Pennsylvania Avenue, with its notorious bars and houses of ill fame, suddenly presented itself to Jesus’s disciples as a disgrace and a shame to the republic. Great meetings were held all over the city to protest against the wrong and selfishness of centuries as represented by the liquor business. The daily papers were besieged with communications and petitions demanding that the press do its duty in a campaign against this enemy of civilization. The members of Congress in House and Senate received vast numbers of letters from their constituents all over the country urging national legislation on the liquor issue so that manufacture would no longer be possible, or recognized by the government as a source of revenue.

Meanwhile, at different public gatherings, Jesus spoke boldly on great questions of plain right and wrong. All Washington would never forget the day he spoke to them about the sacred duty of the nation to keep its treaty obligations with other nations. Or when he spoke on the brotherhood of humankind and demanded in the name of the Father of all, that justice and love should mark the nation’s treatment of Japanese and Chinese, of Slav and Italian and Negro.

As the days passed into weeks, and the weeks into months, the interest in Jesus and his sayings and doings deepened all over the republic and the world. As is always true, wherever he came he aroused the greatest love and the greatest hate. The Navy Leagues of the world were enraged at his bold utterances on the sinfulness of war. The manufacturers of war material actually succeeded in shutting out of some subsidized papers all reports of his statements on the war question, and the feeling in the exclusive Army and Navy circles of Washington deepened with anger and opposition daily.

But nothing could exclude the influence of Jesus’s words and acts from the great masses of the people. The throngs that poured around him whenever he was recognized on the streets were enormous. Wherever he stayed, the house was besieged day and night with people clamoring for a sight of him.

As the summer deepened and the date of the great World Congress of religious workers in New York drew near, there seemed to be all over the country a pervading sense of some great event, even of something that would eclipse all that so far occurred. But of its nature no one could speak. It was an intangible, unspoken awe.

Mr. Maxwell and a company of First Church friends were together one evening at the parsonage, deeply stirred by news that had been coming to Raymond through all the months since Jesus had left New York to go to Washington. They were talking over the most prominent events and eagerly anticipating the great Congress in October.