moonlight of the soul." It was
note a complete saying, but Dawson was a creature of intimations. He
startled one sometimes by an intellectual crudity, but he had always
reserve.

There are many still living who remember the truly astonishing eloquence
and devotion of those improvised prayers of his at the Church of the
Saviour. Old mouthing George Gilfillan, by the way, author of the _Bards
of the Bible_ and other deservedly neglected works, wrote to Dawson when
his congregation built this church for him: "You have started the Church
of the Saviour, but you will never be a saviour to the church." To which
the other George fittingly responded "that the Church had its Saviour
already and it was a plain man's business to preach His plain meaning."
But those prayers! They were the mere breathing of a strong, sane
soul towards an infinite hope, an infinite possible good, a great
half-revealed Fatherhood. Doubt faltered there, hope exulted. I have
not heard from other mortal lips--I do not hope to hear again--such an
expression of humble hope and doubt, such a tone of complete abasement
before the Divine Ideal, such a final triumphant note of praise in the
far-off haven to which creation moves.

The best result of the life of my dear old chief was the effect he had
upon the municipal spirit of that town of Birmingham. It was not then
a city in those days to which he devoted so large a portion of his
many gifts and his great energies. Such men are the salt of great
communities. Not so endowed as to command the armies of the world,
missing something of the ambition, or the vanity, or the push of
potential greatness in its wider spheres, they gain in force by the
very limits of the current to which they commit their powers. Many a
generation will go by before the capital of the Midlands wholly forgets
the influence of the man whose character I have so feebly indicated
here, who was to its teeming thousands the lighthouse of honesty, and
who still seems to me, after the lapse of all these years, the bravest,
the sincerest and the most eloquent soul it has been my fortune to
encounter. I owed to him a personal acquaintance with the leading
politicians of the town. John Skirrow Wright--of whom Dawson always
spoke as the "great Liberal party"--a big, noisy, vehement, jovial man,
whom the phrase accurately fitted; Dr R. W. Dale, the Archbishop of the
Nonconformists of his day and many others.

On one memorable afternoon, he introd