, no climaxes, no
dramatic effects of voice, yet he was eloquent beyond description. His
earnestness broke over and broke through all rules of rhetoric. He made
his audiences think and feel as he did himself. That, I believe, is the
best of a man's inner salvation.

In the autumn of the same year we paused to close the chapters of Jerry
McCauley's life, a man who had risen from the depths of crime and
sin--a different sort of man from Bishop Simpson. He was born in the
home of a counterfeiter. He became a thief, an outlaw. By an influence
that many consider obsolete and old-fashioned, he became converted, and
was recognised by the best men and women in New York and Brooklyn. I
knew McCauley. I stood with him on the steps of his mission in Water
Street. He was a river thief changed into an angel. It was supernatural,
a miracle. McCauley gave twelve years to his mission work. Two years
before his death he changed his quarters, converting a dive into a House
of God. What an imbecile city government refused to touch was
surrendered to hosannas and doxologies. The story of Jerry McCauley's
missionary work in the heart of a wicked section of New York was called
romantic. I attest that I am just as keenly sensitive to the beauty of
romance as any human being, but there was a great deal that was called
romantic in American life in 1884-1885 that was not so. Romance became a
roseate mist, through which old and young saw the obligations of life
but dimly.

A strange romance of marriage became epidemic in America at this time.
European ethics were being imported, and the romance of European liberty
swept over us. A parental despotism was responsible. The newspapers of
the summer of 1884 were full of elopements. They were long exciting
chapters of domestic calamity. My sympathies were with the young fellow
of seven hundred dollars income, married to a millionaire fool who
continually informed him how much better her position was before she
left home; the honeymoon a bliss of six months, and all the rest of his
life a profound wish that he had never been born; his only redress the
divorce court or the almshouse. The poetry of these elopements was
false, the prose that came after was the truth. Marriage is an
old-fashioned business, and that wedding procession lasts longest that
starts not down the ladder out of the back window, but from the front
door with a benediction.

But, morally and politically, we were in a riot of opinion