostrum for half a century: a God swift of anger and mighty to punish: an omnipotently jealous God. The Deity he served was one of infinite charity to whose forgiveness nothing was unforgivable--except unforgiveness. He was expounding a doctrine of joy and aspiration: a splendid and uplifting message from a God of the onward and upward march. No suspicion came to him that, in effect, he was assailing the life work of the old man below him, whom he deeply revered, yet he breathed a conception of religion not only unlike, but contradictory to the set and riveted dogma of his listening predecessor. Minds that had unquestioningly accepted the old and hard gospel of righteousness by duress of brimstone awoke to a new insurgency and eyes little given to the light of thought kindled to this new postulate of brotherhood and the service of brotherhood. Conscience sat with her eyes hypnotically fixed on the face of the speaker. Yesterday afternoon he had gone sailing with her; to-day he was voicing her own beliefs from the pulpit whose former incumbent had strangled and throttled them with his tyranny of weakness. Of her father and the influence this sermon might have on him she did not just then think at all. She like the others was being swept on a tide of rapt attention--and she had forgotten that William Williams was not at home in his study. But as that discourse progressed one might have followed the ebb and flow of a man's life-battle, had he watched only the face of the old man, in the wheel chair, crowned with a white mane. First there was the expression of exaltation which mutely proclaimed: "A prophet is risen among us," but after it came swift doubt and foreboding. The eagle eyes, deep-set in the thin face, were clouded and hurt. Tho talon-like fingers clutched at their chair arms. Must he sit here constrained to silence, while another confounded his teachings? After doubt came certainty under which the sunken eyes of the paralyzed man smouldered fiercely and his face blanched to the deadness of parchment. This was all a passionate and revolutionary appeal for liberality--or--by his interpretation--for license. It mounted into an indictment against the cramping evils of intolerance, it scathingly denounced the goodness of the strait-jacket until the old minister saw every effort of his life assailed and vilified. His mind, distorted by suffering and brooding, beheld a prophet indeed, but a prophet who carried Satan's commission and who dared to serve it in the house of God.