I cannot bear it."

"_She_ bore it," said Latimer, "until death ended it."

"Was there no one--to save her?" Baird cried. "Was she terrified like
that when she died?"

"The man who afterwards took her child--the man D'Willerby," Latimer
answered, "was a kindly soul. At the last moment he took her poor little
hand and patted it, and told her not to be frightened. She turned to him
as if for refuge. He had a big, mellow voice, and a tender, protecting
way. He said: 'Don't be frightened. It's all right,' and his were the
last words she heard."

"God bless the fellow, wheresoever he is!" Baird exclaimed. "I should
like to grasp his hand."

* * * * *

The Reverend John Baird delivered his lectures in many cities that year.
The discussion they gave rise to had the natural result of awakening a
keen interest in them. There were excellent souls who misinterpreted and
deplored them, there were excellent souls who condemned; there were even
ministers of the gospel who preached against the man as an iconoclast and
a pagan, and forbade their congregations to join his audiences. But his
lecture-halls were always crowded, and the hundreds of faces upturned to
him when he arose upon his platform were the faces of eager, breathless,
yearning creatures. He was a man speaking to men, not an echo of old
creeds. He uttered no threats, he painted no hells, he called aloud to
that God in man which is his soul.

"That God which is in you--in me," he proclaimed, "has lain dormant
because undeveloped man, having made for himself in the dark ages gods of
wood and stone, demanding awful sacrifice, called forth for himself later
a deity as material, though embodied in no physical form--a God of
vengeance and everlasting punishments. This is the man-created deity, and
in his name man has so clamoured that the God which is man's soul has
been silenced. Let this God rise, and He will so demand justice and noble
mercy from all creatures to their fellows that temptation and suffering
will cease. What! can we do no good deed without the promise of paradise
as reward? Can we refrain from no evil unless we are driven to it by the
threat of hell? Are we such base traffickers that we make merchandise of
our souls and bargain for them across a counter? Let us awake! I say to
you from the deepest depths of my aching soul--if there were no God to
bargain with, then all the more awful need that each man constit