The First Church of Raymond believed in having the best music that money could buy, and its quartet choir this morning was a source of great pleasure to the congregation.  The anthem was inspiring.  All the music was in keeping with the subject of the sermon.  And the anthem was an elaborate adaptation to the most modern music of the hymn,

    “Jesus, I my cross have taken,
     All to leave and follow Thee.”

Just before the sermon, the soprano sang a solo, the well-known hymn,

    “Where He leads me I will follow,
     I’ll go with Him, with Him, all the way.”

Rachel Winslow looked very beautiful that morning as she stood up behind the screen of carved oak which was significantly marked with the emblems of the cross and the crown.  Her voice was even more beautiful than her face, and that meant a great deal.  There was a general rustle of expectation over the audience as she rose.  Mr. Maxwell settled himself contentedly behind the pulpit.  Rachel Winslow’s singing always helped him.  He generally arranged for a song before the sermon.  It made possible a certain inspiration of feeling that made his delivery more impressive.

People said to themselves they had never heard such singing even in the First Church.  It is certain that if it had not been a church service, her solo would have been vigorously applauded.  It even seemed to the minister when she sat down that something like an attempted clapping of hands or a striking of feet on the floor swept through the church.  He was startled by it.  As he rose, however, and laid his sermon on the Bible, he said to himself he had been deceived.  Of course it could not occur.  In a few moments he was absorbed in his sermon and everything else was forgotten in the pleasure of his delivery.

No one had ever accused Henry Maxwell of being a dull preacher.  On the contrary, he had often been charged with being sensational; not in what he had said so much as in his way of saying it.  But the First Church people liked that.  It gave their preacher and their parish a pleasant distinction that was agreeable.

It was also true that the pastor of the First Church loved to preach.  He seldom exchanged.  He was eager to be in his own pulpit when Sunday came.  There was an exhilarating half hour for him as he faced a church full of people and know that he had a hearing.  He was peculiarly sensitive to variations in the attendance.  He never preached well before a small audience.  The weather also affected him decidedly.  He was at his best before just such an audience as faced him now, on just such a morning.  He felt a glow of satisfaction as he went on.  The church was the first in the city.  It had the best choir.  It had a membership composed of the leading people, representatives of the wealth, society and intelligence of Raymond.  He was going abroad on a three months vacation in the summer, and the circumstances of his pastorate, his influence and his position as pastor of the First Church in the city—­