d the rare facility in everything he said
and did of communicating himself; the most precious thing he could
bestow." We are told that a multitude in distress came to this
overburdened man. Ringing his doorbell they found entrance, and always
as they came back, the "step was quicker which was slow before, the head
was up which was down before, and the lips wreathed in smiles that were
sad before."

Thus we can see that it was not solely his eloquent defense of liberty
and justice which caused a San Francisco journal, reporting his funeral,
to say, "Perhaps more deeply beloved by a vast number of our people than
any other who has lived and toiled and died among us." His good deeds
made him worthy of this, one of the most beautiful eulogies ever given
mortal man, "No heart ever ached because of him until he died." This
was Starr King the philanthropist, a friend to all who needed his
friendship.

It would almost appear that in telling the story of "Starr King in
California" we were altogether forgetting that he did not come to the
State to influence its political action, or even to alleviate poverty
and distress. He came as a preacher of Liberal Christianity, and to
build up the church that had honored him with a call to its pulpit. Long
before he left Boston it was written concerning him, "That he loved his
calling, and that it was his ambition to pay the debt which every able
man is said to owe to his profession, namely to contribute some work
of permanent value to its literature." At that early period a
discriminating critic bears testimony, "that his piety, pure, deep,
tender, serene and warm, took hold of positive principles of light
and beneficence, not the negative ones of darkness and depravity,
and--himself a child of light--he preached the religion of spiritual
joy."

It was King's first and chief ambition to be an effective preacher. In a
letter, written in 1855, he says, "How we do need good preaching. Would
that I could preach extempore." A wish that six years later "came true"
in his San Francisco pulpit. In the inspiring atmosphere of his new
field, and under the stress of a great era, King cast his manuscript
aside, and though he made careful preparation, as every man must who
speaks worthily, he never again submitted to the bondage of the "written
sermon." To a man of King's gifts and temperament this was an immense
gain. Indeed, Bostonian Californians were a unit in declaring that
Easterners could ha