What of the poor creatures surrounded by the hell of drink while just beginning to feel the joy of deliverance from sin?
Who could tell what depended on their environment?
Was there one word to be said by the Christian disciple, business man, citizen, in favor of continuing the license to crime and shame-producing institutions?
Was not the most Christian thing they could do to act as citizens in the matter, fight the saloon at the polls, elect good men to the city offices, and clean the municipality?
How much had prayers helped to make Raymond better while votes and actions had really been on the side of the enemies of Jesus?
Would not Jesus do this?
What disciple could imagine Him refusing to suffer or to take up His cross in this matter?
How much had the members of the First Church ever suffered in an attempt to imitate Jesus?
Was Christian discipleship a thing of conscience simply, of custom, of tradition?
Where did the suffering come in?
Was it necessary in order to follow Jesus' steps to go up Calvary as well as the Mount of Transfiguration?
His appeal was stronger at this point than he knew.

It is not too much to say that the spiritual tension of the people reached its highest point right there.

The imitation of Jesus which had begun with the volunteers in the church was working like leaven in the organization, and Henry Maxwell would even thus early in his life have been amazed if he could have measured the extent of desire on the part of his people to take up the cross.

While he was speaking this morning, before he closed with a loving appeal to the discipleship of two thousand years' knowledge of the Master, many a man and woman in the church was saying as Rachel had said so passionately to her mother: "I want to do something that will cost me something in the way of sacrifice." "I am hungry to suffer something." Truly, Mazzini was right when he said that no appeal is quite so powerful in the end as the call: "Come and suffer." The service was over, the great audience had gone, and Maxwell again faced the company gathered in the lecture room as on the two previous Sundays.

He had asked all to remain who had made the pledge of discipleship, and any others who wished to be included.