"Who hath defied God and escaped?" he demanded, with flashing eyes and trumpet voice. And then he recited the histories of nations and men that had made the fatal experiment, and the doom that had whelmed them in utter ruin.
"And yet you hope to escape!" he thundered to the silent and awestruck men and women before him. "You expect that God will abrogate his law to please you; that he will tear down the pillars of his moral government that you may be saved in your sins! O fools, fools, fools! there is no place but hell for such a folly as this!"
His haggard face, the stern solemnity of his voice, the sweep of his long arms, the gleam of his deep-set eyes, and the vigor of his inexorable logic, drove that sermon home to the listeners.
He was the keenest of critics, and often merciless. He was present at a camp-meeting near San Jose, but too feeble to preach. I was there, and disabled from, the effects of the California poison-oak. That deceitful shrub! Its pink leaves smile at you as pleasantly as sin, and, like sin, it leaves its sting. The "preachers' tent" was immediately in the rear of "the stand," and Sanders and I lay inside and listened to the sermons. He was in one of his caustic moods, and his comments were racy enough, though not helpful to devotion.
"There! he yelled, clapped his hands, stamped, and—said nothing!"
The criticism was just: the brother in the stand was making a great noise, but there was not much meaning in what he said.
"He made one point only—a pretty good apology for Lazarus's poverty."
This was said at the close of an elaborate discourse on "The Rich Man and Lazarus," by a brother who sometimes got "in the brush."
"He isn't touching his text—he knows no more theology than a guinea-pig. Words, words, words!"
This last criticism was directed against a timid young divine, who was badly frightened, but who has since shown that there was good metal in him. If he had known what was going on just behind him, he would have collapsed entirely in that tentative effort at preaching the gospel.