ute
himself a god--of justice, pity, and mercy--until the world's wounds are
healed and each human thing can stand erect and claim the joy of life
which is his own."

On the morning of the day he said these words to the crowd which had
flocked to hear him, he had talked long with Latimer. For some weeks he
had not been strong. The passion of intensity which ruled him when he
spoke to his audiences was too strong an emotion to leave no physical
trace. After a lecture or sermon he was often pallid and shaken.

"I have things to say," he exclaimed feverishly to Latimer. "There are
things which must be said. The spoken word lives--for good or evil. It is
a sound sent echoing through all the ages to come. Some men have awakened
echoes which have thrilled throughout the world. To speak one's
thought--to use mere words--it seems such a small thing--and yet it is my
conviction that nothing which is said is really ever forgotten."

And his face was white, his eyes burning, when at night he leaned forward
to fling forth to his hearers his final arraignment.

"I say to you, were there no God to bargain with, then all the more awful
need that each man constitute himself a god of justice, pity, and
mercy--until the world's wounds are healed and each human thing can stand
erect and claim the joy of life which is his own."

The people went away after the lecture, murmuring among themselves. Some
of them carried away awakening in their eyes. They all spoke of the man
himself; of his compelling power, the fire of meaning in his face, and
the musical, far-reaching voice, which carried to the remotest corner of
the most crowded buildings.

"It is not only his words one is reached by," it was said. "It is the
man's self. Truly, he cries out from the depths of his soul."

This was true. It was the man himself. Nature had armed him well--with
strength, with magnetic force, with a tragic sense of the anguish of
things, and with that brain which labours far in advance of the thought
of the hour. Men with such brains--brains which work fiercely and
unceasingly even in their own despite--reach conclusions not yet arrived
at by their world, and are called iconoclasts. Some are madly
overpraised, some have been made martyrs, but their spoken word passes
onward, and if not in their own day, in that to-morrow which is the
to-day of other men, the truth of their harvest is garnered and bound
into sheaves.

At the closing of his lectures, men