ich prevented my admiring him, for, from start to
finish, he was a man of impeccable reputation, and undoubtedly
irreproachable character, as we use those words, and I could have
admired him as anything else but a preacher. It was his shockingly
developed talent for worldly success that revolted me. To this day,
the gospel, the real "lose-your-life-for-my-sake" gospel sounds better,
more like gospel to me if it is preached by a man who is literally
poor. Maybe it is because I learned to revere this trait in William.

But in every way, always William could surpass me in the dignity of
love. So he went on loving Horace Pendleton. He believed that the
Lord was lavish in favors to him because of his superior worth, and
this accounted for his good fortune, and I never interfered with any of
William's idolatries; they were all creditable to him.

At last the time came when he received an invitation from Pendleton
(who was now pastor of the leading Methodist Church in a flourishing
city in another state) to visit him. They had always kept up a sort of
desultory correspondence, and I am sure Pendleton never received finer
laurels of praise than William sent him in his letters.

We were in a small town that year in the malarial district and
William's health was not good. It was early spring, before the revival
season opened, and it so happened that there was some kind of political
convention on hand, which enabled him to secure special rates on the
railroad. So one morning in April, I plumed and preened him in his
best clothes and sent him on his happy journey. When he returned a
week later William was a changed man. He talked with a breadth and
intelligence upon many old and new subjects, that I had never observed
in him before. Yet it seemed to me that something great in him had
faded. He was stuffed to the neck with ethics as loose fitting morally
as the sack coat of worldly-mindedness, and he did not suspect it. His
very expression had changed. He looked, well, to put it as mildly as I
can, William looked sophisticated, and it is as belittling a look as a
good man can wear. There is a Moses simplicity about goodness that has
never been improved upon by the wisest ape-expression of the smartest
man that ever lived, and William's simplicity had been blurred.

"Mary," he said to me, as we sat at our evening meal the day after his
return, "I must read and study more. This visit has been an eye-opener
to me. I