And then, in a moment, almost with the giving out of the text, the sudden stillness and that tense sensation which told that the young orator had gripped his congregation.
Thereafter she hardly heard him, as it were, and she certainly lost the feeling of ownership that had been hers before.

As he leaned over the pulpit, and the words rang out almost harshly from their intensity, she began to see, as the rest of the congregation began to see, the images that the preacher conjured up before her.

A sense of coming disaster riveted her--the feeling that she was already watching the end of an age.
"Jesus had compassion on the multitude"-- that had been the short and simple text.

Simple words, the preacher had said, but how when one realised Who had had compassion, and on what?
Almighty God Himself, with His incarnate Mind set on the working out of immense and agelong plans, had, as it were, paused for a moment to have compassion on hungry women and crying babies and folk whose petty confused affairs could have seemed of no consequence to anyone in the drama of the world.

And then, with a few terse sentences, the preacher swung from that instance to the world drama of to-day.