in a vivid memory of that service--William standing
in the little yellow pine-box pulpit with his long gray beard spread
over his breast, and his blue eyes shadowed with his dark thoughts of
Dives's torment. I can still see, distinctly enough to count them, the
rows of sallow-faced men and women with their hacking concert cough,
casting looks of livid venom at Sears sitting by the open window on the
front bench, a great red-jowled man who was regarding the figure in the
pulpit with such a blaze of fury one might have inferred that he had
already swallowed a shovelful of live coals. Nevertheless William went
on like an inspired conflagration. There proceeded from his lips a
sulphurous smoke of damaging words with Dives's face appearing and
reappearing in the haze in a manner that was frightfully realistic. I
longed to leap to my feet and exclaim:

"William, stop! You are hurting Brother Sears's feelings and appealing
to the worst passions in the rest of your congregation!"

But it was too late. Suddenly Sears arose and strode out of the house.
Five minutes later William closed with a few leaping flame sentences
and sat down, so much carried away with the sincerity of his own
performance that he had not even noticed Sears's departure.

When he discovered the sensation he had created and the enormity of his
chief steward's indignation, he was far from repentant. He simply
withdrew and devoted an extra hour a day to special prayer for Brother
Sears. It was no use to advise him that he might as well cut off the
electric current and then try to turn on the light as to pray for a man
like Sears. He had a faith in prayer that no mere reasoning could
obstruct or circumvent. And the nearer I come to the great answer to
all prayers, the more I am convinced that he was right. But in those
days I almost suspected William of cheating in the claims he made for
the efficacy of prayer. Thus, in the case of Brother Sears, to all
appearances it was I who brought about a reconciliation by readjusting
one of the little short circuits of his perverse nature.

Brothers Sears was a man who loved to excel his fellow-man even in the
smallest things. He not only felt a first-place prominence in the
little society of the village, he strove to surpass the least person in
it if there was any point of competition between them. It would have
been a source of mortification to him if the shoemaker had grown a
larger turnip than he had g