I am going to tell you the story of a man--a man as passionate, as headstrong, as weak and vulnerable as you yourselves." He halted for a moment, and his glance seemed to grow more concentrated, more intense.
"Once, many years ago, there was a boy born here, in this city of London.

Don't lose patience! My story has the merit of truth.
"There was nothing pleasant, there was nothing easy, in the circumstances of this boy's birth.

His first sight of the world was gained through the window of a tenement-house, and the picture he saw was the picture of an alley--dark, foul, teeming with life.

His first knowledge of existence was the realization of poverty--not the free, wholesome poverty of the country, but the grinding, sordid, continuous poverty of the town, that no tongue can adequately describe.
"These were his surroundings--this was his environment; and yet--so great are the miracles that love can accomplish--every day of that boy's life was illumined and glorified by one presence.

God in his bounty had given him a mother!" It was the first time in any discourse that he had mentioned the supreme Name, and as if conscious of the tremor it aroused, he continued his narrative without pause.
"To say that a boy's life is made happier by his mother's existence sounds too trite and obvious to bear any weight; but it is through the obvious facts of life that the world's machinery is kept in motion.