He was a tall man, thin and erect, with a sallow, beardless face unrelieved by any line of mobility, but redeemed and almost glorified by the deep-set, eager, burning eyes.  He had a way of bending to his audience when he spoke, with one long arm crooked behind him and the other extended to mark the sentences with a pointing finger, as if to remove the final trace of impersonality; to break down the last of the barriers of reserve which might be thrown up by the impenitent heart.

The hush remained unbroken till he announced his text in a voice that rang like an alarm-bell pealed in the dead of night.  There are voices and voices, but only now and then one which is pitched in the key of the spheral harmonies.  When the Reverend Silas hurled out the Baptist’s words, Repent ye:  for the kingdom of heaven is at hand! the responsive thrill from the packed benches was like the sympathetic vibration of harp-strings answering a trumpet blast.

The thin, large-jointed hand went up for silence, as if there could be a silence more profound than that which already hung on his word.  Then he began slowly, and in phrase so simple that the youngest child could not fail to follow him, to draw the picture of that Judean morning scene on the banks of the Jordan, of the wild, unkempt, skin-clad forerunner, thundering forth his message to a sin—­cursed world.  On what deaf ears had it fallen among the multitude gathered on Jordan’s bank!  On what deaf ears would it fall in Zoar church this night!

He classed them rapidly, and with a prescient insight into the mazes of human frailty that made it seem as if the doors of all hearts were open to him:  the Pharisee, who paid tithes—­mint, anise and cummin—­and prayed daily on the street corners, and saw no need for repentance; the youth and the maiden, with their lips to the brimming cup of worldly pleasures, saying to the faithful monitor, yet a little while longer and we will hear thee; the man and woman grown, fighting the battle for bread, living toilfully for time and the things that perish, and hearing the warning voice faintly and ever more faintly as the years pass; the aged, steeped and sodden in sin unrepented of, and with the spiritual senses all dulled and blunted by lifelong rebellion, willing now to hear and obey, it might be, but calling in vain on the merciful and long-suffering God they had so long rejected.

Then, suddenly, he passed from pleading to denunciation.  The setting of The Great White Throne and the awful terrors of the Judgment Day were depicted in words that fell from the thin lips like the sentence of an inexorable judge.