The remedy was for the world to come up higher.  Standing upon one of the grand old peaks of the Rocky Mountains, the speaker had once witnessed a scene in the valley below which, for beauty of illustration of the thought in hand, the world could not surpass.  He told his hearers what the scene was.  And he besought them to come up to the rock of Charity and mingle in the blue serene.  Charity—­a tear dropped on the world’s cold cheek of intolerance to make it burn forever!  Or it was the grand motor-power which, like a giant engine, has rolled the car of civilisation out from the maze of antiquity into the light of the present day where it now waits to be freighted with the precious fruits of living genius, then to speed on to that hoped-for golden era when truth shall rise as a new and blazing star to light the splendid pageantry of earth, bound together in one law of universal brotherhood, independent, yet acknowledging the sovereignty of Omnipotence.  Charity indeed was what Voltaire meant to inculcate when he declared:  “Atheism and fanaticism are the two poles of a universe of confusion and horror.  The narrow zone of virtue is between these two.  March with a firm step in that path; believe in a good God and do good.”

The peroration was beautifully simple, thrilling the vast throng with a sudden deeper conviction of the speaker’s earnestness:  “Charity! Oh, of all the flowers that have swung their golden censers in the parterre of the human heart, none so rich, so rare as this one flower of charity.  Other flowers there may be that yield as rich perfume, but they must be crushed before their fragrance becomes perceptible; but this flower at early morn, at burning noon and when the dew of eve is on the flowers, has coursed its way down the garden walk, out through the deep, dark dell, over the burning plain, and up the mountain side—­up, ever UP it rises into the beautiful blue—­up along the cloudy corridors of the day, up along the misty pathway to the skies till it touches the beautiful shore and mingles with the breath of angels.”

Hardly was there a dissenting voice in all St. Antipas that Sabbath upon the proposal that this powerful young preacher be called to its pulpit.  The few who warily suggested that he might be too visionary, not sufficiently in touch with the present day, were quieted the following Sabbath by a very different sermon on certain flaws in the fashionable drama.

The one and only possible immorality in this world, contended the speaker, was untruth.  A sermon was as immoral as any stage play if the soul of it was not Truth; and a stage play became as moral as a sermon if its soul was truth.  The special form of untruth he attacked was what he styled “the drama of the glorified wanton.”  Warmly and ably did he denounce the pernicious effect of those plays, that take the wanton for a heroine and sentimentalise her into a morbid attractiveness.  The stage should show life, and the wanton, being of life, might be portrayed; but let it be with ruthless fidelity.  She must not be falsified into a creature of fine sensibilities and lofty emotions—­a thing of dangerous plausibility to the innocent.