It was here, in his old home, that the Reverend Allan Delcher Linford found his first pastorate.  Here from the very beginning he rendered apparent those gifts that were to make him a power among men.  It was with a lofty but trembling hope that the young novice began his first service that June morning, before a congregation known to be hypercritical, composed as it was of seasoned city communicants, hardened listeners and watchers, who would appraise his vestments, voice, manner, appearance, and sermon, in the light of a ripe experience.

Yet his success was instant.  He knew it long before the service ended—­felt it infallibly all at once in the midst of his sermon on Faith.  From the reading of his text, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believed therein might not perish, but have everlasting life,” the worldly people before him were held as by invisible wires running from him to each of them.  He felt them sway in obedience to his tones; they warmed with him and cooled with him; aspired with him, questioned, agreed, and glowed with him.  They were his—­one with him.  Their eyes saw a young man in the splendour of his early prime, of a faultless, but truly masculine beauty, delicate yet manfully rugged, square-chinned, straight-mouthed, with tawny hair and hazel eyes full of glittering golden points when his eloquence mounted; clear-skinned, brilliant, warm-voiced, yet always simple, direct, earnest; a storehouse of power, yet ornate; a source of refreshment both physical and spiritual to all within the field of his magnetism.

So agreed those who listened to that first sermon on Faith, in which that virtue was said be like the diamond, made only the brighter by friction.  Motionless his listeners sat while he likened Faith to the giant engine that has rolled the car of Religion 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 come forth 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.

Rapt were they when, with rare verbal felicity and unstudied eloquence, the young man pictured himself standing upon a lofty sunlit mountain, while a storm raged in the valley below, calling passionately to those far down in the ebullition to come up to him and mingle in the blue serene of Faith.  Faith was, indeed, a tear dropped on the world’s cold cheek of Doubt to make it burn forever.

Even those long since blase to pulpit oratory thrilled at the simple beauty of his peroration, which ran:  “Faith! Oh, of all the flowers that swing their golden censers in the parterre of the human heart, none so rich, so rare, as this one flower of Faith.  Other flowers there may be that yield as rich perfume, but they must be crushed in order that their fragrance become perceptible.  But this flower—­”