These combats with Satan at close quarters, if they made the week-day evenings exciting, reacted with an effect of crushing dulness upon the Sunday services.  The rule was to admit no strangers to the grounds from Saturday night to Monday morning.  Every year attempts were made to rescind or modify this rule, and this season at least three-fourths of the laymen in attendance had signed a petition in favor of opening the gates.  The two Presiding Elders, supported by a dozen of the older preachers, resisted the change, and they had the backing of the more bigoted section of the congregation from Octavius.  The controversy reached a point where Theron’s Presiding Elder threatened to quit the grounds, and the leaders of the open-Sunday movement spoke freely of the ridiculous figure which its cranks and fanatics made poor Methodism cut in the eyes of modern go-ahead American civilization.  Then Theron Ware saw his opportunity, and preached an impromptu sermon upon the sanctity of the Sabbath, which ended all discussion.  Sometimes its arguments seemed to be on one side, sometimes on the other, but always they were clothed with so serene a beauty of imagery, and moved in such a lofty and rarefied atmosphere of spiritual exaltation, that it was impossible to link them to so sordid a thing as this question of gate-money.  When he had finished, nobody wanted the gates opened.  The two factions found that the difference between them had melted out of existence.  They sat entranced by the charm of the sermon; then, glancing around at the empty benches, glaringly numerous in the afternoon sunlight, they whispered regrets that ten thousand people had not been there to hear that marvellous discourse.  Theron’s conquest was of exceptional dimensions.  The majority, whose project he had defeated, were strangers who appreciated and admired his effort most.  The little minority of his own flock, though less susceptible to the influence of graceful diction and delicately balanced rhetoric, were proud of the distinction he had reflected upon them, and delighted with him for having won their fight.  The Presiding Elders wrung his hand with a significant grip.  The extremists of his own charge beamed friendship upon him for the first time.  He was the veritable hero of the week.

The prestige of this achievement made it the easier for Theron to get away by himself next day, and walk in the woods.  A man of such power had a right to solitude.  Those who noted his departure from the camp remembered with pleasure that he was to preach again on the morrow.  He was going to commune with God in the depths of the forest, that the Message next day might be clearer and more luminous still.

Theron strolled for a little, with an air of aimlessness, until he was well outside the more or less frequented neighborhood of the camp.  Then he looked at the sun and the lay of the land with that informing scrutiny of which the farm-bred boy never loses the trick, turned, and strode at a rattling pace down the hillside.  He knew nothing personally of this piece of woodland—­a spur of the great Adirondack wilderness thrust southward into the region of homesteads and dairies and hop-fields—­but he had prepared himself by a study of the map, and he knew where he wanted to go.  Very Soon he hit upon the path he had counted upon finding, and at this he quickened his gait.