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Updated: May 2, 2025
Did you ever regret the partnership?" "Now if that isn't straight out Western fashion!" murmured Reynolds. Constance beamed at me from her place beside John Crondall. "I leave it at that," said our host. "A palpable bull's-eye," said Forbes Thompson. I hardly needed George Stairs's friendly clap on the shoulder, nor the assurance of his: "You are right, Dick.
Anything less would condemn a man as a fool or a mountebank. But be it remembered that the key-note and most striking feature of all recent progress has been the advance toward simplicity in all things. At the period of George Stairs's first exposition of the new evangel in the Albert Hall, we were not greatly given to simplicity.
Both men gave substantially the same Message, there can be no doubt of that; but there were differences, and upon the whole I am inclined to think that Reynolds's address was more perfectly adapted to his hearers than Stairs's would have been if his had been given that evening.
Choose, my kinsmen! Is it Duty, or is it pleasure?" It was a severe test to put to such an assembly, to a congregation of all classes of London society. There was a moment of silence in which I saw George Stairs's face, white and writhen, through a mist which seemed to cloud my vision. And then the answer came, like a long, rolling clap of thunder: "Duty!"
Sixteen years on the young side of thirty is a considerable stretch of time, and all that had passed since I had last seen my old Tarn Regis playmate. Stairs introduced me to his friend, Reynolds, and I learned the curious fact that this comrade and chum of my old friend's was also a parson, but not of Stairs's church.
But what I would say of it is that, even now, sufficient emphasis and import are never attached to the most compelling quality of all in George Stairs's words: their absolutely unaffected simplicity. I think a ten-year-old child could have followed his every word with perfect understanding. Nowadays we take a fair measure of simplicity for granted.
Yet I was assured that fully two thousand five hundred more people crowded into the hall for the evening service than had been there to hear Stairs's address. And I had thought the huge place crowded in the afternoon.
The most bumptious and self-satisfied Cockney who ever heard the ringing of Bow Bells, would have found resentment impossible after George Stairs's little account of his leaving Dorset as a boy of twelve, and picking up such education as he had, while learning how to milk cows, bed down horses, split fire-wood, and perform "chores" generally, on a Canadian farm.
Now he seemed to pounce down upon Stairs's last words. "And yet you say your part is another one than ours. But why not the same? Why not the very essence and soul of our part, Stairs?" "Gad he's right!" said Sir Herbert Tate, in an undertone. Reynolds leaned forward in his chair, his lean, keen face alight. "Why not the very soul of our part, Stairs the essential first step toward our end?
Without that foundation, the enduring results achieved must have been impossible. But this was entirely unlike any previously known religious revival, in that it supplied no emotional food whatever. There was no room for sentimentality, still less for hysteria, in the acceptation of George Stairs's message from that "Stern Daughter of the Voice of God," whose name is Duty.
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