Five years walked along, and great events took place. The earthquake seized the San Francisco Bay district and shook it as a dog shakes a rat. Fire swept the great city on the peninsula almost out of existence; it made rich men poor, and hard hearts soft—for a few days at least—and by shifting populations and business centers, affected the east side of the Bay almost as much as the west, so that in all that water-circling population there was no business and no society, no man or woman or child even, that was thereafter quite as it or he or she had been.
In this seething ferment of change nothing altered more than the circumstances of John Hampstead. He had buried himself and found himself. He had sought relief in a self-abandoning plunge into obscurity, yet never had a minister so humble gained such burning prominence. The town hung on him. Men who never went to church at all leaned upon him and upon the things they read about him from day to day.
He had gone upon a thousand missions of mercy; he had fought for his lambs like a lion; he had faced calumny; he had dared personal assault. He had triumphed in all his conflicts and stood out before this sprawling, half metropolitan, half-suburban community of half a million people as a man whom it trusted—too much almost.
Under his ministry in these five years, the wretched little chapel had grown into the great All People's Church.
