een said and written of the quality of revelation
which was instinct in that first address; of its compelling force, its
inspired strength, the convincing directness of it all. And I should be
the last to deny to my old friend's address any of the praises lavished
upon it by high and low. But what I would say of it is that, even now,
sufficient emphasis and import are never attached to the most compelling
quality of all in George Stairs's words: their absolutely unaffected
simplicity. I think a ten-year-old child could have followed his every
word with perfect understanding.

Nowadays we take a fair measure of simplicity for granted. Anything less
would condemn a man as a fool or a mountebank. But be it remembered that
the key-note and most striking feature of all recent progress has been
the advance toward simplicity in all things. At the period of George
Stairs's first exposition of the new evangel in the Albert Hall, we were
not greatly given to simplicity. It was scarcely noticeable at that
time even among tillers of the earth. Not to put too fine a point upon
it, we were a tinselled lot of mimes, greatly given to apishness, and
shunning naked truth as though it were the plague. Past masters in
compromise and self-delusion, we had stripped ourselves of simplicity in
every detail of life, and, from the cradle to the grave, seemed
willingly to be hedged about with every kind of complexity. We so
maltreated our physical palates that they responded only to flavours
which would have alarmed a plain-living man; and, metaphorically, the
same thing held good in every concern of our lives, until simplicity
became non-existent among us, and was forgotten. There were men and
women in that Sunday afternoon gathering at the Albert Hall whose very
pleasures were a complicated and laborious art, whose pastimes were a
strain upon the nervous system, whose leisure was quite an arduous
business.

This it was which gave such striking freshness, such compelling
strength, to the simple, forthright directness, the unaffected
earnestness and modesty of the Message brought us by the Canadian
preachers. The most bumptious and self-satisfied Cockney who ever heard
the ringing of Bow Bells, would have found resentment impossible after
George Stairs's little account of his leaving Dorset as a boy of twelve,
and picking up such education as he had, while learning how to milk
cows, bed down horses, split fire-wood, and perform "chores" generall