to them an always new story, an always entertaining and
delightful story, after all these years.

It is not only that they still throng to hear him either preach
or lecture, though that itself would be noticeable, but it is the
delightful and delighted spirit with which they do it. Just the other
evening I heard him lecture in his own church, just after his return
from an absence, and every face beamed happily up at him to welcome him
back, and every one listened as intently to his every word as if he
had never been heard there before; and when the lecture was over a huge
bouquet of flowers was handed up to him, and some one embarrassedly said
a few words about its being because he was home again. It was all as
if he had just returned from an absence of months--and he had been away
just five and a half days!

VI. MILLIONS OF HEARERS

THAT Conwell is not primarily a minister--that he is a minister because
he is a sincere Christian, but that he is first of all an Abou Ben
Adhem, a man who loves his fellow-men, becomes more and more apparent as
the scope of his life-work is recognized. One almost comes to think
that his pastorate of a great church is even a minor matter beside
the combined importance of his educational work, his lecture work, his
hospital work, his work in general as a helper to those who need help.

For my own part, I should say that he is like some of the old-time
prophets, the strong ones who found a great deal to attend to in
addition to matters of religion. The power, the ruggedness, the physical
and mental strength, the positive grandeur of the man--all these are
like the general conceptions of the big Old Testament prophets. The
suggestion is given only because it has often recurred, and therefore
with the feeling that there is something more than fanciful in the
com-parison; and yet, after all, the comparison fails in one important
particular, for none of the prophets seems to have had a sense of humor!

It is perhaps better and more accurate to describe him as the last
of the old school of American philosophers, the last of those
sturdy-bodied, high-thinking, achieving men who, in the old days, did
their best to set American humanity in the right path--such men as
Emerson, Alcott, Gough, Wendell Phillips, Garrison, Bayard Taylor,
Beecher; men whom Conwell knew and admired in the long ago, and all of
whom have long since passed away.

And Conwell, in his going up and down the country,