On that same Saturday morning the Reverend Ralph Cutter entered the Wilderness from the opposite direction. Perhaps none of those who listened to the impassioned and earnest appeals of the young minister, knew that he helped to keep both his spiritual life and his oratorical powers at white heat by this weekly journey to the Wilderness, where he spent an hour in secret prayer and in speaking to the rocks and trees from the text he was to use on the morrow. Leaving the public road, he made his way through the Wilderness, along a path not very well marked, through somber groves of pine and hemlock, through other groves of red oak, rock-maple and beech, across brooks, among large flint boulders, and through tracts where the wood had been cut off, and the thorny blackberry canes had taken its place. Part of the way the snow still covered the ground, and part of the way the floor of the Wilderness was carpeted with the blooms of the hepatica, or liverwort, with here and there an early blossom of the trailing arbutus. He made the same journey each Saturday, that he might be alone for secret prayer, where he expected no interruption and also where he might, in the freedom of the Wilderness, give the morrow’s sermon. I do not mean that he would use the same words on Sunday that he hurled at the white birch trees and flint boulders on Saturday. But the ideas would be the same. He never used any written sermon. One of his deacons once said of him:--“He seems to have everything connected with his subject so completely under his control, that he has only to reach out and grasp the idea that comes next, and hurl it at you with the force and speed of a thunderbolt. We used to have sleepy hearers. I have seen no one nodding under Ralph Cutter’s preaching. We used to have complaints from people who were hard of hearing. Ralph Cutter seems to think it is a part of his business to make the people hear.” How much of Ralph Cutter’s power on Sunday was due to his hour of prayer in the Wilderness, and to his Saturday sermon to the crags and bushes from Pulpit Rock, I cannot tell. He was heavy-hearted to-day, and the first words which were echoed back to him by the flint ledge across the valley were these:-- “This is my farewell to you. There are people in this church who attempt to dictate what I shall say from this pulpit. Not only do they attempt to dictate what I shall say here, but they attempt to dictate my actions outside. They tell me that I must not exercise the right, belonging to every citizen, of expressing my opinions in private or public, on questions of public policy.