What of the personality of the man back of all this ceaseless work, these stupendous undertakings?  Much of it can be read in the work itself.  But not all.  One must know Dr. Conwell personally to realize that deep, abiding love of humanity which is the wellspring of his life and which shows itself in constant and innumerable acts of thoughtfulness and kindness for the happiness of others.  He cannot see a drunkard on the street without his heart going out in a desire to help him to a better life.  He cannot see a child in tears, but that he must know the trouble and mend it.  From boyhood, it was one of the strongest traits of his character, and when it clasped hands with a man’s love of Christ, it became the ruling passion of his life.  The woes of humanity touch him deeply.  He freely gives himself, his time, his money to lighten them.  But he knows that to do his best, is but comparatively little.  To him it is a pitiful thing that so much of the world’s, misery cannot be relieved because of the lack of money; that people must starve, must suffer pain and disease, must go without the education that makes life brighter and happier, simply for the want of this one thing of so little worth compared with the great things of life it has the power to withhold or grant.

One must also be intimately associated with Dr. Conwell to realize the deep humility that rules his heart, that makes him firmly believe any man who will trust in God and go ahead in faith can accomplish all that he himself has done, and more.

“You do not know what a struggle my life is,” he said once to a friend.  “Only God and my own heart know how far short I come of what I ought to be, and how often I mar the use He would make of me even when I would serve Him.”

And again, at the Golden Jubilee services, in honor of his fiftieth birthday, he said publicly what he many times says in private: 

“I look back on the errors of by-gone years; my blunders; my pride; my self-sufficiency; my willfulness—­if God would take me up in my unworthiness and imperfection and lift me to such a place of happiness and love as this—­I say, He can do it for any man.

“When I see the blunders I unintentionally make in history, in mathematics, in names, in rhetoric, in exegesis, and yet see that God uses even blunders to save men—­I sink back into the humblest place before Him and say, ’If God can use such preaching as that, blunders and mistakes like these; if He can take them and use them for His glory, He can use anybody and anything.’  I let out the secret of my life when I tell you this:  If I have succeeded at all, it has been with the conscious sense that as God has used even me, so can He use others.  God saved me and He can save them.  My very faults show me, they teach me, that any person can be helped and saved.”

Speaking of his sermons, which are taken down by a stenographer and typewritten for publication in the “Temple Review,” he said, with the utmost dejection, “Positively they make me sick.  To think that I should stand up and undertake to preach when I can do no better than that”