He had a triumphant invective which drew the mind from chasms in logic, and a tender sense of poetic beauty which drew it, when he quoted great lines, from everything else.

He loved the euphony of the Old Testament; his sonorous delivery would lift a chapter from Isaiah to the height of ritual, and every Psalm he read was a Magnificat whether he would or no.

The warrior in him was happy among the Princes of Issachar; and the parallels he would find for modern events in the annals of Judah and of Israel were astounding.

Yet he kept a sharp eye upon the daily paper, and his reference to current events would often give his listeners an audacious sense of up-to-dateness which might have been easily discounted by the argument they illustrated.

The survivors of a convulsion of nature, for instance, might have learned from his lips the cause and kind of their disaster traced back forcibly to local acquiescence in iniquity, and drawn unflinchingly from the text, "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord." The militant history of his Church was a passion with him; if ever he had to countenance canonization he would have led off with Jenny Geddes.