The simplicity, and fervor, and long-drawn melody with which he had read the hymn apparently inspired the choir with sympathy, and after a few notes from the organ they began to sing an old familiar tune. It was taken up by the congregation until the church trembled with the sound, and the saunterers in the street outside involuntarily ceased laughing and talking, and, touched by some indefinable association, raised their hats and stood bareheaded in the sunlight, while the solemn music filled the air. The hymn was sung, the prayer was offered, the chapter was read; then, after a little silence, that calm, refined, anxious, pale, yearning face appeared again at the desk. The preacher balanced himself for a few moments alternately upon each foot--moved his tongue, as if tasting the words he was about to utter--and announced his text: "Peace I leave with you: my peace I give unto you." He began in the same calm, simple way. A natural, manly candor certified the truth of every word he spoke. The voice--at first high in tone, and swinging, as it were, in long, wave-like inflections--grew gradually deeper, and more equally sustained. There was very little movement of the hands or arms; only now and then the finger was raised, or the hand gently spread and waved. As he warmed in his discourse a kind of celestial grace glimmered about his person, and his pale, thoughtful face kindled and beamed with holy light. His sentences were entirely simple. There was no rhetoric, no declamation or display. Yet the soul of the hearer seemed to be fused in a spiritual eloquence which, like a white flame, burned all the personality of the speaker away. The people sat as if they were listening to a disembodied soul. But the appeal and the argument were never to passion, or prejudice, or mere sensibility. Fear and horror, and every kind of physical emotion, so to say, were impossible in the calmness and sweetness of the assurance of the Divine presence. It was a Father whose message the preacher brought. Like as a father so the Lord pitieth His children, said he, in tones that trickled like tears over the hearts of his hearers, although his voice was equable and unbroken. He went on to show what the children of such a Father must needs be--to show that, however sinful, and erring, and lost, yet the Father had sent to tell them that the doctrine of wrath was of old time; that the eye for the eye, and the tooth for the tooth, was the teaching of an imperfect knowledge; that a faith which was truly childlike knew the Creator only as a parent; and that out of such faith alone arose the life that was worthy of him.