Woodard.Tech

Graphic Scenes

361 min read

Graphic Scenes

by Beverly Carradine

← Beverly Carradine · Library Home

Contents

Analytical Table of Contents

A possible topic arrangement for use of the chapter data as sermon illustrations

  • Chapter 1. TOPIC: Duty SUBTOPIC: Divinely Returned To TITLE: Earliest Recollections (Final Part)

  • Chapter 2. TOPIC: Entire Sanctification SUBTOPIC: Received After Persistent Seeking TITLE: The Reward Of Faithful Waiting

  • Chapter 3. TOPIC: Carnal Rivalry SUBTOPIC: The Futility Of TITLE: A Rival At School

  • Chapter 4. TOPIC: Suffering Unjustly SUBTOPIC: Perpetrators and Rewarded Victims TITLE: An Undeserved Whipping

  • Chapter 5. TOPIC: Sin SUBTOPIC: Its Deceptive, Disappointing Allurments TITLE: Things Not What They Seem

  • Chapter 6. TOPIC: Gifts SUBTOPIC: Wrongly Given, Perilously Received TITLE: The Present Of A Pony

  • Chapter 7. TOPIC: Happiness SUBTOPIC: Not Found In Sin TITLE: Seeking Happiness Through Playing Hookey

  • Chapter 8. TOPIC: High Things SUBTOPIC: Foolishly Attempted By Novices TITLE: The Lesson Of The Ladder

  • Chapter 9. TOPIC: Purpose In Life SUBTOPIC: Found Through Divine Providences TITLE: A Lapse Of Years

  • Chapter 10. TOPIC: Conversion SUBTOPIC: Stories Of TITLE: My Conversion

  • Chapter 11. TOPIC: Call To Preach SUBTOPIC: Examples Of How Received TITLE: Call To The Ministry

  • Chapter 12. TOPIC: Faithfulness SUBTOPIC: To Duty, Rewarded TITLE: The First Conference And Appointment

  • Chapter 13. TOPIC: Revival Fire SUBTOPIC: After A Cold Reception TITLE: The First Circuit

  • Chapter 14. TOPIC: Singing Without Accompaniment SUBTOPIC: Pitched Too High, Too Low TITLE: (Chapter Part A) A Tuning Fork

  • Chapter 14. TOPIC: Texts For Sermons SUBTOPIC: The Seemingly Inappropriate Used TITLE: (Chapter Part B) A Strange Text

  • Chapter 14. TOPIC: Needs Supplied By The Lord SUBTOPIC: Illustrations Of TITLE: (Chapter Part C) A Generous Gentile

  • Chapter 14. TOPIC: Needs Supplied By The Lord SUBTOPIC: Illustrations Of TITLE: (Chapter Part D) A Kind Jew

  • Chapter 15. TOPIC: Suppression Of Carnality SUBTOPIC: Not Always Successful TITLE: (First Part Of The Chapter) Interesting Characters

  • Chapter 15. TOPIC: Retribution SUBTOPIC: For Unkind Treatment TITLE: (Final Part Of The Chapter) Interesting Characters

  • Chapter 16. TOPIC: Bride Of Christ SUBTOPIC: The Shame Of Unfaithfulness TITLE: (First Part Of The Chapter) A Group Of Preachers

  • Chapter 16. TOPIC: Sermons SUBTOPIC: Using Those Of Another TITLE: (Final Part Of The Chapter) A Group Of Preachers

  • Chapter 17. TOPIC: Surmounting Difficulties SUBTOPIC: Through God’s Grace TITLE: Trials And Sorrows

  • Chapter 18. TOPIC: Stewards Of God’s Grace SUBTOPIC: The Wise, The Foolish, The Judgment Of TITLE: An Incident And Its Lessons

  • Chapter 19. TOPIC: Gifts Differing SUBTOPIC: In The Pulpit TITLE: …Wightman & …Marshall

  • Chapter 20. TOPIC: Entire Sanctification SUBTOPIC: Experienced, Then Explained TITLE: (Chapter Part A) My First Station

  • Chapter 20. TOPIC: Conversion SUBTOPIC: Through Hearing A Hymn Sung TITLE: (Chapter Part B) A Song In The Garden

  • Chapter 20. TOPIC: Giving As To Christ SUBTOPIC: Greatly Rewarded TITLE: (Chapter Part C) The Ragged Coat

  • Chapter 21. TOPIC: Tragedies Of Life SUBTOPIC: Sometimes Point To A Better World TITLE: (Chapter Part A) The Young Lovers

  • Chapter 21. TOPIC: Lengthy Prayer SUBTOPIC: Not Despised On The Death-Bed TITLE: (Chapter Part B) A Dying Traveling Agent

  • Chapter 21. TOPIC: Defenders Of The Old Paths SUBTOPIC: Methodist Champions TITLE: (Chapter Part C) …Dr. J. B. McFerrin

  • Chapter 21. TOPIC: Resurrection Of Jesus Christ SUBTOPIC: The Lively Hope Of The Saints TITLE: (Chapter Part C) …Dr. J. B. McFerrin

  • Chapter 22. TOPIC: Pride & Humility In The Pulpit SUBTOPIC: Abased & Exalted TITLE: (Chapter Part A-1) An Overconfident Preacher

  • Chapter 22. TOPIC: Entire Sanctification SUBTOPIC: For The Hungry And Honest TITLE: (Chapter Part A-2) An Overconfident Preacher

  • Chapter 22. TOPIC: Sudden Death SUBTOPIC: After The Last Warning TITLE: (Chapter Part B) A Sudden Death

  • Chapter 22. TOPIC: Preaching Under The Anointing SUBTOPIC: Results Cannot Be Gainsaid TITLE: (Chapter Part C) An Humble Man Of God

  • Chapter 23. TOPIC: Doing Good SUBTOPIC: Its Impact On Others TITLE: (Chapter Part A) A Faithful Physician

  • Chapter 23. TOPIC: Riches SUBTOPIC: Worry Over TITLE: (Chapter Part B) Ten Dollars

  • Chapter 23. TOPIC: Plague SUBTOPIC: Delivered Out Of TITLE: (Chapter Part C) The Yellow Fever

  • Chapter 24. TOPIC: Preacher’s Itch SUBTOPIC: Humbling Its Cure TITLE: (Chapter Part A) ..Second Visit.. Sea Shore Camp

  • Chapter 24. TOPIC: Broken Cisterns SUBTOPIC: Instead Of The Fountain TITLE: (Chapter Part B-1) Stationed At Vicksburg

  • Chapter 24. TOPIC: Friends On The Other Side SUBTOPIC: More Than Here TITLE: (Chapter Part B-2) Stationed At Vicksburg

  • Chapter 25. TOPIC: Gospel Warning SUBTOPIC: The Different Reactions TITLE: A Steamboat Occurrence

  • Chapter 26. TOPIC: Oratorical Ability SUBTOPIC: Fruitless If Not Anointed TITLE: (Chapter Part B-1) Dr. W. E. Munsey

  • Chapter 26. TOPIC: Money-Raising SUBTOPIC: unBiblical Methods Condemned TITLE: (Chapter Part B-2) Dr. W. E. Munsey

  • Chapter 26. TOPIC: State Lottery SUBTOPIC: A Slain Monster Resurrected Today (1995) TITLE: (Chapter Part C) The Louisiana State Lottery

  • Chapter 27. TOPIC: Child Abuse SUBTOPIC: Opposed By Faithful Ministers TITLE: The History Of Two Cruelly Treated Children

  • Chapter 28. TOPIC: Preaching SUBTOPIC: Distractions TITLE: The Street Cries Of New Orleans

  • Chapter 29. TOPIC: Holy Ghost Revival SUBTOPIC: Examples Of TITLE: The Great Revival In Carondolet St. Meth. Church

  • Chapter 30. TOPIC: Entire Sanctification SUBTOPIC: Meeting The Conditions TITLE: How I Obtained The Blessing

  • Chapter 31. TOPIC: Holy Ghost Revival SUBTOPIC: Despite Carnal Opposition TITLE: The Revival At Centenary Church In St. Louis

  • Chapter 32. TOPIC: Getting Rid Of A Spirit-Filled Pastor SUBTOPIC: Contrived By Carnal, Holiness Fighters TITLE: Called Before The Sanhedrin

  • Chapter 33. TOPIC: Masonic Lodge Opposed SUBTOPIC: The Carnal, Unjust Reaction TITLE: The Clash With Free Masonry

  • Chapter 34. TOPIC: Perfect Love SUBTOPIC: While Suffering Shame For Christ’s Sake TITLE: Skirmishes And Battles

  • Chapter 35. TOPIC: Holy Ghost Revival SUBTOPIC: Through Divine Judgments, Biblical Methods TITLE: The Victory And Revival At First Church

Chapter 1: Earliest Recollections

In spite of all the wonders of material creation, life itself is the most amazing work of God, as presented to the thoughtful human mind. The older we grow the more we stand amazed and awed in the study of every kind of existence possessing, as it does, the marvelous properties and attributes of motion, choice, instinct and reason. The wonder, of course, is greatest in considering human life with its multiplicity and complexity of faculties and powers. Here is a self-going machine of so intricate and perfect a nature or natures, that only an omniscient and omnipotent Being could have made it.

But an additional surprise is the fact of our being unable, even in possession of this life, to go back nearer in recollection than two or three years of its beginning. One of the forces of our being called memory is not aroused or developed, we are told, to the extent that it can make records and pictures for subsequent reference until we are over two years of age. The physical nature seems to be the first on deck; later comes the intellectual; and still later the spiritual.

There are some who claim memories dating back into the first year; but I do not doubt that stories of their childhood, repeated early and often, produced this conviction. The narrative finally stamped itself on the mind, and feeling very much at home, at last posed as a veritable recollection of infantile days.

With all of us there is a strange interest connected with that beginning of an existence which is never to end. Coming out of the blackness of nothing we entered the world and for months were nothing but fussy, crying, eating, sleeping little animals, caring for nothing but food and rest. So far as thought was concerned we did not even know we were living.

Then the mind slowly began to wake up, take notice, connect and separate objects, learn a few words, and then came the hour and day when we, in an indescribable sense, became conscious of ourselves, thought was aroused in some way, and on that occurrence was based our first recollections. There were long mental lulls after that, and big gaps of days and weeks and perhaps months where we do not recall a person or circumstance. Then came another recollection, and then another, and after that increasing lines and groups, until behold! the procession and rush of conscious existence had begun never to end. I have thought that the first waking up of the mind is to the intellectual nature what conversion is to the soul.

A strange fact connected with the very beginning of the life of the writer, cannot properly be called a memory of the incident, but is simply a reminiscence of a piece of family history told him repeatedly by the members as well as some of the servants of the household.

Early on the morning of April the fourth, I was born in our beautiful Southland, in the County of Yazoo, in the State of Mississippi. But instead of beginning life in the regular orthodox way by breathing and crying, I failed for some reason to take in the necessary inhalation of the world’s atmosphere, and so began existence with beating heart and throbbing pulses, but breathless and silent.

It seemed as if the child took a prophetic look at the life and world on which he had entered, and not caring to remain on such a planet that held so much of trial, labor and sorrow for him, concluded not to go farther, but to turn back and enter Heaven at once.

This was so evidently what the infant was doing that the nurse gave me up as good as dead, while the screams of my mother and the heart-broken lamentations of two of my aunts filled the room and house.

Just at this juncture, old Aunt Esther, a true and tried family servant, full of expedients and all kinds of useful practical knowledge, hearing the shrieks, rushed into the room, and taking in the situation at a glance, caught the fast dying babe in her arms and filled the collapsed lungs with steady breathing from her own mouth, while manipulating at the same time the infant’s chest, until finally the little one gave the first gasp, and then reluctantly turned back to earth with a bitter cry.

This history was frequently told to me when I was a lad, and I was disposed to think then that a very great favor had been done me. But many times since, in days of weariness, loneliness, sorrow, need, the hatred of some, the betrayal of confidence by others, the loss of friends, the bereavement of loved ones, the accusation of enemies, the suffering of long sick spells, I have been sorely tempted to wish that old Aunt Esther had let the child go as he had started, to a glad, beautiful, restful Heaven. Surely such a world, filled with holy angels, with Christ present, and with no sin, sickness, pain or trouble ever there, would be a lovely and most desirable place for children to grow up in wisdom and stature, in grace and knowledge, and in favor with God and the inhabitants of the skies.

My first recollection goes back to a period when I was between three and four years of age. Standing on the front porch of my father’s house in the country, I was listening to a bugle whose notes ascending from a pine-clad hillside a quarter of a mile away, floated across the intervening valley and fell upon my wondering ears.

The county road led across this valley, wound up the hillside and through the pine grove, and then on to town sixteen miles away. Once a week a large wagon with an ox or mule team was sent to the county seat for supplies of various kinds. The musical strains I heard were the notes of a tin bugle blown by the returning driver, when mounting the crest of the hill he came in sight of the distant home and plantation.

It was the first sound coming to me from the great busy world outside. I little thought as I hearkened to the plaintive echoes, that this same old world would summon me by clarion calls to leave home, to come over the hill and help it in its trouble. Nor did I dream that the time would ever be when I would cross ten thousand separating mountains and plains, and with Gospel trumpet in hand, sound in the ears of hundreds of thousands, the glad notes of a free and full salvation.

So it happened that my first memory was a kind of figure of things to come; a prophecy in symbol of what was to be in me and through me. Certainly it seems to the writer that the life he has followed since the Savior called him to leave home, has been one of highways, hills, towns, cities and constant journeyings, while he drives a Gospel wagon loaded down with heavenly supplies, and sounds trumpet calls about a wonderful world just out of sight over that last range of dark mountains called Death.

My second recollection comes soon after the first, and stands related with the death of a personage known in the South in ante-Bellum days as the black “Mammy.”

The colored nurse of the Southern child was called by this title, and very tender and lasting often were the heart ties between the two. My nurse was named Margaret, and I heard from a number of lips after her entrance into Heaven high encomiums of her life and character.

When I was quite a child, this kind, faithful woman died, and I have been informed that I was inconsolable. They told the sobbing child that she was gone. I asked where? Some one lifted me in their arms and pointed up to the sky, saying, “She has gone up there.” Instantly my reply, according to informants, was, “Then bring a ladder and let us go after her.”

These speeches they tell me were made. The only recollection of the writer is the death of his nurse, the being held in somebody’s arms who pointed upward, and my own heartbreaking sorrow.

This poor colored woman on her deathbed left to the child she was deeply attached to, about all of her earthly possessions, in the shape of an iron tea kettle and a small oven or boiler of the same metal.

I have no idea who got possession of these articles of the old-time kitchen fireplace; I only know that I did not. But at the same time I have never recalled this remembrance of the nursling by the poor slave on her deathbed without being deeply moved.

Again, I see a kind of prophecy of a certain character of life in this matter. All my days, if I have not been in a frying pan, I have been in the fire. If somebody was not cooking and roasting me in an oven, I was being treated by another person to a stream of scalding water from his own little hooknosed kettle.

Sometimes I have wished that Margaret had not left me those symbolic utensils. But as I began to notice, that like the Hebrew children, I did not perish in the flames; and that furthermore, whenever the furnace of persecution was hottest, that the Son of God invariably came down and walked with me in the fire, giving me the gladdest and most triumphant hours of my life — I ceased to repine, and have learned to praise God for the oven and kettle both in type and fulfillment.

According to family chronology, my father sold his hill place and procured a swamp plantation on the Yazoo River, when I was just four years of age. There is a faint, misty remembrance of tree-lined roads and a dwelling standing by the riverside. But the clear third recollection of life is connected with one of the porches of the new home. The flooring must have been defective, for suddenly a plank tilted and I possess a vivid memory to this day of having been literally shot from the face and sight of the upper world and landed in darkness and dust under the verandah in question.

I have not the faintest remembrance of anybody finding me there, and no recollection whatever of getting out. Of course, I must have gotten out, for here I am writing this chapter about my early days. But I have no proof that any one found me, and cannot for my life recall a face or form of young or old, white or black, who came after me under the house, and rescued me from my mortifying predicament and situation.

The symbols hold good even in the third incident. For in the matter of salvation, I have never been able to point out a soul who came to me in the darkness of sin and led me to Christ. Not a being came to me in my gloom and misery. No man seemed to care for my soul. I woke to find myself under the house. The Savior himself found me there, and brought me up and out, into the light, love, service and beautiful fellowship of the kingdom of God.

A few nights after our arrival at the new home, my father aroused me from my warm bed, deep in the night, to see two steamboats passing. Partly from the cool air, and mainly from awe and wonder at the spectacle of the two great, sparkling, scintillating, nocturnal monsters in the river before me, I shook in my father’s arms as though I had an ague. I recall his soothing words and touch, but was glad to escape the startling sight and get back to bed and a dreamless, peaceful pillow.

Several months later my mother, not satisfied with the swamp location, persuaded my father to purchase a home in Yazoo City, a town twenty miles distant by land and nearly forty by water.

The morning we were to depart by steamboat, the family and house servants stood on the bank waiting for the vessel to land. The river was high, the current strong and the big steamer in swinging in to the shore encountered a great snag which entered one of the side wheel houses with a crash, and then ripped off a number of planks with a succession of loud noises that to one of the writer’s few years and great inexperience was simply terrifying and unbearable. It seemed to me that the end of the world had come. And the present carrying on of the steamer before us, coupled with the still vivid recollection of the two snorting, panting crafts of a memorable night before, gave birth to the conception, and intensified the idea, that steamboats were the natural enemies of children, and were bent upon the death and destruction of little boys who were three or four years old, and two or three feet high.

Anyhow, the impression was on me that Death was in the air, and the language of the heart was, “To remain here is to die! Why tarry we here any longer!”

Nor did I tarry. While the family, friends and servants were absorbed in watching the difficult landing of the boat, I, bent on saving my life, ran across the road, climbed a rail fence, and entering upon a furrow of the broad cotton plantation, made for the woods that stretched a long green wall against the horizon. Evidently I wanted a lodge in some vast wilderness, rather than become a sacrifice and burnt offering in the ways, walks, works and inventions of men.

I have been informed that I had advanced fully one hundred yards over the cotton field before my absence was discovered. Then an elder brother and a couple of servants ran after, overtook, and brought me, panting and protesting, back to the landing, and then actually put me on the deck of the thing that seemed set for my destruction.

Oh, how the family smiled, the neighbors tittered, the captain, clerk, pilot and deck hands laughed, and the Negroes guffawed. But the little boy, brought back to duty, and, as he thought, to death and destruction, saw nothing in the world to be amused about.

Well, asks the reader, where are the life symbols in this fifth recollection, and what prophetic teaching can be found in the circumstance?

My reply is that I have found two most important lessons in the incident or happening of that morning.

First, I never started to fly from duty, and was making for some wilderness of seclusion, loneliness and inactivity, but the Lord sent some of His servants, and always our Elder Brother, after me. Thus far they have always caught me before I got to the woods.

Second, God has often made me take passage on the very thing I dreaded. He in His wonderful wisdom and power, has caused persons and circumstances that I thought were set for my destruction, actually to bring me on in the way of spiritual life and religious duty, and in the ripening and perfecting of character for the skies.

There are situations and occurrences of life as terrifying to the human soul as a noisy steamboat to a little child. But God can make the dreaded and dreadful event land for us, take us aboard, so to speak, bear us on up the stream of years, and bring us safe and sound into the Holy City, where our Father has prepared us a home and mansion eternal in the heavens.

Thank God for the Bible statement that “ALL THINGS work together for good to them that love God.”

Chapter 2: The Reward of Faithful Waiting

The childhood and boyhood home of the writer had in front a large flower yard. A clump of cedars was in one corner, a row of arbor vines lined the sides of the garden, while the main and central part was filled with roses of every color and perfume. An arbor on the left was almost hidden as to its framework by the beautiful climbing plant and yellow flowers called the Cloth of Gold; violets bordered many of the walks and beds, while carnations, peonies, four-o’clocks, calacanthus, cape jasmine, crepe myrtle and many other plants made such a riot of color and combination of fragrance that the golden-winged butterflies flitting through the shrubbery seemed to make the place their settled home.

The portico of the house jutting into the flower yard was literally buried in woodbine and honey-suckle, while in the sweet, shadowy depths of the clambering vines the bees droned their song, and humming birds fluttered their delicate wings through all the sunny hours of the day.

The fence that inclosed this garden was unusual in its style and construction. A board panel two feet high formed the base. From this wall, square white pickets four inches apart shot up to the height of four feet. They were kept steady by passing through two planks one above the other and separated by eighteen inches. Panels, posts and pickets were all painted a pure white, giving a most attractive appearance to the fence, while at the same time it was as substantial and strong as it was handsome.

The white pickets projected about a foot above the top plank, making, as the reader will see, a most comfortable as well as safe perch and good outlook for a lad of five years, who was not allowed to leave home, but was anxious to see all he could of the world as it flowed before and beneath him on street and pavement in his immediate neighborhood.

Here sitting on the top plank, with hands grasping a picket on each side, and with a background of waving plants and nodding roses, the writer spent many happy hours studying life as it rattled and rushed along in the shape of every kind of vehicle on the thoroughfare or walked and hurried by in the form of all kinds of pedestrians on the brick walks of the avenue.

One afternoon I occupied the usual observatory, having just left the hands of the servant maid, who had arrayed me in all the glories of a white suit, long curls falling to the shoulder, and polished low quarter shoes.

Among those who spoke graciously to me in passing was a nice looking colored girl of eighteen or twenty. She had a white pitcher in her hand and was on her way to a neighboring dairy for milk.

Stopping in front of me, she studied the childish figure on the lonely perch for several seconds very steadily, and then said:

“You are a mighty nice looking little boy; and tomorrow evening I am going to bring you a stick of molasses candy.”

With that she passed on; but the promise remained fixed and fast in the memory of the urchin on the fence.

Next afternoon at the same hour I went promptly to the tower of observation, so to speak, looking for the sweet fulfillment of yesterday’s pledge.

By and by the girl with the pitcher hove in sight. When as she approached I cried eagerly:

“Have you got the candy?”

She had forgotten it. And said pleasantly that she would remember it next time. The third evening I was laying in wait for her, and the old question fell upon the woman’s ear from the top of the fence:

“Have you got my candy?”

Lo! her recollection had proved treacherous again, and with some little asperity in her voice and manner she answered:

“No, I have not got your candy!”

The fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh afternoons found the determined youngster in his accustomed place, while the same query, full of faith and expectancy, would ring out: “Have you got my candy?”

As well as I can recall this early incident, weeks passed in the fruitless effort to obtain the promised blessing. I have a dim memory of the summer season going by, and the sober tints of autumn appearing in the flower garden as well as on the wooded hills near by; but still the lookout station was occupied and the appeal was regularly made each day. I doubt not that life began to be a burden and even wretched to the young servant maid. I can but think the little figure perched on the fence filled her with dismay when her eyes each afternoon fell upon it. Moreover, the streets were so arranged in that part of town that the girl had to pass our home to get to the dairy. So I unconsciously was the source of great trouble to her. I recall very plainly that some of her replies were quite snappish, and the former sentence of promise was never repeated.

But it had been made once, and; I held gravely, steadily and imperturbably on. The candy had been pledged and was mine by virtue of the promise. So I never failed to say “my candy.”

One afternoon from my watch tower on the palings, I saw the woman coming and put the stereotyped interrogatory, “Did you bring my candy?”

When, to my unspeakable gladness, she exclaimed:

“Yes! Here’s your candy!” And, running her hand into the pitcher, she drew out a long stick of molasses candy that she had pulled a yellowish white, and held it out to me. Seizing it with a disengaged hand and placing one end of the elongated sweetness in the mouth, I began eating and, somewhat indistinctly mumbling at the same time:

“Won’t you promise to bring me some more?” Her instant reply, shot from her lips like a musket ball was, “That I won’t!” and with a quick step left me and vanished around the corner.

I have repeatedly recalled this scene of my childhood, which not only suggests moral lessons, but is a parable in itself.

One teaching is that the man who desires pardon and holiness should place himself in the Lord’s way and get a promise from Him.

With such a Bible as we have, this is not hard to do. So it is not long when putting ourselves in the Heaven-appointed course, the Savior meets us in the way, and the pledge is given.

The next thing for us to do on hearing the promise from the pulpit, or reading it in the Scripture, is to take the position of faith and expectancy and begin to ask for the blessing.

“Lord, where is the fulfillment of the assurance you made me? Where is the sweetness and gladness and fullness of Pentecost? Where is the candy?”

The trouble with many is that they leave the fence too soon. They get too quickly discouraged over the empty pitcher days, and heaven’s apparent forgetfulness to redeem its covenant.

The thing to do is to stay on the prayer pinnacle and faith outlook. Keep asking. Continue to hang on the Lord.

What if Summer seems to depart, and the chill of Autumn days come on? God is faithful and cannot deny His Word. Keep entreating and asking, “Where is my promised Pentecost? Where is the fullness of the blessing of the Gospel of Christ?” And behold the hour will come when the Lord will suddenly appear with the promised blessing; and the soul of the faithfully praying, patiently waiting one will be baptized with the Holy Ghost, and find itself filled with the sweetness and gladness of the fullness of God.

So when people tell me today that they tried and could not obtain the blessings of pardon and full salvation, I give some of them this page of my child’s history and say:

“You left the fence too soon. You did not wait long enough for the candy.”

The holiness movement is getting filled today with people who have never received the real Upper Room experience. They seem to know nothing of the baptism with the Holy Ghost and fire and the death of the Old Man. They know nothing of the white stone given by Christ to the Overcomer in the church, with a new name written in the stone which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it. They have a dry, mechanical profession, but are minus a sweet, burning, unctuous, glorious possession.

In explanation, they say that the evangelist told them to take the blessing by faith and go on. My reply to all such is that the Savior commands to the contrary, and that His words to the disciples were “Tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem until ye be endued with power from on high.” “Wait for the promise of the Father, which (saith he) ye have heard of me. For John truly baptized with water, but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.”

Christ never said wait ten days, but tarry until the blessing comes, whether it takes ten, twenty or a hundred days.

But lo! many of the evangelists today call up the church members, ask them to bow a few minutes at the cushioned altar, request the preachers and laymen to lead in prayer who have not the blessing themselves, and when the wretched little farce is over, dismiss the seekers (?) to their scats with the assurance that the work has been done. Then the report is sent to some distant religious paper that one, two or three hundred have received their Pentecost!

But where is the flame in the soul? The tongue of fire? The wine-like joy? And the power of the Holy Ghost in them and on them?

Even a complete consecration is not entire sanctification! So what shall be said of an imperfect consecration? And yet the human side of the matter is called the divine work, and a most defective seeking is misnomened a finding.

The pledge of the young woman to me was not the candy itself. I believed the promise she made, but kept looking for the candy. I lived, so to speak, on the top of the fence until I got it. The promise was sweet, but the fulfillment was far sweeter. As well as I recall it, the candy tasted immeasurably better than the promise. The latter was splendid, of course, but it brought a lot of restless longing and lonely waiting with it! But when the sugar composition arrived and suddenly filled the mouth, the feeling was entirely different, and the satisfaction experienced at the time of the reception was simply immense.

The lesson is, do not leave the Upper Room too soon. And do not leave it without the blessing. The command is to tarry. The promise is that it shall come not many days hence. Do not leave Jerusalem without it, saying you have taken it by faith. Such faith is presumption, for it differs from Christ’s directions. And such faith often turns out to be nothing but laziness, the giving up of the active seeking for the blessing. Faith believes God’s Word, and obeys God. Faith is full of works, according to James. And faith stays out the days until Pentecost is fully come and fills those days with prayer and expectancy for the blessing.

In other words, do not leave, but stay on the fence until you get the candy.

Chapter 3: A Rival at School

At the age of seven I was sent to school. The schoolmaster, named Smur, was a hard looking, stiff, unbending kind of man and the severest pedagogue that ever held that position in our native town. I never knew him to smile, or exchange a kindly word with any of the scholars who came to the great brick building where he presided.

I had been very tenderly raised at home with a loving mother and devoted elder sister, and so the first vision I had of Mr. Smurs’ hard face, and the sight of a boy whipped on his bare legs with a cowhide, until the blood ran down his limbs, fairly froze my blood with horror. I beheld fully a dozen lads castigated in one day, and as I saw them squirm and leap, and cry, I fully expected to be murdered in cold blood at no very distant day.

Perhaps the frightened face with the terror-stricken eyes looking out from a mass of long brown tangled curls may have saved me, I do not know, only I escaped the dreaded flagellation.

It was the fashion then to dress boys of seven years of age in white aprons; one style reaching to the knees, and the other coming only to the waist with a pretty border, edged with something like lace work. I abominated the long apron and delighted in the short one.

One morning my sister was dressing me for school and was placing on me the garment I fairly detested, I pleaded with a swelling heart and tearful eyes for the other.

Her reply was that she knew Mr. Smur would be pleased to see me in the long apron, when I promptly said, “I spoke to Mr. Smur about it, and he said he greatly preferred to have me wear the short apron.”

To this day I can recall the sudden concealment of my sister’s face from view, while her body fairly shook with suppressed amusement. When she looked up, her eyes fairly streaming with mirth, and face crimson with the effort not to laugh outright, I felt somewhat abashed, and decidedly convicted by conscience, but would not recede an inch from my statement of Mr. Smur’s devotion to short aprons.

It was certainly a most amusing and absurd connection I was trying to make between the grave, severe, reticent schoolmaster and the little garment that so filled my eye. The putting of such a speech in the mouth of such a man was beyond question exceedingly ridiculous, and as a fact simply incredible, although it did not so strike me that morning.

I have mentioned the occurrence, to show as some would call it the marvelous imagination of a child of seven, but as others would more truly define and explain, the presence of inbred sin with its amazing power and facility for downright, as well as highly ornamental lying on short notice, possessed by the so-called cherubs and little innocents of the family.

I remember that this deliberate falsehood came from me without the slightest effort. And mind you, this falsifier was not allowed to play with “bad boys,” lived in a sweet home with a large, beautiful flower yard surrounding three sides, had his bath that morning, his hair curled and was being dressed by a lovely, loving, devoted sister.

Truly inbred sin or the carnal mind is in children no matter whether they live on an avenue or back alley. One fruit of carnality is lying, and the doing so with ease and quickness. And the lies come forth like finished work They are thrown off as from a, practiced hand, and yet the fabricator may be in pinafores and knickerbockers.

As I recall that long gone morning scene, I remember the Bible statement about the sin nature which is so warmly denied by certain theologians of today, viz., that we are conceived in sin, shapen in iniquity and go astray from the womb speaking lies!

I entered school at seven, a fluent reader and correct speller, but strange to say, have no recollection of the person or persons through whom I had received these accomplishments. Doubtless it was through the combined labors of my mother and a governess, although I cannot recall this as a fact.

Nevertheless this proficiency obtained through the painstaking care of others, sent me to the head of my class in the first week. And this scholastic triumph caused one of the young belles of the town, the little daughter of a leading merchant, to transfer her admiration and favor from a tall, raw-boned, hard-featured boy three years my senior, to the recent arrival.

The rejected was in no mood to accept such treatment and so after school gave me an unmerciful thrashing on the street. I did the best I could, standing up for my personal rights, but my antagonist out-classed me in weight and I was whipped in body, but not in spirit.

Almost five years followed of a kind of Punic war between us. The little belle was loyal, and for her sake I received about two thrashings a year on the average.

My cause was just, and a strange kind of judgment befell my long-time foe. He ceased for some reason to grow, while I physically flourished and finally overtook him. Perhaps the remarkable massage treatment he had given my body for years assisted circulation and muscular hardening, but anyhow there came one day a drawn conflict, and several weeks later the final battle was waged in the presence of the admired Lizzie M_____, and I had a complete victory over my opponent of years while she stood by most complacently looking on. And so the First Punic War ended.

Now for the conclusion. Neither one of us ever obtained the hand of Lizzie in marriage. When eighteen she visited New Orleans with her rare personal attractions and captured a rich cotton merchant in the Crescent City.

And so Ulysses, the boy’s name, and myself had pummeled each other for five long years all for nothing.

We became great friends after that, but were severely silent on the subject of the marriage in New Orleans, of a girl named Lizzie M_____, and of a certain boyish Punic war we had carried on for years in vain.

The solemn and affecting teaching from this piece of life history must be evident to many, and applied easily to a number of situations in life.

I have known persons struggle long and frantically for fortune and some one else stepped in and rolled up the coveted wealth.

I have beheld men strive and fight with each other for fame and office, and some “dark horse” would succeed where they failed. And all the squabbling bad been for naught.

I have known preachers wrangling for the office of a bishop, and some one else got elected instead of themselves They lost both the office and their religious experience.

Especially does the life lesson apply to the hopeless conflict and struggle going on in the case of millions for the love, favor, smiles and hand of this world. She seems to receive the attention of many, but finally rejects them all. She gives neither her hand or heart to any, but only a burial lot to the whole crowd in one of her cemeteries.

In the morning of the Resurrection, all of these defeated and rejected aspirants will arise from the dust only to behold the World they so worshipped, wedded to another and passing away from their view forever.

There was no hope for them from the beginning. She had been promised from her birth to the “Saints.” “The earth is the Lord’s”. And so clad in the glory of God and filled with righteousness she is beheld by her old-time suitors, the multitudes of the lost, now belonging to Christ and the followers of the Son of God, sweeping away from their gaze and presence for all eternity.

She seems to have forgotten them. And yet, how they fought and pummeled each other, bit, hit and hurt one another to win the terrestrial beauty.

And lo! not one of them received the prize. This planet is not for the Devil’s crowd. “For evil doers shall be cut off; but those that wait upon the Lord, they shall inherit the earth.”

Chapter 4: An Undeserved Whipping

I can recall only several castigations given me by my mother in the days of my early boyhood. Doubtless I deserved these peach-switch ministrations, and can remember that I always felt religious for days afterward and walked around with a meek and quiet spirit.

But there was one tanning I got with a cowhide that was perfectly unmerited. It proved to be a maternal mistake, frankly and tenderly acknowledged afterwards, but the explanation failed to take away the marks and the burning sensation of the instrument of correction.

I had a brother four years older than myself who was always playing pranks, getting into mischief and bringing upon himself the rod of discipline. One day on account of some outrageous piece of conduct on his part, our mother told him she would visit him in his bedroom after he had retired.

My brother well understood what this meant, and as I slept with him, he asked me on retiring, if I would like to sleep on the outside, and not next to the wall that night.

I cordially thanked him, and from this unexpected piece of goodness shown to me, began to think my brother would not live long and was getting ready to go to Heaven.

I had often wished to sleep as I called it, on the outside, and now snugly fixed in this coveted position soon sank into slumber.

But later on I dreamed that something of a painful nature was happening, that a storm of some kind was striking the house, especially my part of it. With a clearer consciousness from a good open-eyed awakening I found that I was receiving a severe castigation from some one in the night, and my only protection was a thin linen sheet.

I could not remember what I had done to receive such a nocturnal flagellation, but accepted it on the ground that I deserved it on general principles, that if I could not recall just at the moment some particular offense, yet my mother might have found out things that I had forgotten, and I was receiving my just deserts.

But as the strokes were severe I had finally to burst forth in a spell of bitter sobbing and weeping. Whereupon there was a quick cessation of the lashes, and my mother in an anxious tone cried out: “Is that you, Beverly?” And I, in smothered accents, told her that what was left of me answered to that name.

Then came the quick query: “Where is that boy, Spence?”

But Spence had already slipped under the bed, and out of the door, and was gone!

This incident of boyhood’s life serves the purpose of showing up several interesting facts.

One is the undeserved censure, abuse and general suffering some people receive in this world.

I know of a boy who was whipped severely by his teacher for an offense he had not committed, and when he got home was castigated still more severely by his father for having committed the same imaginary misdeed.

All this is but a faint type indeed of the suffering of men and women who pass through life criticized, judged and harshly dealt with for things which they had not said, and did not dream of doing.

This is a world where people are far more apt to obtain injustice from the hands of men than justice. Few earthly critics, judges and executioners know the full case of the victim they cut, lash and maltreat. Sometimes the injured one is not asked to explain, sometimes the wronged party will not trouble himself in his own self-vindication.

Anyhow there is much wrong doing committed in life that is not usually called by that name. Preachers who are hated for their faithfulness, evangelists who are misrepresented and denounced for utterances and actions of which they are innocent, statesmen accused of cowardice and disloyalty, parents talked against by their children, all alike know the truth and sadness as well, of the above statement.

Many have read of the occurrence in the Pullman sleeper, where a baby was crying and the father was doing his best but in vain to quiet the sobbing infant. Finally a man cried out, “Can’t you stop the screaming of that child and let us get some rest?” When the father replied in a subdued, sorrow-stricken tone:

“His mother, sir, is in the baggage car ahead in her coffin, and I am doing the best I can to quiet him.”

It is said that a dozen men were instantly on their feet offering to help the bereaved person whom they had so misunderstood and unkindly condemned.

I doubt not that just as swift a change of sentiment and opinion would take place, and just as ready an extension of sympathy and helping hands would be seen on the part of fault-finding, criticizing men towards their tongue victims if they only knew the facts of the case, the real history of the sad face and burdened life.

This can be fairly seen from what is beheld after death of members of the family, and the burial of citizens of the community. An abundance of light seems suddenly thrown on the finished existence. A spirit of justice as well as conscience straightway awakens. And men say with regretful lips we misunderstood the case, the man was a true man. While in the household the feeling is that they did not appreciate the fairest flower in the garden until Death plucked it from their midst, and bore it to a world where its beauty and value would be recognized.

A second lesson from this life incident is that the earnestly desired and coveted position in life is not always the best place for us.

Poor, restless, disgruntled humanity, always wants the front side, the first row of seats on the platform, the best position in the auditorium, and the highest rank in society, state and church. Like the writer, it wants to sleep on the outside.

I have seen many scheme, sigh, plan and struggle for these front places. Some get them. But the whipping is certain to come.

The leader is punished for the faults of his fellows. The man who is at the head of something will discover that he has anything but a pleasant time. Instead, of a shower of roses falling upon him, there will be slaps, blows and lashes of criticism, fault-finding and denunciation; and a regular pummeling of individuals who want the position, office and honor that he has.

Truly the front place is a perilous one. All such occupants are likely to be waked up suddenly at any hour with a perfect downpour of verbal whips and cowhides.

A third lesson is that there are individuals in this world who designedly place others where they know that trouble is certain to come upon them.

This distressing fact so covers the field of temptation, the using of human victims to shelter self in some way, that the space of this chapter will not allow room for development of the thought.

I doubt not that hundreds of our readers will understand this point without any elucidation.

A fourth lesson is that when trial and trouble comes upon the victim, the rule with the plotter then is to vanish.

Once when a member of the St. Louis Conference, a preacher of that body drew up a strong, outspoken resolution against a crying evil of the day. His own name was signed to the unpopular paper, and then he came to me and requested my signature. I could not refuse, although I felt there was a wiser, better course than the one he was pursuing.

As the time drew near according to an order of the Conference when all such papers should be considered, I observed the restlessness of the brother and just a minute before the call, looked in his direction and saw his seat was empty. Nor did he appear until the discussion was all over.

I had not studied the subject, nor prepared for the debate as I should have done if I had been the drawer up of the paper. So I was at a decided disadvantage in the speeches which followed.

As my name came next on the resolution, and the framer having fled, I was left to defend the document the best I could in the midst of a furious opposition.

Our long-headed friend who was under some kind of a promise to present the resolution, foresaw clearly the bitter fight which would ensue, determined to get some one else to suffer in his place, persuaded me to sign the paper with him, and then fled incontinently at the first sign of the approaching battle.

In other words, the incident of my boyhood was repeated; my Conference brother got me to sleep on the outside, and when the whip descended, he slipped, so to speak, under the bed, and out of the door, leaving his victim to take the thrashing he had so adroitly escaped.

On the like principle there are people who divert suspicion and talk from themselves by throwing blame on others.

No wonder such beings never want to meet again face to face, people whom they have thus injured.

A final lesson from the life incident is that a double consolation is the portion of all those who are thus mistreated and ill-treated.

First, that while we are innocent of the deed for which we are made unjustly to suffer, yet there has been so much lack, and unworthiness on other lines that we can take the whipping on general principles so that after all it is a good thing for us.

A second consolation is that God will overrule it all, and bring a great blessing to our souls out of the gross injustice and wrong done us.

I recall that my mother fairly loaded me down with beautiful maternal attentions, made me a lot of presents, and gave me the time of my life for quite awhile, because of the wrong treatment and undeserved punishment I had received.

David had the same idea in mind when Shimei was cursing and throwing stones at him. One of his generals said to the exiled king, let me take the dog’s head off. But David said, No, that God would requite him a blessing for it all.

I have never known it to fail, that when our audiences have verbally stoned us for faithful preaching, God invariably blessed our souls to overflowing.

And when wrong has come from the tongues, hands and conduct of men, without exception greater blessings, sweeter communion and peculiarly rich honors and compensations would come at once from the divine hand to the afflicted heart, saddened spirit, and deeply injured life.

Truly through all ages God’s people have been inspired to look up through every conceivable kind of mistreatment and say as David did, with perfect confidence and Heaven-born assurance, the Lord will requite us a blessing for every curse that is uttered, and for every stone that in human or Satanic hate may be thrown at and cast upon us.

Chapter 5: Things Not What They Seem

When I had reached the mature age of nine years, I was made to undergo many heart pangs and mortifications in not being old enough to enter into the pleasures and pastimes of brothers, sisters, cousins and friends, male and female, of the family who had arrived at, to me, the wonderfully advanced period known as sixteen, eighteen and twenty summers, not to say anything about the winters.

I was told that I was too small to go on fishing excursions, as if I was to blame for my age and size, and was promptly ruled out with no minority report allowed, when pleading that I might be permitted to form one of a party going off on a camp hunt and deer drive. Several times I had been accorded the privilege of accompanying a gentleman down the lake bank, squirrel hunting, and where my responsible duty was to scare the red, gray or black beauty around to the other side of the tree for the huntsman to shoot. Somehow this failed to thrill and satisfy. Still it was all that one who had the misfortune of being nine years old could hope for in this present world, crowded with towering beings of from five to six feet high, and ranging in years from sixteen upward.

Among the social happenings of that time, and an enjoyment that was especially indulged in one year by our household and family connection, was the giving of what was called “parties.” The main substance of the affair was conversation, songs, games, musical instruments, the ubiquitous violin, a dance, and all terminating with a big supper given somewhere about midnight or one o’clock. The guests ranged in number from forty to sixty, and were composed of young people with a sprinkling of elderly friends and relatives to keep things in order, and give it the right tone.

When one of these social occurrences took place in the country, it added much to the pleasure of the attendants or “company,” as they were called, and necessitated a perfect cavalcade of buggies, with here and there a sedate old family carriage to carry the merry, laughing, thoughtless occupants within.

It happened in the year already mentioned, that there was an unusual number of these festal gatherings. And quite a majority were taking place in old Southern homes, that famous for hospitality and good cheer, were from six to twelve miles distant from town. So my boyish heart was made to ache and swell and all but break as I saw such streams of human happiness as I fancied flowing all about me, and yet debarred by a mere almanac feature from swimming in the current.

A line of wood-crowned hills nearly a mile away made the horizon boundary line on the east of the town. The big white highway climbed this lofty slope and disappeared in what appeared to me fascinating and fairy regions beyond. Over there the sun rose and shone, but on my side it only faintly glimmered, and set; especially the party days.

As the line of vehicles, filled with laughing groups, among whom I could see a brother and sister and almost a score of cousins; as this procession passed over and beyond the hill, it seemed a caravan of purest delight for the party of the first part, but to the party of the second part, viz., the little boy leaning with grieved eyes and trembling lips peering through the pickets of his mother’s back gate, that same cavalcade of joy, performed all the function of a funeral, and bore away the dead body of his hopes, and buried all his joy somewhere on the other side of that wonderful hill.

I had just witnessed the departure of one of these trains of pleasure, each buggy first making and then disappearing in its own little cloud of fascinating dust; and I with brimming eyes was turning away into the back yard with the thought that there was nothing in the world left to live for; when suddenly an old lumbering family carriage belonging to a well-to-do kinswoman rolled up to the front door. This lady was on her way to the party, to partly chaperone and likewise to enjoy herself.

As a lad I happened to enjoy the favor of this kind but stately aunt, and to my delight I was offered the vacant seat in the household chariot, with the proviso of my mother’s consent, and my own individual promise that I would mind everybody, get in nobody’s way, be ever so good, etc., etc.

All this, and even more, I gladly promised. The dream of my life was about to become a reality. The panting hope and desire of months and even years were about to be fulfilled. I was to go beyond those hills which skirted the town and that kept wistful, heartsick lads at home! I was going to have a long ride in a carriage! And I was going to a party! Here was joy indeed. The thing called Happiness had been captured, was tied and fastened down just over the hill yonder, and was patiently waiting for me to come, mount, and fly away on its obedient back. I was ready. I had lived for this hour. And now it had come. It was a golden one. Yes, pure gold. The problem of a boy’s life had been settled. It was not going to school that was needed, but to ride in a carriage and attend a party. Why were the old people so slow in seeing this plain and beautiful solution of a vexed question.

The social gathering referred to was at the home of another aunt of mine, and twelve miles away. The carriage in which the young hopeful of this sketch took the journey was hoisted on some old-fashioned leather springs, so that the vehicle had the rocking motion of a boat at sea. As a consequence I rolled around inside the swaying chariot, and breathing a heated and confined atmosphere laden with a smell of old leather, became dreadfully sick, and in the last six miles could scarcely hold up my head.

Even before I had reached the journey’s end, the affair did not seem so golden, and was taking on the appearance of gilt.

The house was reached an hour after nightfall. The windows were twinkling with many lights, guests had arrived, others were driving up like ourselves, and servants were rushing about in every direction.

The nausea soon disappeared after leaving the cause of it, and streaks of gold threaded the gilt, with reviving animation and expectation, in the breast of the lad. But if the sickness was gone, a great emptiness was realized by the supperless child, and down went my heart again when I was told by the family servants that there had been no regular family supper that night, and would be none, everything being sacrificed, and everybody waiting for the banquet at midnight.

It is true that there was an abundance of gay company; but they were all “grown up” people, and took no notice of the hungry lad. And it is true there was music almost without end, from piano, flute and violins; but no kind of melody will fill and satisfy an empty stomach, especially if that piece of physical economy belongs to a healthy boy of nine years.

By this time all the streaks of gold had disappeared again, and the gilt itself had become nothing but brass.

It would be hard to describe my increasing weariness and wretchedness as the time dragged by. I became dizzy watching through open doors and windows the flying forms of the dancers. I was utterly wearied listening to the clatter of tongues in conversation and the bursts of laughter where I had no part or lot in the matter. I became sleepy when I entered the brightly lighted rooms, and chilled when I retreated to the porch. I was fagged out completely by ten o’clock, and sought the library that I might find a sofa or divan on which to stretch and rest myself. But the apartment was filled with elderly people who had possessed themselves of everything suitable and were absorbed in a kind of conversational buzzing as endless as it was joyless to the worn out stripling.

The piece of brass had now become a lump of lead!

Leaving the Library Reservation that had been filled with a rush of Homesteaders, I went out weak and weary, to find a chair. But all articles of furniture had been moved out of the rooms to make space for the dancers, and even the settees on the front and back verandahs had been spirited away somewhere to make room for the promenaders.

At this time in my wanderings about, I essayed to go into the great dining room, whose portals were most mysteriously kept closed. As I opened one of the doors, I saw the long central table and side tables as well, loaded down with roasted fowls, baked meats, salads of every kind, frosted cakes, quivering gelatins, island float, whipped creams, and fruits and flowers of every variety.

A servant told me as he reclosed the door in my face that supper would be announced at one o’clock. It was then half-past ten.

At eleven my hunger pangs became so great that I returned to the dining room door, and was met by a cousin, a youth of sixteen, who came out of the guarded apartment with part of a raspberry tart in his hand, the other portion being in his mouth. Heart-sick and almost voiceless I told the youth that I was very hungry, and would like something to eat. My cousin replied as he placed the rest of the tart in his mouth, and wiped his hands cheerfully on his handkerchief, that “supper would be ready by one o’clock, and it would never do to take anything off the table now, it would spoil the looks of things,” etc., etc.

In walking away, I examined the golden blessing of the morning, and found it had not only backslidden into ordinary gilt, degenerated into brass, and passed into the leaden stage, but it had resolved itself into a form wonderfully like a quinine pill. And the pill was lodged in the throat. And it had no jelly covering or sugarcoat. It was bitter through and through.

Yet the saddest feature of the case has yet to be related. Hungry, sleepy, head-aching, leg-weary, homesick and heartsick, unable to find a lounge or chair that one could occupy, I crept into a shadowy corner of the porch, where, leaning against a honey-suckle frame, I listened to the music, laughter and tread of feet in the crowded rooms, and shed bitter tears all to myself in the dark.

Little by little, exhausted, grieving, I sank towards the floor, until at last I was curled up sound asleep under the clambering vines that stirred with fragrant breath above my unconscious and dreamless head.

Finally cramped with the position, and chilled through and through with the night air, I awoke with a start. I feared I had overslept myself. But the violins were still going, and the tread and shuffle of feet were sounding just the same. With hunger pangs that were simply unendurable, I staggered to my feet, walked to the dining room, and gazed in. And lo! and behold! supper was over! The room looked like a battle and a cyclone had passed over and through it. With the exception of some damaged garlands and empty plates the place was bare. The sound of dishes being washed could be heard in the distant kitchen, while over twenty or thirty Negro servants out there were making merry over the fragments and remains of the banquet that had been given to them. I had slept four hours!

The golden blessing of the morning had gone through the various stages of gilt, brass, lead and quinine; and now at this stage of proceedings had become a sickening dose of ipecac.

There is no need to retrace minutely this piece of actual history to make explanation and application in spiritual things. The sketch is a self-evident proposition. It is a piece of most familiar biography to every one who has believed the false promises of sin, followed the desires of his own ignorant heart, and gone to the world and into evil, in the search after real pleasure and solid happiness.

What a long list of disappointments is sure to follow. What a vain waiting at open doors and windows for the form of peace and satisfaction to appear. What a chill in the gallery, and what stifling heat in the rooms. How tired one gets of the same old tramp and procession; the same old empty conversations; the laughter that has not a single ring of true joy and happiness about it, in spite of its loudness and frequency.

A fearful spirit hunger goes with the disappointed soul. There is no rest to be found. Doors are shut in the face. One is bidden to stand aside and wait. Selfishness reigns. The crowd overlooks, jostles, pushes aside, and forgets. The body grows weary, the head aches, the heart is heavy, and the spirit discouraged. The band plays on, but somebody out on the porch is chilled to the soul, and wonders where the joy or satisfaction comes in, and when it will appear.

He is finally told by those who look like they ought to know, that it is to be found in certain hours and on certain tables. After more heart-breaking and exhausting waiting, he makes a rush for that peculiar hour and table — and lo! nothing is there! If ever there was anything, it is all gone now.

The staircase trod by the deluded being did not ascend but descended. As he reaches the bottom and looks up, he names the steps. They are Gold, Gilt, Brass, Lead, Quinine and Ipecac.

Chapter 6: The Present of a Pony

The writer had a sister who was bright, good-looking and attractive in her ways, and so had a number of admirers. The fact that in those ante-bellum days the family possessed land, a town residence and a lot of slaves did not have a tendency to diminish the number and ardor of the suitors.

Prominent among these gentlemen was a physician whom I will call Dr. Direct, and a Southern cotton planter whose title shall be Mr. Policy.

The doctor, as the name would indicate, never lost time winning the favor of the family, but went steadily and continually for the affections of my sister. He was not discourteous at all to the rest, but it was evident to all that it was my sister he was after and not the family.

Mr. Policy pursued another course altogether different, and endeavored to ingratiate himself with the whole household, and so having them all on his side would carry my sister by the force of an overwhelming majority vote.

As I was the favorite little brother of this sister, Mr. Policy treated me to greater kindnesses and favors than he did the woman he loved. He fairly loaded me down with presents and gifts of all kinds. He used to tell me charming stories on the portico while Dr. Direct was in the parlor losing no time on side issues and unimportant provinces like little brothers, but using all his strength for the capture of the lovely citadel before him.

The culminating, and as it proved the last present made me by Mr. Policy, was a beautiful clay-bank pony named Gillie. As it was brought to the front gate, with a shining little saddle and bridle, while a servant delivered a note saying that it was all for the writer, I can never forget the transport that filled me. I patted the glossy neck of the pony, and had I possessed a thousand sisters I am confident in my enthusiasm and gratitude I would most cheerfully have married them all to men like Mr. Policy and felt they would have done well, lived long and died happily. Of course that would also have meant a thousand ponies for me.

Dr. Direct did not have the money Mr. Policy possessed, but he owned a pair of dark expressive eyes, was deeply in love and made up in attentions to the sister what he lacked in handsome little horses for the young brother, and so went on his way apparently unmoved by the Gillie episode.

As the public schoolhouse was located in the center of the town where we lived, and our home was in the suburbs, the gift of Gillie at once impressed a certain head of the family most agreeably that a happy solution of the long walk to school by the two boys of the family, my brother, aged fourteen, and myself, still younger, had been beautifully and tastefully and materially found. That problem solution was Gillie.

So Mr. Policy was fairly beamed on by the aforesaid head of the family and indeed all the household, except my sister.

The very next morning Gillie with the glistening new saddle was brought around after breakfast. The family were all gathered with pleased smiles on a side porch to see the stylish and happy departure of the two exultant lads who were hoisted up by the Negro hostler, the older one on the saddle and the younger one on a pillion behind the saddle.

All would have gone well doubtless, and who can tell but Gillie might have won the day in the marriage relation referred to. But how many things after all depends on mere accidents.

My brother, grasping the reins in his hands, gave a loud cheerful cluck, and at the same time jabbed his heel in Gillie’s tender flank. Whereupon our young steed, not accustomed to such rude treatment, at once in some remarkable yet unmistakable manner shot my brother up in midair, and with another similar lightning-like movement sent me up after him; and then quietly went to browsing grass by the side of the flower yard fence as if nothing had happened.

My brother and I both landed on the grass fearfully frightened, but unhurt, amid the shrieks of the female members of the family on the portico.

To this day I can recall their blanched faces and piercing cries. They had gathered to witness our triumphant departure to school, and beheld instead a sudden ascension in the skies followed by a fall as sudden, which they feared was fatal.

Gillie was led in disgrace to the stable, and instead of proving a help to Mr. Policy, operated most naturally against his cause as he had nearly proved the death of the favorite little brother not to mention the older one.

Meanwhile in spite of Mr. Policy’s protests and affirmations as to Gillie’s gentleness, and that he simply did not like a heel thrust into his flanks; said young steed was left severely alone, everyone being afraid to ride him. And so the young horse being healthy and with a good appetite, proceeded as stable men say, to eat his head off.

One day Probe, the hostler, appeared at the back door of the family mansion and said to a certain head of the family, that Gillie had eaten another sack of oats and there must be some more provender ordered for him; when this same head of the family in a momentary fit of irritation over the expense of an unused horse, cried out:

“I wish that Gillie was down Mr. Policy’s throat.”

Now it always happens in the family history that certain youngsters are around the very time they should not be; and with eyes like saucers and ears like little pitchers it is wonderful what they see and hear.

I happened to be around; heard the speech; and being devoted to Mr. Policy, was greatly grieved, and marveled how such an utterance could be made relative to one who had been so kind to me even to the giving of Gillie.

The problem was too great, and the burden too heavy for the child’s heart, and so that very evening when Mr. Policy called, taking his usual seat on the verandah, while Dr. Direct was in the parlor, he drew me to his side and began his usual entertaining conversation.

But my spirit was too troubled to enjoy the badinage and humorous talk, and so I finally said:

“What do you think So and So said this afternoon about you?”

Immediately the man’s eyes sparkled, thinking that if a head of the household had been speaking about him it meant naturally much in his favor; so he replied eagerly:

“What was it?”

“They said,” I answered in a grieved, indignant tone, “that they wished Gillie was down your throat.”

To this hour I have a vivid memory of the shocked and pained look on Mr. Policy’s face as he sat in the twilight on the porch while voices, laughter and music were floating out from the parlor windows.

It has always been a mystery to me how my unfortunate speech on the porch came to be known. It must have been by “wireless,” or I was overhead. I cannot tell, for I do not understand it myself. But I do know that in less than five minutes I was receiving a peach-switch dressing down in the bath room at the end of the back gallery. Moreover, I was bidden to go straight back to Mr. Policy and tell him that the aforesaid party had not said what I had repeated.

My rendering of this corrected address was unfortunate, but perfectly natural as a child. With tears streaming and knuckles in my eyes, I sobbed, standing on the fateful porch again: “Mr. Policy, they told me to tell you that they never said what I told you.”

Well, it is all over now. Dr. Direct married my sister. Mr. Policy, determining to be in the family, took for his wife a pretty black-eyed cousin of ours who led him a lively dance clear up to the portals of the tomb. Gillie was sold and the money placed to my credit in the town bank. One day I went down with a gentleman friend and got it. It was paid to me in a roll of silver and gold. On returning home a member of the family borrowed it; and this was the last I ever saw of the same gold and silver, the price of my little clay-bank pony.

And now to the question what lessons do I propose to draw from this life page of my boyhood, I would answer:

First, the best and quickest way to accomplish a desirable end is to go at the matter personally, immediately and continuously.

Dr. Direct gives us this most excellent teaching; and while Mr. Policy took a roundabout route, and lost time with intermediate personages, he himself went directly for my sister’s heart and hand and won.

When I see Roman Catholics today losing time with the Virgin Mary and the saints, instead of waiting directly and personally on Christ, I say here is Mr. Policy’s blunder over again.

Still, again, when I behold a lot of Protestant evangelical Christians giving the time and attention to some pulpit star or platform light, instead of going directly to the Son of God for the light, grace and blessing, which He alone can bestow, I say behold the blunder of Mr. Policy performed over again in the doctrinal and ecclesiastical realm.

Verily, if one-hundredth part of the time devoted by a lot of religious people to running around to different meetings to hear certain long-haired men and short-haired women air their views would be spent in humble, earnest prayer at the feet of the Son of God, the mystery of the Upper Room experience would be a secret no longer, and purified in heart and filled with the Holy Ghost, they would be mighty under God in the pulling down of strongholds and spreading full salvation everywhere among the children of men.

Another lesson from my boyhood’s history is that a lot of people in the name of religion are giving presents to the wrong person.

There are numbers of individuals who seem to be trying to win the favor of Heaven and a place in God’s family by certain gifts to the public or to some ecclesiasticism.

Christ is a person, and wants our individual and personal love and devotion. He is also omniscient and is not deceived when he sees men delighting not in, and living not in, His presence, yet trying to purchase salvation by a gift to some church, community, college or hospital.

These gifts have their part in the Christian economy, but cannot take the place of personal love, union and communion with the Son of God.

What astounding revelations the Day of Judgment holds for multiplied thousands of such so-called gifts to Christ. It will be found that they were not for the Savior, anyhow, but some were wrenched out by approaching death and some extorted by an agonized conscience, and some were really cases of restitution, and some to disarm the wrath of God, and perhaps not one in a thousand sprang from personal affection for the Redeemer.

Still another lesson from that early scene of boyhood is that some gifts that may be made us or come into our lives can prove very dangerous and even disastrous.

Just as Gillie landed my brother and self head-over-heels on the ground amid loud lamentation from the porch as well as on the street, so we have seen how varied and perilous things called gifts bring a lot of people into a world of trouble.

The Bible says that a gift bringeth a snare. And so we have beheld Gillie brought out to a pastor in the form of a gold watch, broadcloth suit, or trip to Europe by his rich members, and Gillie threw the man of God into the dust. The prostrate being became an earthly sycophant, a boot-licker of the rich, a crawler on the ground ever after. Look out for Gillie!

We have observed Gillie in the form of Oratory. It was a great gift, indeed, and Gillie fairly shone with his resplendent caparisons. But we saw the same Gillie throw the preacher clear out of the Gospel into lectures, Masonic addresses and Fourth of July speeches, and finally landed the rider into backsliding and a backslider’s Hell. Look out for Gillie!

We have seen Gillie in a Blarneying Tongue, in Promises of Financial Help, in Smooth Manners, in a Honeyed Smile, in Good Looks, in a Confiding Manner and many other attractive, captivating and bewildering forms. But no matter how he came, we have never failed to observe that Gillie always throws his rider.

So I say in all earnestness to those who read these lines, and I repeat it, and I repeat it still again — ”Look out for Gillie.”

Chapter 7: Seeking Happiness Through Playing Hookey

When I was a lad of ten years of age I had an experience with some schoolmates on the line of transgression which has been an oft recurring memory with me ever since. It was a kind of parable in itself and most powerfully illustrated and proved the utter inability of disobedience to produce happiness.

These four schoolmates, all of them several years older than myself, offered to show me the way of joy and happiness. In common with the rest of the human family, I craved the experience they so glowingly painted to me. I wanted to have a great time, a splendid time, a real happy, jolly time. So when they expressed their willingness to reveal the path and lead me into the felicity which they said awaited me, I after some misgivings and anxieties consented to be initiated.

In this instance the happiness was to come from “Playing Hookey,” the words used in those days for being a Truant from school.

I was already getting a lot of real enjoyment from school studies and triumphs, but these boys told me that the pleasure of going to school was not worthy to be compared a moment with the joy of not going. That we would leave our several homes with books and satchels, but instead of journeying to the domicile of learning presided over by a strict teacher and there expending hours of mental toil, we would arrive in another part of town and spend all the morning and afternoon in having one of the times of our lives in doing nothing but play, and having fun by the cart and wagon load.

The place of resort which was to be the hall of light, festivity and gladsomeness was under the house of a Mr. Bowers, a citizen of Yazoo City. The dwelling rested on brick pillars of about four feet elevation in the front and gradually ran back until at the rear it touched the ground.

In these cramped quarters, with a damp ground under foot and a moldy smell that was anything but agreeable, I followed my companions in the search after happiness by playing hookey or in other words, by disobedience of home, domestic and school laws.

I remember to have sat down on the damp earth with my head close to the spider-web draped beams and timbers above me and looked for Happiness to appear as had been promised. But I saw no sign and so expressed myself, while I began to feel very low-spirited.

But the leader of our little band informed me that it would come after awhile, and especially after we had played a few games of tag, hiding the switch and some others he named. But the quarters were cramped, the air seemed to get moldier, and anyhow my heart continually got heavier, and fleeting thoughts of my devoted and superior mother, what she would think of me and what she would say and what she would do when I went home and told her where I had been — all these things exercised such a melancholy, doleful power on my mind and heart that already my confidence in disobedience as a producer of happiness was shaken to the very foundation.

But the leader had reserved one of his best and most sprightly games to the last. It was called “Chicky-Me-Crany-Crow,” and was performed by all of us marching around in a ring with one in the center who was dubbed the Old Witch. The chant of the song was intended to be cheerful, but on that afternoon sung about four o’clock with tired body, empty stomach and time for returning home drawing near, it was the most doleful affair in the song line that I ever remember to have heard. And when the song said, “I went to the well to wash my toe” — I felt I wanted to fly home, bury my face in my mother’s lap and all but wash my eyes out with tears of repentance over my act of folly and sin. And when the question was asked at the periodic stop made in the game — ”What time is it, Old Witch?” and the answer was given, one, two, or three o’clock, my miserable heart cried out — ”It is not time at all — this is eternity! When is it to end?”

When I all but crept and slouched my way home I hardly looked like the well-dressed mother-kept boy that had left in the morning at eight o’clock in the search after happiness. It was now nearly five o’clock, and I felt with my sad, humbled, disappointed, guilty heart that I had aged years in those few hours and that I had received a lesson which had come like the lash of a whip and the sting of a scorpion and which would remain a sorrowful, regretful mark upon spirit and memory as long as my life on earth should last.

And when I see numbers rushing in the path of disobedience for happiness, no matter to what house or hall they go, what dance or revelry they engage in, or what song, ballad or opera they sing, I have a sudden vision of some mistaken, misguided little boys under Mr. Bowers’ house; again I hear the doleful strains of Chicky-Me-Crany Crow; I see the desperate effort after happiness in impossible circumstances, and hear the periodic question of the flying hours of life, “What time is it?” And as one, two, three, and the other periods are tolled out and a satisfactory answer is never given, I behold the march resumed, the song repeated, the hopeless quest taken up again, until finally the night of death comes, the summons home is given, and a lot of disobedient beings go out into eternity to meet a disappointed and offended God.

Chapter 8: The Lesson of the Ladder

When I was eleven years of age, a great menagerie, with attendant athletes, tight rope walkers, etc., came to town where I lived. My mother being absent on a visit, I was allowed to attend the performance by an indulgent sister.

I remember to have had only a mild interest in the animals, while the harlequins or clowns were in my green judgment, exquisitely humorous and in every respect superior to the dumb show in the cages. But the acrobatic performances on the dizzy trapeze, mid-air flights, back somersaults and the walking of tight ropes held my attention most profoundly.

I was especially impressed at the sight of two men holding a ladder in an upright position, while a third in tights and spangles went rung by rung to the top and there stood on his head for a full minute, while the band played and the audience applauded.

It all seemed so easily done that I did not question my ability a single second to perform the same deed in the back yard of our home.

That very afternoon I secured a twelve-foot ladder from the stable, directed two little colored boys of ten and twelve years of age to hold it steadily while I ascended to the top.

At this distance of time I do not remember whether I intended to try standing on my head or on my feet when I arrived at the culminating rung. That recollection must have been knocked out of me that day. I only recall that as I reached the summit I heard the colored boys crying out that they could not hold the ladder any longer; that it was going; and I felt and knew it was; and then with a great crash I came to the ground and felt and knew no more.

A large mulatto Negro saw the downfall from his cabin door, leaped a fence, and picking me up, carried me into the house and laid my unconscious form on the bed amid the fright and grief of the family and servants combined. A physician was summoned, restoratives and remedies were applied and I came back to consciousness and life after quite a while, with much pain in my head and body, but a great deal of profitable knowledge besides concerning the vanity of acrobatic stunts, the certainty of the law of gravity, the wonderful power of bodies meeting suddenly, and the decided superiority of staircases to ladders in the matter of going from the bottom to the top of these similar and yet dissimilar pieces of domestic architecture.

I remember to have carried my head sideways for half a week as one of the effects of the fall. And when after my recovery I walked down town, where my mishap had been heard of and heartily laughed over, I encountered much smiling, and received a lot of facetious inquiry and advice from a number of gentlemen who were friends and acquaintances of our family.

I was asked if I intended starting an acrobatic troupe soon? And would I go starring through the country or continue to see stars in the backyard of my home? And did I not judge it expedient to practice a good deal before I tried that particular athletic stunt again?

Well, it is all over and gone now. The pangs of head and soreness of body due to the occurrence have departed. But there were several lessons imparted that day which have not and will never be forgotten.

One is that there are some things that look easier than they really are. The ladder affair seemed simple enough to the acrobat; but it was not so to me. It was beyond me. In fact, it came near putting me into the greater and unrecallable beyond.

Impromptu address seems easy. The ability to rise to an occasion when a speech has not been prepared is regarded as a small matter by many, but those who have tried it, without certain qualifications of brain, tongue and self-collectedness, have broken their heads in the effort to climb the ladder.

Some one saw Henry Ward Beecher tested in this identical way. It was all unexpected by him; but he spoke most happily and powerfully for fifty minutes. A friend said, “You did wonderfully today considering you had no time for preparation.”

His reply was, “My preparation for this sudden speech covers forty years.”

In other words, what seemed easy was not so really. There is a great difference between a trained platform acrobat, and a wondering, admiring, imitating little fellow in the audience.

Real preaching seems simple enough to many. Felicitous, unctuous, powerful delivery of the Word is thought by a number to cost no more than opening the mouth. It is not so. It is in a true sense not easy. It means a full mind, trained powers, much prayer in secret and the Spirit of God abiding in the soul.

A young man contemplating the ministry was as ignorant of these things as the boy was about the ladder. He had observed preachers speaking freely and powerfully for an hour at a time, and all they seemed to do was to take a text from the Bible, and have a glass of water on the pulpit or table near by. They would sip a mouthful of water and talk five or ten minutes, sip again and talk some more, and it all looked so ordinary an accomplishment that he requested to be allowed to deliver some remarks of a religious character at one of the next meetings.

Not being well known and the desire being in the church to encourage a worthy subject, permission was granted.

The young would-be orator saw to it himself that a tumbler of water stood near his hand.

It is said that he read a text from Scripture, announced the verse, chapter and book, and nothing coming to his mind, he sipped his water. Still nothing arising in his brain or coming to his lips he indulged in another mouthful of water in a tremulous, anxious why; and in a third swallow sound with increasing alarm, that still neither ideas nor words flowed! The intellectual pump was dry, the well beneath was empty, and as this fearful fact broke on the comprehension of the youth, he took a fourth sip of the non-inspiring fluid, wiped great beads of perspiration from his brow, and then suddenly and most ingloriously jumped from the platform and struck out with a rapid gait for a strip of woods about fifty feet away.

A revival meeting, is another thing that seems easy enough. Not a person attending the protracted services, but seems to feel competent to say what the preacher should preach, how the service should be conducted, what propositions should be made, how the altar work should be conducted; indeed, everything that pertains to that most trying and difficult of all religious gatherings, the real revival.

Few of the criticizing fraternity realize the mental furnishing that is needed, or think of the hours of lonely prayer with God, the private and public attacks of men, the terrific assaults of evil spirits, the abusive letters received, the deceitfulness of the human heart, the wearing of body and mind oftentimes, the necessity of no commonplace generalship, and scores of other things I have not time to mention.

It looks easy enough to the man sitting off observing the proceedings. Why certainly anybody can climb an upright ladder. Anybody can conduct a successful meeting of ten, twenty or thirty days. All he needs is a longskirted coat, a limp-back Bible and a singer to lead the hymns, and the thing is done.

Yes, but what thing is done? There are different kinds of things; and there are varied results attending certain performances according to the individual who does the performing. The acrobat went successfully to the top of the ladder and so conquered several laws at its summit, that the audience broke into applause. But the writer attempting the same thing got such a fall that it is simply amazing that his head and a half dozen ribs were not broken, while the slim audience he had that afternoon were filled with consternation and the air loaded with lamentation.

As for protracted meetings, it takes gifts and grace to run them. Who is willing to climb the ladder, with a few to hold it up? As for a revival, not one in ten protracted meetings ever flowers forth into a genuine revival.

Who is that I heard falling on the ground just then?

A successful or victorious life also looks easy.

Look at them at the summit. See how they went up rung after rung so quickly and without apparent difficulty. Hear the crowd applauding. Behold the public recognizing the achievement and merit. See the church and state putting honor upon them. Go still farther and hear the Great Judge at the Last Day saying, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord, and rule now forever over many things.”

Surely it must be easy to do all that went before, and come into these lofty places of earth and Heaven.

But what does the history of such conquerors say about these triumphs of time, self, salvation and character?

As for men who became great as warriors, statesmen, orators, authors and scholars, the record is that what seemed an almost effortless history to the careless reader or onlooker was preceded by many years of hardest, severest study and of undeviating toil, struggle and battle with every kind of discouragement, difficulty and opposition. In a word, these acrobats of the high places of earth, filling these positions at last so easily and successfully, had a training and discipline utterly unknown to their admirers and without which they could not have astonished the openmouthed and eye-stretched individuals in the audience.

As for men who have been great with God on earth and will be in high places in Heaven; according to the Bible and their experience, their training and discipline were intense and immense. They left all and followed Christ. They died to the world and their own reputation. They prayed, testified, preached and lived constantly in high places of truth, experience and salvation; but they were training when others were idling; they were on their knees in prayer while others were gossiping in the social circle; they were living for God while others were thinking and planning and working for their personal ends of property, popularity and earthly advancement.

No, there are those who cannot stand on the top of such a ladder. They have not had the private training necessary to bring them into public recognition as a man who can successfully occupy the high places of the spiritual and character realm. The power to prevail with God, and mightily stir and move men to thought and action on religious lines does not come accidentally. It may look easy to the boy in the crowd, but the man on the ladder knows better.

About such failures in life we have this to say.

First, some are killed. The Bible, the histories of earth, and our own observation all reveal a fearful number of people who fell from places where they were not fitted mentally or morally to be.

Second, there are still others who carry their heads sideways the rest of their lives because of their ignorance, presumption and rashness in places and circumstances that proved altogether too high for them in view of their past lives and lack of attainments.

I have heard preachers harshly criticize and judge older ministers of the Gospel who were leading hundreds and thousands of souls to God when the faultfinders were, according to their own confession, living lives of iniquity and crime. I have known of men who in middle age were suddenly converted, and then spent their forces of ridicule and denunciation of Christian congregations and churches who were living decently and morally when these same detractors and abusers were wallowing in the mud and mire of worldliness, drunkenness and sensuality.

The ladder was too high for them; it was to be filled by a different character and spirit; and so they tumbled and got an awful fall. In the sourness of spirit and hardness of soul which came upon them it was evident that they were badly hurt. They carried their heads sideways, so to speak, the balance of their days.

Third, some others get their heads well and straight again and quit climbing into places that they are not qualified to fill, and where neither God nor man has called them.

In the pertness of ministerial youth, I once in a speech criticized a grayhaired preacher on the Conference floor. I got a fall from the ladder and carried my head sideways, with a great ache in the heart besides, for many months. I have never climbed that particular ladder again.

Truly many of us have troubles in various ways since we began the Christian life. The ladders of intolerance, hasty judgment, suspicion, unkindness, fancied wisdom, eloquence and influence were all around and looked so tempting. We could easily run up to the top, show off, and come back again. But lo, we got a tumble. The audience did not applaud, but smiled broadly, and unquestionably over the consequent sidewise tilt of the head.

Well, thank God, many get well from the bumps and bruises they receive in life; and become blessed themselves and a blessing to others. The timid Mark became brave for Christ at last. The rash Peter grew gentle and tender. The fiery, cruel Paul was so filled with perfect love that when he took ship to leave a church, a great company followed him to the shore, and the elders fell on his neck weeping, and kissed him, sorrowing most of all for the words he spoke that they should see his face no more.

And so with us all. If we have been unwise and blundered, the Lord can mend the head, and renew the heart, and send us on the road to Heaven, perfectly cured of the ladder business, walking humbly and faithfully with God, and meekly, gently, patiently and lovingly with men, until he lets another kind of ladder down from the blue which leads directly into the skies, and from which we will not be permitted to fall, as clinging to Him we ascend into Heaven.

Chapter 9: A Lapse of Years

The Civil War period of 1861-5, covering four years of my boyhood, was full of event and incident to me. But in this volume I do not feel drawn to write about those days so full of pain, suffering and sorrow to millions.

Suffice to say that my mother moved from her home in Yazoo City to a plantation on Bee Lake, sixteen miles away. Here for three years and a half I studied, read, sailed or boated on this beautiful sheet of water, or fished on its cypress-lined shores or roamed with gun on shoulder through the sighing depths of the forest, and one summer listened to the big siege guns of beleaguered Vicksburg booming faintly in the distance.

The last five months of the war, I, a mere lad, enlisted in the cavalry, joining Company K, Wood’s Regiment, Wirt Adams Brigade, of Forest’s Corps.

After the “Surrender” I was sent by my mother to college at the University of Mississippi.

On leaving Oxford, it was thought best by members of the family that I should study a profession. And first Medicine and then Law was begun. But such was the prostrate financial condition of the people in the South that many thousands of her youth had to give up all aspirations in certain professional directions, and do whatever came to hand. So as I saw the hopelessness of the case, I ceased my wrestlings with Anatomy Materia Medica and Botany, and later cut the acquaintance of Blackstone, but read everything else besides that I could lay my hands on.

God evidently had plans concerning me and was leading me by a series of disappointments and through the instrumentality of a number of closed doors in a way that I knew not and understood not. I thought I was given up, when the Savior was all the while slowly but surely bringing me to Himself and to the work of my life.

Chapter 10: My Conversion

The first deep religious impression I can recall occurred in my boyhood. A protracted-meeting was being conducted in the town where I was raised. Several preachers were in attendance and I, a lad of eight or ten years, was present a few times. At the close of the services, and on the departure of the ministers, I remember to have gone into a room alone. And, casting myself on the bed, wept a considerable while. At that time I felt a great softness of heart, and realized a decided drawing to, and preference for, the Christian life; but in the course of a few weeks it all passed away.

At the age of nineteen or twenty, on returning from college, I joined a fashionable Church of another denomination from that in which I had been raised. This step was brought about mainly through certain social influences, and in connecting myself with that branch of Christ’s Church there was no change of heart, nor indeed any proper spiritual impression.

At the age of twenty-six, with a young wife and two children, God found me. For years I had not been to church, avoided preachers, laughed at religion, and was on the broad road to ruin. I regarded not the Sabbath, was a great smoker of tobacco, had got to imbibing wine occasionally, and was very profane. My temper at this time had become ungovernable, and the devil undoubtedly had me.

In the place where the Savior found me there were no churches and no Christians. Instead of this, there was any amount of card-playing, horseracing, and whiskey-drinking. I did not take up with these last three things, but, nevertheless, spiritually I was in a lost condition.

The way my conversion took place has been an unceasing wonder to me, as well as source of endless gratitude.

Let the reader remember that there were no churches in miles of me, and no preachers or Christians around.

The business of the store in which I was employed as clerk and bookkeeper fell off greatly during the summer of 1874. I used to walk up and down the lonely building and meditate. Christ had got me at last to a place where I was quiet, and could think. The thought which repeatedly arose to my mind, and with ever-increasing bitterness and sorrow, was that I was a failure; that at twenty-six years of age I had done nothing and was nothing.

I can see now that the Spirit was very busy with me; I could not recognize his work so readily then, but it is all clear now. He had no one to use in that part of the country to teach me, and so worked directly upon my mind and heart. Repeatedly, when alone in the store, I have buried my face in the piles of goods on the counter, and wept the saddest of tears. Then there would come longings to redeem my life, and be a true man. But I was profoundly ignorant as to what steps to take.

At this juncture I wrote two or three lines to my mother, saying, “I am determined to be a better man, and when I am a better man, I am going to pray.”

The reply of my mother was all the help of a human character I obtained in my conversion. She wrote a hasty and brief answer, in these words:

“MY DEAR SON, — I am delighted to hear of your good resolutions. But you have made a great mistake. Don’t wait to be a better man before you pray, but pray, and you will be a better man.

“Affectionately, YOUR MOTHER.”

This note brought a perfect flood of light to my mind. I saw I had been putting the cart before the horse. Like the lightning illumines the whole landscape with a sudden flash, so God used the simple words of my mother to clear up the uncertainty and darkness, and I saw in an instant, and that most vividly, what I had to do. I must pray, and keep at it until something happened.

That Thursday night I knelt down to pray at my bedside for the first time since my boyhood. My young wife looked perfectly astounded at the act.

I do not believe that if a wild animal had leaped through the window into the room, she could have been more amazed than she was at the spectacle of her kneeling husband; but I always possessed a goodly amount of willpower and what is commonly called backbone, and so prayed on. Still I did not believe God would have mercy on such a sinner as myself; and so He did not, for without faith it is impossible to please Him.

Friday night I was on my knees again before retiring; but it seemed to me that God was far away in heaven, and I was down here on earth, and I did not see how He could save me. And so He did not, for here was unbelief again.

On Saturday night I went again through the melancholy and apparently fruitless struggle. I arose with neither light nor comfort, but full of determination to press on and pray on until something happened.

On Sunday the store was closed, and I had the entire Sabbath at home. After breakfast I walked out in a grove near the house, and there, hidden from view, knelt down amid the trees, and with longing eyes looked up through an open space into the blue heaven. I told God that I gave Him myself and all I had, that I wanted salvation and rest, and please to take me. I pleaded with Him in this way for quite a while, and discontinued I know not why. I walked thoughtfully back to the house, and took my seat by the side of a center-table in the room. I picked up the Bible to read, and had scarcely read a line when suddenly I was converted. Such a peace and rest flooded my soul as I had never felt before in my life, and it was so new, so sweet, so strangely blissful, so melting, that I burst into tears, and cried out to my wife on the opposite side of the table, “O Laura, I am not going to hell after all!”

I went across the room, and poured water into the basin to bathe my tearstained face. But I found that a fountain was flowing which I could not stop; and a blessed, beautiful love and peace was in me that water could not wash away.

In a few hours the ecstasy was gone; but I was a changed man. Moreover, everybody saw it, at home and abroad.

In going from my house to the store, two miles away, I would pray three times before I got there. I had the places picked out, one in a deep wooded valley, one in a willow thicket in the middle of the field, and one on the top of a hill, protected from view by a clump of trees.

I was very ignorant in regard to spiritual things; but I kept on praying, read much in a Bible which I carried in my pocket; began family prayer, although it came near choking me to pray before my wife and neighbors who dropped in; and, in addition, talked to everybody who would listen to me about this new strange, wonderful life which had come to me.

Two men drove up to the store one day, and after the exchange of salutations, pulled out a flask of whisky and asked me if I would take a drink with them. I replied: “No, I thank you. Now, as you have offered something to me, let me read something to you out of this Book.”

I began drawing my little Bible out of my pocket; but the instant they saw what it was, they gave their horse a sharp cut with the whip, and without a word of farewell dashed down the road. To this day I can recall their astonished look, discomfited faces, and rapid retreat.

Yet with this completely changed life, I could not understand many things about my own experience. I could not see why that delightful joy which had filled me that Sabbath morning had left me. I knew it was from God; but why should it depart? It did not abide, although it left me a changed man. The constant query of my mind was relative to that new sweet emotion that swept over me. Was it salvation, or God simply encouraging and drawing me on to salvation yet to come? Let the reader remember I had no one to look to or advise with.

One day there came an unutterable longing to experience again the same sweet spiritual sensation which had flooded me for the first time a few days before. In my rummaging over the library for religious books I had found an old work, wherein I read of a devout woman who was so humble that she always prayed to God on her face. It made a deep impression on me. I was standing on the gallery of the store thinking about it with that hungry heart of mine. Looking up and down the long road, I saw no one in sight, whereupon I stretched myself upon the ground, put my face down in the grass, and asked God to please grant me the same blessed joy He had given me in my house that Sabbath morning, that I might know I was His. Instantly I was filled with holy joy, the identical first experience. I arose from the ground all smiles, and with happy tears flowing down my face. But in a few hours it was all gone again.

So passed ten days or two weeks away, when I became hungry for spiritual instruction. There was so much I did not understand, and craved to know.

I determined to go to a Methodist preacher, and lay the whole case before him. So, saddling my horse, I rode twelve miles to Yazoo City, and called on the Rev. R. D. Norsworthy. There were other preachers in the town; but it is significant that I felt drawn to go to a minister of the Church of my mother, and in which I had been brought up.

This Methodist pastor said afterwards, that as he saw me walking towards his gate he felt, as he looked at my face, that he had business on his hands. Telling him that I desired to speak with him on spiritual matters, he dismissed all from the room, asked me to be seated, and to tell him what was on my mind.

Something of my ignorance of religious phrases and terms can be seen in one of the first utterances that fell from my lips. The preacher must have been amused, if not amazed. I said in a broken voice: “Mr. Norsworthy, I am an awakened man; but I do not think I am convicted yet;” and promptly burying my face in my hands, burst into a flood of tears.

From this occurrence it can be seen that the heart and head do not always run equally together in the race for heaven. It is possible to be all right in soul, and not understand theology. The spiritual part of a divine blessing can come on the lightning express while the intellectual part may arrive some hours or days later on the freight.

The preacher saw at once that I was a converted man; but determined that God should tell me, and in His own way and time. He, however, quoted a number of Bible passages to me, which brought floods of light then and afterwards.

So, on returning home, when this beautiful joy swept again into my heart, I knew it was the Spirit’s witness to my salvation and sonship. I pored over the Bible, devoured every good book I could find, prayed on my knees six or seven times a day, talked religion to everybody, stirred up the whole country, saw my wife and sister both converted in less than a month, and became blessedly established in a few weeks.

Chapter 11: Call to the Ministry

Soon after my conversion, I felt drawn to join the Methodist Church. Hiring a buggy, I drove into Yazoo City one Saturday with my wife and two children. The little ones were brought in to be baptized. We all came to the altar together, the whole family being given to God at the same hour. On returning to my pew, I was melted with holy love, and wept convulsively with my head bowed on the bench before me. An old, grayheaded member of the Church, Brother Hunter by name, came over to me, and, giving me his hand, wept also as he tried to speak.

It was while sitting in this pew I felt the first call to preach. As my eyes fell on the preacher who had taken me into the Church, and who was now speaking in the pulpit, a voice whispered within me, “That is your place.”

I was astonished, and yet thrilled. In another moment this verse was deeply impressed upon me, and I was less familiar with it than many other passages: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!”

As these words lingered like a strain of melody in my heart, I found a great desire springing up to do as the verse said. It seemed, however, as I thought upon the matter, among the impossibilities, and so I dismissed the thought, and remembered the impression no more for days.

After this my pastor paid me a short visit, and while walking with him along the road, he suddenly turned, and said, “My brother, you ought to preach.”

Again I was both pleased and yet disturbed. Then followed several weeks of a most remarkable struggle in regard to the matter. An impression was on me that I must preach, accompanied with delightful divine touches upon the soul; but as I reasoned against and resisted it, a profound gloom would come upon me for hours.

While in this state of mind I spoke one day to a friend and relative, who was an unconverted man, telling him of the impression upon me, but that I felt so unworthy that it seemed to me if I should enter the pulpit some one ought to kick me out. His reply was, “If you feel this way, you evidently ought not to preach.”

His answer brought no relief, but cast me down more than ever. It was some time afterward before I got the light to see that he, being an unregenerated man, was in no condition to give advice in spiritual matters. I also got to see that a sense of unworthiness is a good and proper feeling for one to have who enters upon the sacred vocation of the ministry. I saw that while I had expressed myself unfortunately in confessing to my sense of unworthiness, yet back of the faulty words was a right spirit and state of heart with which God was well pleased.

There were two approaches to the house where I lived, one which skirted a field and went over a hill to the high road, and another much shorter, which passed through a narrow, dark valley of several hundred yards in extent. This valley was so filled with forest trees, growing up its steep sides and bending over at the summit, that even in the daytime the place was shadowy and gloomy-looking; but at night the darkness was intense, and on starlit nights it was exceedingly difficult to see the path which wound about through the trees, crossing and recrossing the little branch of water that tinkled down the center.

One night I entered this place, trying to persuade myself that it was impossible for me to preach, that I did not have the ability, the eloquence, and many other things that I thought to be necessary. I found that as I thus mentally argued against my entering upon such a calling and life, that I was becoming more and more darkened in mind and wretched in soul. About the time I reached the darkest portion of the woods, I felt that the valley was not as black as my spirit in its conscious lack of all spiritual light and comfort. I was in such misery, and there came upon me such a horror of darkness, that I fell upon the ground, and rolled upon the leaves in the most acute and overwhelming distress.

Suddenly, I know not why, I looked up, and cried out, “Lord, I will preach,” when instantly the glory of God filled me, the dark valley fairly flashed and glittered, and laughing, crying, and shouting, I leaped along the path, jumped the branch, ran up the hill-side, on the top of which was my home, and fairly quivering with joy, and with my face all aglow with the happiness in me, I stood before my wife in the sitting-room, crying out, “I will preach.”

This joy remained in me for several days, when I began looking again at my unfitness. I remembered I had never been trained to speak in public, had not gone to a theological college, was far from sure that I could preach a sermon, etc. Whereupon all the old gloom came back upon me.

I struggled along with the depression the best I could while I attended to the work at the store. One day I was out on a collecting tour, and had ridden from house to house, and plantation to plantation, with my bills and accounts, and was that wretched I could scarcely speak to the people I was calling upon. Happening to pass in the neighborhood of my home in the afternoon, my wife, seeing my fatigue and melancholy, insisted on my stopping while she had me a lunch prepared. I sat down at the table mechanically, and did not even notice what was placed before me. I fear I did not hear her when she spoke to me. I was in a gloom that God himself was putting on me to bring me to my senses.

I can not tell why I did so, but without any mental process leading up to the speech, without having anticipated saying it a minute beforehand, and just as if it was hurled out of me by some internal force, I struck the table with my clenched hand, and cried, “I will preach the gospel!” Instantly the glory of God filled me, so that I laughed, wept, and rejoiced uncontrollably for fully a half hour.

Will the reader be out of patience with me, when I state that, in spite of all this evident will of God in my case, I allowed Satan in the next hour to direct my mind to the fact that I was no speaker, never had been one, and that the twenty-sixth year of one’s life was a very late hour to get ready for such an important work. The consequence was, another spell of gloom followed. For in less than a minute after I allowed the doubt to enter, God’s Spirit withdrew, and left me in the old-time horrible gloom.

It gives me pleasure to state that the next battle I fought proved a victory, and one that was glorious, complete, and permanent.

Several days after the occurrence just related, I was sitting one night in company with my wife in our room. She was sewing by lamplight on one side of the center-table, while I was on the other side unable to read, talk, and scarcely think, because of the burden on the heart and conflict in the mind. Forgetful of her presence and everything else in my misery, suddenly as had happened twice before, without any studied purpose of saying such words, here they came again, “God helping me, I will preach the gospel,” when such a flash of light, such a tender, melting, thrilling joy entered my soul, that I leaped to my feet, and stood all trembling and transfigured before my wife. To this day I recall her words: “Beverly, how can you doubt God’s will in this matter any longer after what he has just done for you?”

Thank God! I never did any more. From that hour to this, there has never been a question in my mind but that God, in his infinite condescension, called me to preach the gospel of his blessed Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

A few weeks after this, I was recommended by the Church Conference of Yazoo City, Rev. R. D. Norsworthy pastor, to the Quarterly Conference for license to preach. The last named body licensed and recommended me to the Mississippi Annual Conference. A single vote was cast against me; it was that of the old man who had wept over me when I joined the Church. He doubtless could not see how so much could be done for a young man in so brief a period: converted July 12th, and here in October licensed to preach and recommended to the Annual Conference. It all looked like undue haste and general prematureness to him. He did not know that sometimes people can live a year in one day, and that God can marvelously carry on His work in a surrendered soul and life.

I was outside of the church while they were balloting on my name, having been requested to withdraw. I can see the old brick building now, the place where I had gone to Sunday-school as a child, and attended Church with my mother, brother, and sisters. My mind was not on what the Quarterly Conference was doing inside. I was in the shadow of an old tree which grew near the pavement, and was looking up at the distant stars, filled with thoughts of Christ, and feeling what an honor and responsibility was laid on me in preaching the gospel.

Some one came to the church door and called me. I went in, and was told by the presiding elder, the Rev. H. H. Montgomery, that I had been licensed to preach, and recommended for the traveling connection in the Mississippi Annual Conference, the next session of which was to be held in December, 1874, in the town of Hazelhurst.

That night, when assigned to a room in the hospitable home of the Methodist pastor, I could not sleep; but lay thinking and praying on the bed. It seemed so strange to be a preacher. Then I felt so keenly my littleness and helplessness that I was quite cast down. Suddenly I had such a view of Christ presenting me to his Father, protecting and covering me by his love, grace, and power, that I was filled with one of the sweetest blessings I had ever experienced.

Having a long ride before me the next day, I arose before daylight without disturbing the family, saddled my horse, and left Yazoo City asleep behind me, while the firmament was twinkling above my head, and the morning star hung, a great orb, of beauty, in the east, the beautiful forerunner of the unrisen sun.

I was five miles from town when the day began to break. The cotton and corn fields had little spots and banks of silver haze upon them. A sweetness and freshness was in the air of the early dawn that was like an elixir to brain and heart. The hills were standing up in the indistinct light, solemn and gray, like great altars. A slight mist on their heads looked like rising incense. Nature seemed to be sacrificing to God. I was drinking it all into my already over-flowing soul, when fully a quarter of a mile away, on one of the hills, I heard a negro man singing. His voice was rich, deep, and solemn. The hymn was a plaintive old melody. The words and music God brought to me through the misty, tremulous, beautiful morning air were:

“Awake, my soul, stretch every nerve,
And press with vigor on;
A heav’nly race demands thy zeal,
And an immortal crown.”

How the sacred song echoed and re-echoed over the fields, in the valley, and was thrown back from the opposite hillsides! I was almost breathless, while the words “heavenly race” and “immortal crown” seemed to linger the longest.

The singer was hidden from me in the trees on the hill. He knew not that his song was reaching, filling, and blessing me, and this made it all the more powerful. I had checked the canter of my horse, and was walking him along the road, that I might catch every strain and hear every word. The singer was deliberate. He may have been employed in some kind of work, and hence took his time; so that a full minute elapsed, giving the strains of the first verse full time to die away in the distance before he resumed again. This time it was:

“A cloud of witnesses around,
Hold thee in full survey;
Forget the steps already trod,
And onward urge thy way.”

This time I felt the wonderful strengthening and girding power of the words, and said most fervently, “Lord, it shall be so.”

Again, after a pause, came another verse, thrown outward by the mellow, solemn voice of the singer:

“‘Tis God’s all animating voice,
That calls thee from on high;
‘Tis His own hand presents the prize
To thine aspiring eye.”

O, how the strain and words sank into the soul! The contrast between earth and heaven was so profoundly felt. The littleness of the one, and the greatness and blessedness of the other, seemed to be two facts unquestioned by the glowing heart.

As the Negro sang that morning, would that all could have heard him in one of God’s natural temples! And yet, as far as I could see, there was but one listener and worshiper beside himself. What a pity not to have heard such a sacred song, with the sides of the valley for sounding-boards, the opaline sky for a ceiling, the floating mist on the hilltops like incense rising from majestic altars, while the silent woods and fragrant canebrakes seemed actually to be drinking the scene and sound in, like the solitary listener!

The singer reached the fourth stanza. How triumphantly it rang out! Not a note or word was lost:

“That crown, with peerless glories bright,
Which shall new luster boast,
When victors’ wreaths and monarch’s gems
Shall blend in common dust.”

The world looked very little, and its honors and rewards very contemptible, under the words of the last verse. Heaven seemed the only thing worth living for. The heart was all melted, and the tears dropped fast.

I had reined in my horse to hear the last strain and word of the hymn which God had sent to me. I also wanted to impress the scene upon my mind, and carry it away with me, a precious mental treasure forever. And I did so.

After a little, when the silence reigned unbroken over the fields, and the singer had gone, I touched my horse and galloped swiftly away. I had many miles to go, and much to do that day. I had to tell my employer that God had work for me; I wanted to see my mother and get her blessing; and then I wanted to reach my own home by sundown, where my wife was waiting to hear what had happened, and what I was going to do.

All this was attended to that day with a glad and overflowing heart. The die had been cast. I had crossed my Rubicon. I had turned my back on the old-time life forever, and was now the Lord’s. I was His servant and ambassador from this time forth to preach his gospel.

But I took that morning picture with me. To this hour I see the dawning day, the outspread misty fields, the motionless woods, the silent, solemn hills, while floating over it all I hear the plaintive song of the unseen Negro singer, whom God sent forth to nerve, encourage, and bless the soul of a young, newly-made preacher.

May he, with all others in the Christian ministry, be able to join in the last verse of the already quoted song:

“Blest Savior, introduced by thee,
Have I my race begun;
Till, crowned with vict’ry, at thy feet
I’ll lay my honors down.”

Chapter 12: The First Conference and Appointment

After having been licensed to preach and recommended by the Quarterly Conference to the Annual Conference; as a newly-fledged preacher I made preparation to attend that important assembly of one hundred and fifty ministers and laymen of the Church.

For several years previous to conversion I had been connected with the mercantile life. My ignorance of matters ecclesiastical and ministerial was profound. I knew little about the work in which I was soon to be engaged, and nothing of the field where I was to be appointed. One thing I did know, and that was I had been most powerfully converted, was hungry to save souls, and that the whole earth had become a bright, beautiful, new world, through the sweet, beautiful, new love which God had put in my heart.

Somehow I had picked up the idea that a preacher ought to wear a beaver hat. This was natural, as all the preachers in the town where I lived wore that lofty, distinguished head covering. In perfect simplicity of mind I thought that the two as necessarily went together as a helmet and warrior, a black robe and chief justice, or a leather apron and a blacksmith. So in preparation for conference I was careful to secure a shining beaver hat, and did so with the spirit filling one who is discharging a solemn duty. The remainder of the wardrobe did not tally with the hat, but was a compound of a business and evening suit, consisting of a black sack coat and pearl-colored pantaloons. The state of the purse at that time prevented indulgence in regular clergyman garments. Perfectly accustomed to the kind of clothing I wore, I felt easy in the suit, and promised myself to regulate that part later on. My main dependence was on the hat, for I had conceived the opinion that a preacher was not rightly attired nor presentable unless he wore a beaver.

To the Conference of grave, faithful ministers of the Gospel my combination suit, in which society, business and the church all met, must have presented a study! Certainly Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. I doubt not I was a trial to many, a bewilderment to others, and a source of deep amusement to still others. The larger number were too Christ like and pitiful and gentlemanly to say anything, or even let the young preacher see that he was not all in appearance that he should be, and that they would like him to be.

There were a few, however, who did not follow this godly example; and their cutting, satirical remarks were soon brought, by busybodies, to the victim. The human target did not open his lips in reply; the tears gushed to my eyes, as I turned silently away with the first stabs that were destined to be the precursors of many thousands more in a long subsequent Christian life.

One thing I knew as my heart bled in my bosom; that while every other preacher in the Conference room knew more theology, understood the Bible better, and could preach with greater ability than myself, yet I felt to the bottom of my soul that no man there had an humbler spirit than my own. There was not the slightest feeling of pride of appearance. There was no thought of clothing in the mind. The one prominent and dominant emotion in my heart had been a sweet, humble joy that I was allowed of God to live and labor with such holy men. There was no one of them but the misjudged young preacher would gladly have blacked his boots or served him in any way.

The impression with a few was that the young probationer was a “greeny,” and so one of the messages sent me was “Would I like to learn how to catch gophers?”

To show how mistaken the judgments of men are, the man they thus criticized was the opposite of the novice they thought him. He had been deep in the world, and knew all the ropes. He doubtless could have amazed his critic with his revelations of the ways of the world. Alas for it! he was in this respect far from being a “greeny.” But he was now a new creature, wanted to do right, and to help save men from the same sinful world which he had forsaken. His apparent verdancy was simply his ignorance of the new realm upon which he had entered.

The man who sent the message about the “gophers” lived to see the young preacher he ridiculed rise to the leading churches of his denomination, while the ridiculer himself, about ten years later, was expelled from the ministry for the grossest of iniquity.

So right here in the beginning of my ministry I learned a very important lesson, viz., that we cannot always judge a person’s heart by mere externals. And often since then I have found humble and holy spirits under a handsome roof or nice-looking garment, and just as frequently have beheld the most intolerable pride in a jeans coat and brogan shoes.

I soon got rid of the pearl-colored trousers, but held to the hat for fully two years longer, as I was still under the impression that it was a preacher’s duty to wear a beaver.

To this day I think, with a smile of mingled amusement and melancholy, of what an appearance I must have made galloping along the public and private roads of my circuit. Now the sun must have flashed and glistened from the silk hat, as from a helmet, and how the waiting congregation must have seen the sparkling coming of their pastor while as yet he was a great way off.

The day came, however, when I saw that the kingdom of God was not meat and drink, and so could not be the cut of a garment or the shape of a hat. Then perhaps the consciousness of an empty globe on the head may have suggested thoughts about another empty globe being in immediate and startling proximity to the other. Anyhow, the hat went, and another of much humbler proportions reigned in its stead.

Being a college man, I went through the Conference examination with flying colors on the textbooks brought up. I did fairly well on the Bible, but went down with a crash on the Discipline. To the question if a member of the Church should break one of its rules, how would you proceed with him? the instantaneous answer was, “I would turn him out.” “Would you not at first remonstrate with him, or send a committee to deal with him in some way?” The response was, “No, sir; I would see to an immediate expulsion. He had no business breaking the rule.” How the chairman laughed, and how the rest of the class laughed is a vivid memory to this day. All knew more about the economy of the church than the young probationer who gave such immediate and energetic replies.

Without a steward, committee or congregation to welcome the new pastor, and in the face of the bitterest weather I ever knew in my native State, I rented an empty cottage in a small town and moved in with my wife and two little children. The next day was the Sabbath. My first appointment was fourteen miles away; a snowfall nearly a foot deep covered the country; and the wind, veering into the north, locked everything in ice and pierced the face and body like daggers.

Securing a horse, I started on the dreary journey. People in town told me no one would be out to service on such a day. But I replied, “I will be at my post whether others come or not.”

At eleven o’clock the country church was reached. With the snow piled up on its steps, icicles hanging from the roof, and gleaming white and bare in the midst of a wind-swept grove, the building looked as cheerless and cold as the weather outside. The wintry blast which tossed and wrung the branches of the stripped trees moaned through the belfry and around the eaves of the church. Not a human soul was in sight. Not a single track of man or animal was on the snow in front of the edifice. This was any thing but an inspiring beginning of the year’s labor, and of a life work in addition to that.

Hitching the faithful animal where he was protected from the wind, I attempted to get in at the two doors, but both were locked. Then I tried the long line of windows, and found all fastened but the last one. Taking a fence rail from a frozen fence near by, I made a kind of ladder and crawled into the cold, silent building.

I next knelt down in the altar and prayed a long while for the blessing of God upon my own soul, the work he had sent me to do, and upon the people I craved to see saved. In the midst of this prayer I heard some one trying to get in at one of the doors. I told the individual, whoever it was, that he would have to enter as I did, through the window. In a few moments more the man appeared through the unusual side entrance, and I found him to be the one steward I had in that part of the mission.

After a little religious conversation I called him to his knees and prayed most earnestly and lovingly and unctuously for him and the church at that point. Soon after we shook hands and parted, the weather still cold, the roads and fields hard and frozen, but with our souls warm, tender and glowing

My solitary attendant of that day went through the neighborhood in the ensuing days and told the people how he had found their new pastor not only at church on that cold day, but on his knees praying in the church, and how he had gotten him also on his knees and prayed for him and for them all.

Naturally, everybody wanted to see and hear a preacher that did things like this, and so on the next Sabbath appointment that same church had the largest audience gathered in its walls that had ever been seen there before, no matter what was the occasion or how pleasant the season. There was a blessed melting time on that second visit and service, and in two months more a revival broke out which swept over and through the entire district of country.

This was the spiritual harvest; and the seed that started it was the blessing of God on that lonely discharge of duty and that solitary faithfulness to Christ, as I have already pictured, amid the silent aisles and empty altars of the snow-banked, ice-fringed church that was hidden far away in the country.

Chapter 13: The First Circuit

My first circuit was on the shoestring order as to shape, being much longer than it was broad. The length was twenty-five miles, and as it possessed no railroad facilities, it had to be traveled on horseback.

The deep forest that bordered a goodly part of the road made a wonderful closet of prayer for the inexperienced young preacher. I was not slow to turn aside and commune, in my ignorance and helplessness, with God in the heart of his beautiful works. It was a hard, trying year, but out of these interviews and meetings with the Lord in the woods the servant would come from a communion of flame with the Master, ready and able for any kind of work and suffering.

At the remote end of the circuit was a village called Vernon, which was the second appointment on the monthly round. This little community consisted of a post office, blacksmith shop, two stores, a half dozen private dwellings, and a Methodist church with pillared porch, and front and side yards lined with arbor vine and cedar trees.

The town was the center of a beautiful district of country that was once as wealthy as it was lovely. But the Civil War had left its blight, and some of the stately old Southern homes had been burned down, others were crumbling to ruin, long rows of Negro cabins were empty while the broad plantations, once covered with the snowy cotton or rustling with the golden-tasseled corn, were now washed in great gullies or waved with the melancholy yellow sedge, and sighed with the young groves of pine that steadily usurped their way over the once cultivated fields.

It was curious and pathetic to see families that once rolled in wealth and luxury coming to the little dilapidated church in town in faded, broken-down old family coaches, or oftener still in two-horse wagons, with the most primitive kind of harness in the shape of shuck collars, and bridles and reins of rope.

It was in this sleepy-looking village that the life history took place which we have described in “Remarkable Occurrences” in the chapter called “The Two Letters.”

The second Sabbath found me approaching the church, which, with its belfry, pillars in front, and evergreen trees and shrubbery, looked well enough from a distance; but a nearer view revealed the front gate prostrate for lack of a single hinge, the beautiful lot upturned in every direction by the snouts of enterprising swine, the paint on the walls in a final stage of departure, broad sheets of plastering fallen from the ceiling, while fully twenty panes of glass had been broken out of the windows.

It was a bitterly cold day, and the wind whistled keenly through the riddled sash and scurried all over the building. Seven men had gathered in answer to the ringing of the bell to hear the new preacher, or rather to see who he was, for not one expected that regular service would be held.

So when I entered the pulpit, read and sung an opening hymn, knelt down and prayed, and then after a second hymn, which was altogether a solo, proceeded to take the text and commence preaching, there were seven astonished spectators, and not one delighted auditor in the freezing sanctuary.

All of them were wrapped in overcoats with collars pulled up high over their heads so as to look like visors. Hence we had seven concealed faces, but fourteen eyes peering out of shadowy retreats in a not very inspiring way as I strove under the circumstances to deliver my first message.

Brother K , one of the seven attendants upon service that morning, was a steward and leading member of the church. He distinguished himself on this occasion not only by hiding more of himself in his overcoat than did the others, but drew up his feet on the bench, and, I think, sat on them. The position was not conducive to seriousness upon the part of beholders, but the preacher was too much in earnest to be affected by the spectacle, and the remaining six brethren were too cold to notice anything but the fog which came up in clouds from their mouths and nostrils.

The text wasJohn 9:4, “I must work the works of him that sent me while it is day; the night cometh when no man can work.” I spoke about thirty-five or forty minutes. The only sound in the building was the voice of the preacher which at the beginning shook fearfully with cold, the sweep of the wind through the broken panes, and the rustle of a few scattered leaves of hymn books on the dirty floor.

I finished the sermon, offered up a short prayer, sung the doxology alone, pronounced the benediction, and came down from the pulpit to receive introductions, if not congratulations. Six of my auditors gazed wonderingly, and I rather think unutterably, upon me, and hurried away to distant home fires. But Bro. K , the leading man of the little church, walked up to me, stiff, erect and dignified, and said, in the most aggrieved and injured of tones, as I reached out my hand to give a cordial grasp:

“If any of us contract pneumonia from the cold to which you have exposed us for nearly an hour, you will have to be responsible for the results of sickness, expense, and possibly death.”

This was my first greeting in appointment number two. Among the famous seven of that morning was Bro. W_____, a steward and trustee, whose exact counterpart I have never beheld before or since. One remarkable trait of the man was his instantaneous acceptance of any kind of reproof or blame. Saying to him one day that I thought the congregation owed it to themselves, the community and to Christ to repair the broken windows, that the cost would be a trifle, anyhow, his reply was:

“Yes, Bro. Carradine, I know it ought to be done, and should have been attended to a long while ago. But we are a sorry lot of people here, and have not done it. The fact is, there is not one of us worth killing.”

On another occasion, when I pointed out the advisability of the church gate having a new hinge, that the hogs might be kept out of the yard and from under the building, he said: “Yes, we have thought of it; but the fact is, we are a very neglectful, postponing kind of people; and all of us put together are not worth killing.”

Such a reply as that made further speeches and judgments simply impossible. He confessed to guilt in the prisoners’ dock, and, instead of asking for mercy, requested instant execution. He even seemed willing to adjust the noose to his neck and spring the trapdoor.

Moreover, there is an old saying about not striking a fallen man, and here he was, not only prostrate, but he had voluntarily gotten down. It was impossible to strike him. He reminded me of an old dog that for years was a dependent and pensioner at the home of my childhood. The poor brute had been struck so often by the colored people, and received so many blows from careless and cruel individuals whom he met in the way, that whenever anybody came near him with kind, unkind or no intentions at all, with a stick or no stick, over he would go on his back, throw his four legs in the air and give vent to the most pitiful of howls. He never waited to be knocked down but got down himself.

Bro. W_____ continually brought this inwardly whipped out and outwardly life defeated old canine to my recollection. I had only to make the faintest approach to a criticism, protest or reproof; utter some statement of what ought or ought not to be done, when here would come the old speech: “I know it — but we are not worth killing,” and my spirit-subdued friend metaphorically would be on his back, while his legs, figuratively speaking, would be pointing in the air.

Of course I projected and in due time undertook a protracted meeting for Vernon. Feeling my own incompetency and inexperience, I was careful to secure a promise from a station preacher in the Conference to come and do the preaching. But through sickness in his family he was prevented; and for days Sister Annie in the tower never looked more anxiously for a cloud of dust down the road than I did for a sign of the approach of my pulpit help.

He never came, and here was a big congregation day and night on my hands, a deep interest springing up, while the four or five sermons I had saved up were preached out and up. There was nothing left me but that unfailing resource of the circuit preacher, viz… the woods. So, Bible in hand, I made for the deepest thickets and stretched out on my face for hours under the big sighing trees of the woodland, begged the Savior to help me in my great need.

And He did help. Intellectually and sermonically considered, I doubt not that the discourses delivered for the rest of the two weeks of the meeting were ordinary indeed. But Jesus blessed them, and they were saturated with prayer, baptized with tears, and delivered with absolute dependence on the Holy Ghost.

So the Spirit of God blessed the feeble instrument, honored the Word, came down with power on the people, and the town and community witnessed the greatest revival that had ever been known in all their previous history.

Among the many results of the meeting was the conversion and accession to the church of over twenty young girls, between the ages of twelve and sixteen, who were the daughters of Southern planters in the neighborhood. One of them was Belle Kearney, the acknowledged Frances Willard of the South.

A lady belonging to one of the oldest and most prominent Southern families in the country was powerfully converted, and shouted so that people who were one mile distant heard her rapturous cries.

Of course, all the window panes were attended to, the plastering restored to the ceiling, the hogs were driven out, the hinge put on the gate, and the little cedar-dotted churchyard made as beautiful as of yore.

The brother who said so often that he, with others, was not worth killing, received an overwhelming blessing, under which he so laughed, wept, shouted, clapped his hands and fell on the floor that it looked to a good many of us that the long-expected, much-talked-of killing had come at last.

Chapter 14: A Tuning Fork — A Strange Text — A Generous Gentile — A Kind Jew

There were two minor Sunday afternoon appointments on my first circuit, where but a handful of people gathered in a schoolhouse, and I did the best I could without pulpit, platform, pew and church organ. The hymns at these places were first read and then “lined,” as it is called, and then some lay brother was formally requested to “Raise the tune.”

Very often the brother raised anything but a melody, and would sit down with embarrassment and failure written on every feature of his labor-becrimsoned countenance.

At one of these side appointments I made my first acquaintance with what is termed a tuning fork. The young man who manipulated this interesting musical invention was as proud and conscious of it as an officer of his sword or a soldier of his plume. With the announcement of the hymn being turned over to his tender mercies, there would be a sudden rap like a hammer on one of the benches, a metallic buzzing sound would fill the air, followed immediately by a nasal humming noise produced by the young man as he felt, so to speak, for the note, and then there would be a sudden blurting forth of “Arlington,” “Dundee” or “Hebron” in such a startling way as to destroy the gravity that had been left in the audience under the combined attack of the metal hammer and the nostrilized voice.

At the other small appointment, a Bro. A_____ “raised the tune.” In all the twelve services of the year in that place I never knew our song leader to make a success of the matter. He was a timid and easily excited man, and when the request was given that he would vocally lift the melody his very anxiety and nerve-wrought condition conspired against his voice so that he invariably pitched the hymn so high that no one dared to follow him. In the second effort being sadly mindful of the skyscraping notes of the first performance, he naturally fell into the opposite error, and started the hymn in such low notes that it sounded like a dirge and seemed to come from his very boots.

Nevertheless, in spite of these backsets and trials in their way, the Gospel I preached went straight to human hearts and a number of bright conversions took place at both of these appointments.

I added two church buildings to the real estate of the Methodist church in the first year of my ministry.

Most of the money given to build one of these chapels was contributed by a rich man who was said by all the community to be a great sinner. The report did not keep me from calling on him in his beautiful country home, as I read in the Bible I preached, that the Lord went among and ate with publicans and sinners. I read also that by doing this he saved many.

The first time I met Mr. L_____ I felt strangely drawn to him. There was a feeling that away down in the mud of this irreligious, neglected life was what under the blessing of God would become a diamond of grace, a gem of the first water.

On expressing my regret that there was no church in all this beautiful district of country, and how desirous I was of seeing one erected, Mr. L_____ said, quickly: “Put me down five hundred dollars.”

How little either of us dreamed what this act meant for him. He had in a very wicked life taken millions of steps away from Heaven and towards Hell. A momentous hour had come to him. An epoch had arrived. He had turned and made his first movement toward God and a better life.

The second step soon followed, in the words, “I will go with you through the neighborhood and see where we can obtain an addition to my gift.” That afternoon, through his introductions and great influence, I received five hundred dollars more. With that we began, and lumber was ordered and carpenters engaged. Mr. L_____ took still another step in donating the land, and another advance still in seeing that the lot was in a central place, easy of access to the majority of dwellers in that section of country.

I watched with deepest pleasure the ever-growing interest of this “sinner,” as men called him, in this new work of God. He loaned his wagons and hired men to haul the plank, shingles, nails and tools to the site of the building. He gave hours of his valuable time to a very necessary supervision of the undertaking. The structure cost a thousand dollars more than was at first expected. Mr. L_____ paid this additional sum. A strange new light began to come in his face. His voice dropped much of its gruffness. At home he was observed to be gentler and kinder to his wife and children and servants.

At the dedication of the church he was seen to be in tears. At a protracted meeting held soon afterward in the church he was soundly converted to God. A few years later he died in great peace and went home to Heaven. Doubtless in the world of sweet and just reward he belongs to that division of the redeemed of whom it is said of each individual, “He loveth our nation, and hath built us a synagogue.”

Judging from the outcome of this piece of life history it seems to be a wise and excellent thing to get people tangled up in a good work for the Lord.

In the dedication, to which reference has been made, it was thought best, as the pastor was so young and inexperienced, to secure a prominent and distinguished preacher to deliver the dedicatory discourse and take charge of the service of that hour. The pastor was to follow in the evening with a sermon suitable to a mixed crowd. All this was right enough, but unfortunately when the widely advertised day and occasion arrived the big preacher was not on hand. His many duties as a college president and presiding elder combined had prevented his attendance. Here was a vast crowd on the ground and filling the church, and the speaker of the hour not present, but a hasty message instead, regretting the unavoidable absence.

Of course there was nothing to be done but for me, the young pastor, to take the place of the prominent official. I had one sermon on hand, or rather in my head. The subject was, “The Barren Fig Tree.” I felt that it was hardly an appropriate topic at such a time; but in those days a sermon was no little thing to get up. It cost no little mental as well as spiritual toil to properly divide and subdivide the text and rightly unfold and enforce the truth. So it was this sermon with me or none. Besides this, the building committee and trustees said I was the only man they could call on to meet the duty of the hour, and, going down under this last appeal, I walked tremblingly into the pulpit and faced a house packed with well-dressed people, while another crowd surged on the outside, unable to get in. My text was, “Behold these three years I come seeing fruit on this fig tree, and find none! Cut it down! Why cumbereth it the ground?”

I have never mentioned this occasion and my text to preachers since that hour without their bursting into a fit of laughter. Here these good people had just built a church and were starting forth with it and its services and works on a better life, when they were greeted with the startling words from the pulpit: “Cut it down I Why cumbereth it the ground?”

And yet it was under this sermon that Mr. L_____ was seen weeping. He doubtless saw a picture of his own previous barren and unprofitable life. Others did with him, and the same day I had an altar service and witnessed five clear cases of conversion and reclamation.

The first year of my ministry, while blessed in the salvation of several hundred souls, was an exceedingly trying one in a financial way. I was compelled to live in a town out of the boundaries of the circuit, so that a number of good people belonging to the charge did not know of the privations of their pastor. Then it was a new work and not yet organized and drilled in methods well known to the older appointments of an annual conference.

Hence it was that we suffered for the necessaries of life. Meat for months was a luxury indeed. Many days the preacher, his young wife and two children lived on bread and molasses. There was a day when we only had bread. And still another sad, dark day when we did not even have bread. A temporary relief for several days came most remarkably from the hands of a country boy. A knock sounded on the door while I was on my knees. Going to the front, I found a sun-browned lad of eighteen, who told me with great awkwardness of manner, but equal earnestness and kindness of spirit, that my preaching had done him good and he wanted to give me four dollars. His eyes filled as he spoke, and my own gushed with tears at the simple, loving, beautiful act. The sky was dropping rain at the time, and so we all three stood crying together.

In the midst of this trying period a full-blooded Jew who owned a farm in the country and ran a market in town heard incidentally of my need. He at once ordered the deliverer of his goods to leave me two good beefsteaks every day for the balance of the year. The account finally amounted to seventy dollars, but this man would never receive a single cent of compensation. He seemed reluctant even to accept the thanks which the grateful preacher offered. In reply he waved me off, and said, with a smile: “I have done nothing worth mentioning.”

I was afterwards informed that this man had raised and started in life not less than twelve orphan children. So he was not a stranger to the doing of good deeds. His kindness to the preacher was far from being his first act of generosity.

One day this Jew was standing in his yard, when a Negro man who had become angry with him over a trifle crept up behind his unsuspecting victim and split his head open with an axe.

The awful occurrence not only distressed me greatly, but greatly staggered my faith as well as I tried to reconcile it with certain statements of Scripture and with the providence of a just, good, overruling God who has all power in Heaven and also on earth. I had finally to leave this problem, with many others, in the hands of the Faithful One who has promised to explain all things and make every thing clear on the day of judgment.

Meanwhile I remember that the Judge of that day was a Jew. And that He said when on earth that a cup of cold water given to one of his servants should never lose its reward. So I can but trust that all will be well with my Israelite friend in the day when time ends and eternity begins. How sweet it would be to me to hear Jesus say to him, “I was hungry, and ye gave me meat.” And as the man in his humility and modesty replies, “Lord, when saw we thee an hungered?” Oh, how glad I will be to hear the Savior answer, “Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.”

Chapter 15: Interesting Characters

From the youngest and weakest Mission of the Conference, I was sent by the bishop at the close of the first year to one of the oldest and strongest among the Circuits.

My second work consisted of two small towns separated by a distance of eight miles, and connected by a broad, smooth highway running through a continuous stretch of Southern plantations, each one ornamented by a lovely grove from which could be partially seen the porticoed and pillared old-time Southern home.

It was on this road, and several miles from one of these towns, that occurred the incident which years later brought forth one of my productions called “A Churchyard Story.” A sudden storm of wind and rain drove me for shelter to a ruinous Gothic church, where from a broken window I beheld as described the strange-looking tomb in the graveyard.

This monument, with a couple of facts belonging to the neighborhood history, formed the foundation of the volume edifice which I constructed some twenty years afterward.

In this year’s work I was blessed with revivals at both of the principal charges, had a handsome new Methodist church built in a beautiful but neglected neighborhood, held a protracted meeting after the dedication of the building, and witnessed there a blessed revival.

I was much helped and benefited in this second year’s pastorate by the presence and labors of the presiding elder. He gave me weeks of his valuable time, and I have never ceased to be grateful for the strength, comfort and inspiration received through the companionship of those days.

This presiding elder, Bro. H_____, was one of the most devout men I ever knew. He was not a sanctified man, for the doctrine was not preached in our Conference at that time; but he was walking in all the light he had and was a mighty man of God. He was one of the few men I have known who seemed to be actually saturated with a spirit of prayer. I am confident that he spent four hours every day on his knees. His face was lustrous, and nearly always had a glad, pure light resting upon it. He talked to everybody about their soul’s salvation; held family prayer in each home he visited; pulled the fire out of the skies in his pulpit petitions, and was always signally honored by the Spirit of God when he stood up to preach.

And yet, strong as was this man, I have seen him fail at times. The “Old Man” may be kept down for long periods by just such a beautiful and useful life as this preacher lived, but he has a way of coming forth suddenly at most unexpected and undesirable times and occasions.

Bro. H_____ was assisting me in a series of services held at the new church. It was a hard community, and the congregation slow to yield. This doubtless affected our good brother, and he started in one of the night services in something of a crabbed spirit. The man was jaded from the pastoral work of the day, which duty had led us to visit, talk and pray with many stolid and stubborn households. Then the night was warm and the congregation disposed to be inattentive and disorderly. Moreover, the brother had in the duties and calls of the day been prevented from his usual hours of private prayer and the consequent reception of grace sufficient to keep the “Old Man” down and still.

In addition, he made the mistake of taking at such a time and in such a condition a sad and severe text. His opening words were harsh, and there was the pop of a whip in his voice. It sounded as the sermon proceeded as if he were glad that there was a Hell; and especially pleased that some people before him were going to that world of despair.

When he concluded the discourse and invited penitents, no one came. Nor would the audience respond to any kind of proposition. He then told them that their destruction and damnation was on their own head; and that he cleared his skirts and shook the dust off his feet.

After thus figuratively giving the people up, the preacher, now evidently angry, attempted to sit on the broad altar that ran around the chancel, but missed it, and fell with a crash on the floor.

There were some rude bursts of laughter and a great deal of suppressed amusement in the congregation, while the discomfited man arose from the floor and said in a low tone to two sad-hearted ministers sitting near: “It looks like the devil has got into everything tonight.”

Perhaps he had. Perhaps it was not the devil at all. It may have been the “Old Man” in one of his outings or on one of his rampages after weeks of suppression. He had broken jail for a couple of hours.

Dear man of God! he spent not less than two hours on his knees that night after service; rounded up the “Old Man” so to speak; got the escaped captive back in the guard house; and watched him so diligently that for the rest of the year no one obtained a single glimpse of the prisoner through the barred door of the mouth or the grated window of the eye.

In connection with my two leading appointments I had attached to the circuit an old weather-beaten, moss-covered church on Pearl River. The building threw its shadow over a graveyard that was more ancient than itself. It was a neighborhood burial ground, and under the towering forest trees which filled the enclosure the graves of entire households stretched in grassy hillocks on all sides.

I came but once a month to this ancient church, and then on a Sunday afternoon. But I hardly ever met this appointment without visiting a lowly, unmarked mound near the foot of an old sighing pine tree.

It was the grave of a Methodist preacher, who was one of the holiest men I ever knew. He died at the age of thirty-five or six.

When I was a lad of nine or ten, this man was my mother’s pastor. His holy, shining face and Christian life had not only forced themselves on the recognition of the boy, but had deeply impressed him as well. Very genuine was the sorrow of this same child when he heard that the Rev. Mr. L_____ had been sent away by the bishop and conference to another and distant charge. It was only a few years afterwards when we all heard of his death, and now, after the flight of other years, here I stood as a minister of the Gospel at the foot of this preacher’s grave.

Another part of the man’s history had come to me since I had entered the ministry, which added a most painful and mournful interest as I silently looked down at the sod which covered the sweet, gentle, Christ like face I had known in childhood.

He had been very unhappily married. His wife was a scold and termagant. She even resorted to physical violence, slapping his face and tearing his hair. He never resented the mistreatment, and never breathed a word to a living soul about his wrongs and sufferings. It was found out through servants and certain members of the family. His manner, in spite of the hell on earth in which he lived, was always unruffled. His face continually wore the sweet, patient expression and gentle, holy look that impressed all who knew him, and became an unfading recollection even with a little boy.

His pet name for his wife was “Dove.” I often heard him call her by this term; and yet she was a “Hawk,” and tore at his heartstrings and happiness all their wedded life of nine years. At last God in his mercy took him from his earthly sufferings, and the man was delivered forever from the ill-sorted and monstrous companionship which had turned his domestic peace into an existence of misery, and made his life one long, bitter crucifixion.

I thought of all this as I looked down at the lowly grave under the pine tree. I also recalled the fact that the first profound religious impressions I ever experienced in early life came from this man.

My mother had taken me to the class meeting led by this preacher. After all the older ones had testified, he turned to the one child in the small audience and said, with a sweet, gentle smile: “My dear little boy, have you anything to say?” My instant reply was:

“I am a great sinner,” and burst into tears. I never forgot the hour nor the impression.

Does anyone wonder that I knelt down on the grass by the grave of this good man and thanked God for his life and influence over me, and also rejoiced that he was now at rest from a life of torment, and was living with God?

It was only a few months after my first visit to the grave that I attended a large camp-meeting in my native State. One day between services a frailbodied, haggard-faced, wretched-looking woman approached me, extended her hand and said: “I knew you when you were a boy; do you remember me?”

I confessed ignorance, and was shocked almost beyond utterance when she informed me who she was. She was Mrs. L_____, the wife of the preacher whose grave I had visited in the old church yard. But a greater physical change I could scarcely have imagined. I had last seen her as a young, pretty woman, and abloom with health. At this time I beheld an emaciated form and one of the saddest countenances I ever beheld. She had married again after the death of her husband, and wedded a man who was as wicked as her first consort had been good. He had broken her heart and utterly crushed and subdued her spirit. He treated her with physical violence and cruelty. A gentleman informed me afterwards that he regularly cowhided her. She told me that he slapped her face, tore her hair and beat her with his fists!

I grieved, of course, over the pitiful narration and yet marveled at the same time over the amazing retribution that had come into her life. As she had treated her husband she was now being exactly and identically served herself, with a horrible interest and addition on the capital of her iniquity.

One of the last things she said to me in this brief interview was in reference to the man who was slumbering in the old graveyard on Pearl river. She sobbed as she wiped away the fast-falling tears and said:

“If ever a woman had an angel for a husband, I was that woman, and had one in Mr. L_____.”

I thought, as I turned away, Yes, and as the Bible teaches us, if ever a person entertained an angel unawares, it was the individual before me. Like many others, she had a white-winged mercy in her home, and seemed to regard it not, and even to know it not, until suddenly it flashed away from her side and its form disappeared forever in the skies.

Chapter 16: A Group of Preachers

The annual conference which sent me to my second work was held in Canton, Miss., and presided over by Bishop E. M. Marvin.

As no church could hold the audience that desired to hear such a man, the theater was secured, and this was packed to every wall. The stage and a small table in the center constituted the spacious pulpit. The speaker of the hour in preaching would quietly pace from one side to the other of the great platform, often taking up the large pulpit Bible that rested on the stand and walking around with it held up by his arms and clasped to his breast. I never saw a man handle the sacred volume as tenderly, reverently and impressively as did this preacher.

He stood up that day amid a group of mighty men of the pulpit, such as W. L. Linfield, H. F. Johnson, Linus Parker and others, who were church editors, presiding elders and college presidents; but he was a giant among giants.

His discourse that morning was his famous sermon on Christ and the Church. As he traced in his felicitous and unctuous language the analogy between husband and wife and the Savior and his bride, the faces of hundreds were wet with tears and the mighty congregation moved most profoundly. And when he came to picture a devoted husband toiling in distant fields and enduring every hardship to keep his wife in ease and comfort in a home he had furnished for her, and that wife false and faithless to him, no language could describe the disgust and loathing that appeared literally stamped on every face bent upon the wonderful speaker. His application of a church committing adultery with the world, while Christ, the husband, was far away, preparing a mansion for her, and remitting her great checks of love and grace and doing everything for her comfort and happiness — was simply overwhelming. We saw horror on every face; and we do not doubt that every Christian man went out from the building with a profounder tenderness for his wife, if she was a good one, and a conception such as he never had before of the utter blackness of heart of a faithless wife and a false Christian.

I was well acquainted with many people in the town, and as I walked along the street heard the highest encomiums upon the bishop’s sermon. There was a single exception. The criticism fell from the lips of a handsomely dressed woman just in front of me. She said:

“It was the most disgusting sermon I ever heard. I would never hear him preach again for any consideration.”

Does the reader wonder at this speech? Then listen. I had heard a dozen men at least say that during the Civil War this woman’s husband was a gallant officer at the front; and that such was her faithlessness to him in his absence that when he returned home and discovered it, he drank himself into the grave.

Thus early in the ministry I learned why people hate some preachers and strike venomously at certain sermons. They themselves have been wounded by the verbal sword of God’s messenger. Jezebel has had a visit from Elijah. Another John, the Baptist has spoken to Herod and his wife and told them they were great sinners. Sin has been discovered and uncovered. The smitten canine gives an angry yelp. And as the Georgia evangelist puts the matter in homely language, “If you are not hit, what makes you holler?”

During the conference session services were held every afternoon at three o’clock in the church, and clerical lights of greater or lesser luster shone upon the audience from the pulpit.

To me many things about the Conference were still new, and the hearing of preaching was quite luxury, so that I did not miss a single one of these means of grace.

One afternoon my expectation was unusually high, as the preacher of the hour wore a beaver hat and what is called the regulation clergyman’s suit. Sitting by the side of a gifted ministerial friend, I prepared for an intellectual and spiritual banquet. The result was not what I expected, and so I walked away at the conclusion of the services in a kind of mentally dazed condition.

As for the text, I cannot recall it. Such was the rambling nature of the pulpit deliverance that any text would have done as well as the one he selected. The good brother, with much vociferation, fist-pounding and perspiration, covered everything. It was hard to see what he was so excited about, for I cannot remember a single point he made from beginning to end.

As I went down the street by the side of our grave friend, the abiding greenness of the younger man was still seen in the questions I propounded in perfect innocency of heart to the older minister.

“Why did the preacher this afternoon put the word ‘old’ before the names of the patriarchs and prophets, calling them ‘Old Abraham, ‘Old Jacob,’ ‘Old Elijah,’ and ‘Old Malachi?’ The Bible has no such prefixes. God did not call his servants by such titles.”

Our friend answered:

“He did it because he belongs to a class of people who seem to lack a certain nice sense of the proprieties, and of the fitness of things.”

“But why,” I pursued, “did he say the father of the prodigal son was sitting on the front porch looking through his spectacles down the road for his boy, when glass had not been discovered at that time, and spectacles are a recent invention?”

“It is very likely,” answered the preacher, “that he did not know any better himself, and, if he did, he preaches to a class of people who prefer the picture just as he drew it.”

“But,” I rejoined, “he called the prodigal son Jake; why should he take such a liberty as that?”

The older preacher laughed and said: “I once asked him that very question; and his composed and triumphant reply was that the boy’s name might as well be Jake as anything else.”

One night Dr. Linfield, one of the greatest preachers of Mississippi, filled the pulpit. Whenever it was known that he was to preach, the church could not hold the people. He was a heavily-built, square-faced, beetlebrowed man, with complexion somewhat florid and hair black and disposed to be stiff and bristling. But the towering mind and matchless tongue speedily made everyone forget the homely face and the somewhat cumbersome body. With his first sentence he always secured instant and profound attention, and then for one hour and a quarter would hold the audience spell-bound. When five minutes before concluding, he would close the pulpit Bible, there would be invariably a feeling of regret by the congregation, and I have frequently heard a sigh at such times over the house that plainly meant that everybody wished he would go on.

A verse taken by him in the Scripture for a text would be so marvelously opened up by him that it could never resume a commonplace setting or remain with its former ordinary meaning. He took it up a rosebud, and, separating and opening leaf after leaf and petal after petal of thought and hidden meaning, left a full-blown flower in our possession.

I beheld him that night, and often afterwards, with his eyes burning with an inward spiritual fire, his great voice trembling with emotion, while his lips poured forth in the choicest and happiest language a perfect tide of Gospel eloquence and power.

Repeatedly I believe the audience would have leaped to their feet with shouts and cries, but the people were unwilling to lose a single utterance of the transfigured man, and so remained breathless in their seats. Then the ponderous thought and massive manner of the preacher held the congregation down. The solemn face, grave though often impassioned tone, the stately dignified tread and the occasionally uplifted hand, agreed well with the noble, mighty and everlasting truths that were being delivered.

After hearing Dr. Linfield preach, the text he used, as before said, would ever after appear in a manner luminous and attractive when met in Scripture reading, or heard quoted by other lips from the sacred desk. The wonderful man stamped it in lines of light on the hearer’s mind in the most unforgettable character.

In fact, his sermons so powerfully impressed a number of preachers that they took them bodily away and reproduced them in their several circuits and stations as their own sparkling, flashing and valuable property.

This naturally led to embarrassing situations. One was that these same purloining brethren were afraid to invite the doctor to preach in their charges lest he should handle one of the very discourses they had paraded as their own.

A second trying situation was when Dr. Linfield would appear at one of the two great camp grounds of the conference. This occasioned quite a flutter more than once among the plagiaristic gentlemen of the cloth.

Once at the Seashore Camp Ground, and only a few minutes after Dr. Linfield’s arrival, a preacher took him aside, and in a most earnest and anxious manner said: “Doctor, when the committee asks you to fill the pulpit, please, sir, do not preach your sermon on Ephraim, or the one on Jacob, for I have used them both on my charge, and a number of my people are on the ground, and you can imagine how I would feel. It would ruin me.”

Dr. Linfield, with deep, suppressed amusement, promised the alarmed brother that he would cut the acquaintance of Jacob and Ephraim, at least at this camp-meeting, and walked away. In less than half an hour two other ministers on the ground, with the same disturbed countenances, preferred a similar request, for the identical reason, only the sermons they desired restricted were different. One was on the Crucifixion, and the other from the text in Hebrews, “For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come.”

Again the preacher made promise, though the lines of mirth were steadily deepening on his face. Finally, however, when not less than two others of his conference brethren took him mysteriously aside, and one after the other asked for the same favor to be shown to them, and all unknowing that others had preceded them, the doctor burst forth in his great, hearty laugh, and said, while he wiped the tears of merriment from his eyes:

“Certainly I will grant your request; but will you tell me what on the face of the earth you and the other brethren have left me to preach about?”

Of course the great preacher was in no such intellectual and sermonic bankrupt condition as his words might indicate to the uninitiated. His was a mind factory that had a thousand whirling spindles of thought. So while the famous discourses on “Jacob,” “Ephraim,” “The Crucifixion,” “The Continuing City,” “A Wounded Spirit” and “The Bruised Reed” were not delivered, yet equally wonderful sermons were preached by him, which thrilled and blessed the great multitude of worshippers by the seaside, and not a single one felt there was lack anywhere in this gifted and faithful servant of Heaven.

Meanwhile the jackdaw brethren returned to their several circuits and stations unstripped of their borrowed plumes, and so continue to be regarded as great in the eyes of their people.

Chapter 17: Trials and Sorrows

It was in this year that as a household we had the unenviable experience of being robbed or burglarized. The shocked sensation still remains as a vivid memory, when I was informed very early Sunday morning by a startled member of the family that thieves had visited every room in the house and had taken something from everybody.

Springing from bed, I found my clothes gone. Looking out of the window, I saw coat, vest and pantaloons stretched on the ground in the most grotesque and absurd positions. In one pocket of the waistcoat I had five dollars, in another I carried a New Testament. The thief or thieves took the money, but left the Bible in the dust by the rejected suit. The clothes would have betrayed them, and the little book containing their doom as transgressors condemned them.

Everything in the larder had been previously cooked and prepared on Saturday for the Sabbath. Our night visitors swept the entire store away and left us without a mouthful of anything.

The news spread rapidly through the village that we had been robbed of every cent of money, and that the storeroom had been emptied as well. The fact was that there was nothing in the storeroom, and it was the dining-room which had been stripped; and so I told all our friends and acquaintances. I also informed them that the currency loss was only five dollars, and even that did not belong to me.

But all I said was of no avail; the people were aroused, indignant, sympathetic and generously disposed, so that a perfect stream of provisions poured into our astonished little larder. It was the first time since I had been a preacher that I had seen a whole barrel of flour, keg of lard, box of cheese, kit of mackerel, sack of potatoes and a dozen hams, all at once, in our pantry. Then there were many other things besides. And as for the money, in spite of all our information and protestation on the subject, no less than three five-dollar bills were sent in to take the place of the one the thief abstracted.

So good came out of it all. An empty store-room was resupplied. The people got blessed in giving. We were blessed in receiving. And as for the thief, I forgave him freely as soon as the crime was committed. Then when the provisions and money came in, I forgave him again still more freely; and I don’t know but that I realized a really warm, affectionate feeling springing up in the heart for the poor fellow who had been unconsciously such a help and assistance to the family. Moreover, there have been times since when I could see very plainly indeed a most pressing need for his benevolent services again.

However, let no Ladies’ Aid Society apply to me for this man’s name and address. I did not see him that night, and would not know him if I met him. He has never visited our household again. Doubtless he was disgusted with the small haul he made on his first expedition. For all I know, the sight of a preacher’s sideboard and kitchen led him to repentance and reformation.

As the year advanced, trials and troubles multiplied and intensified. I was advancing in knowledge and grace, getting stronger in the Christian life, and so difficulties, besetments, discouragements and oppositions were allowed to increase in number and gather in force upon the ardent, devoted young preacher who still had so much to learn and so many things yet in the unborn future to endure.

As I preached a clear, deep, uncompromising Gospel, even before I had heard of sanctification, human and Satanic hate sprang up and confronted me. Friends fell off. Grave spells of sickness attacked the young mother of the family. Repeatedly I would be summoned from pulpits here and there to wait upon her sick bed. Other sorrows swept in. And finally death itself entered the home and took away our little boy, whom we had named Ernest. For a month the child made a desperate and most pathetic battle for his life. The preaching had to go on just the same as though I had no dying son in the house.

Every night at one o’clock I had to leave his side and go to the woodpile for an armful of fuel to replenish the fire. At the very same hour a freight train would be struggling up a steep grade fully a mile away down the railroad. The throbbing of that mighty iron heart, the panting of that distant engine as, burdened and pulling a long line of loaded cars, it strove, struggled and all but fought its way up to the summit of the great, wearisome slope, I have never forgotten, and can never forget.

This nightly occurrence peculiarly and powerfully appealed to me then, as, burdened in soul and life, I was drawing a heavy load up a wonderfully steep grade of trouble. It seemed at times as if I would certainly be dragged back to the bottom of the hill; that I could never get over the ever-rising summit of the life situation. And so my soul labored, agonized and fairly panted in its onward and upward course, and with a desperation that seemed to be voiced and declared by the lonely toiling engine far away in the night.

Repeatedly I stood with the load of wood in my arms under the silent autumn stars and waited for the big Mogul to get its victory, mount the ridge and come rolling towards the town. Then I would turn into the death chamber and toil up a steeper grade, and climb a more heart-breaking hill, the top of which was so distant that it could not be seen.

The memory of those nocturnal hours still abides, and still appeals to the heart after the flight of over thirty years. To this day I never hear a freight train at night laboring up a difficult grade but instantly the mind reverts to the past, and the sad history of those weeks and months is lived all over again.

I have pulled up many long, steep places since the time I have spoken about. The heart has ached and throbbed, the spirit panted, the lips called mightily on God, while the life struggled on with its load for the topmost height.

Thus far I have gotten over many sad, hard places and left numberless hills between me and the old past. Doubtless many steep grades still remain to mount. And there is one swell in the ground, called a grave, which is waiting for us all to get over. But I have no question whatever in the mind that if we keep the flame of love and holiness burning in the soul which Christ lighted there years ago, we will all run up the last grade, cross the final hill, view the city of God as it bursts on the sight, and will rush with a shout of exultation and victory into the Union Depot of Everlasting Life and Glory.

Chapter 18: An Incident and Its Lessons

While still on this circuit, I became acquainted with an old lady of seventy years of age who was not only devout, but surpassed in intelligence many of her country neighbors. On one of my pastoral calls she told me the circumstances that led to her conversion.

She said that sixty years before she lived in a new settlement in one of the Middle States. At the hour of twilight one day she was sitting side by side with her brother of twelve and sister of eight years of age, watching the burning of a brush heap in front of their father’s cabin home. After quite a period of silence, the boy remarked to his sisters: “How would you like to burn forever in a fire like that?”

Both of the girls quickly replied, expressing their horror and dread of such a fate.

“But,” the boy persisted, “they tell me if we die and go to Hell we will burn that way forever.”

There was an anxious silence for a while, and then the little ones fell to devising ways and means to escape so frightful a punishment. The old question of the Philippian Jailer was in their hearts, “What must I do to be saved?”

At that time churches were widely scattered, preachers rarely came around, and hence the stock of religious knowledge possessed by these children was exceedingly small. Still they felt somehow that their relief and escape depended on prayer. Then followed, we may say, a rapid and troubled inventory of their spiritual resources, when it appeared that they had in possession “The “Lord’s Prayer” and that alone! It was the one talent or pound!

Nor was this their only alarm, for they soon discovered that only one of the three knew this prayer, and that was the sister of ten years of age. So really there was only one-third of a talent for each. This dampened them some at first, but they found a happy escape out of the embarrassment by prevailing on the elder sister to go over the form of supplication a number of times, the other two learning it as fast as they could.

Here was their capital, their entire stock in trade, on which they were to operate. But it was not in their minds to despise the day of small things; neither did God despise it.

Evening after evening these three children went off to themselves, filled with a profound concern for their souls’ salvation, and kneeling down together in a fence corner, the elder sister would repeat the prayer while the other two stumbled along after her.

In a few days the older sister was converted, and in a few weeks the brother. Later still the younger sister was saved.

They presented to God the only Talent which had been entrusted to them, and He blessed it. They put the spiritual Pound in the Bank of Faith, and it doubled, trebled, quadrupled, bore interest and is still bringing returns that no earthly mathematician can begin to compute.

It is now nearly one hundred years since the occurrence took place. The brother and younger sister after lives of Christian usefulness died in the faith and went home to God. For many years they have been at rest in Heaven and their works do follow them. The older sister, the one I knew as a young preacher, was at that time full of joy and the Holy Ghost, had been a blessing to hundreds of people, and was only waiting for the summons from the Lord to sweep into the skies. Doubtless she is there today, with her brother and sister, magnifying the grace and love of that God who could stoop from Heaven to listen to and answer the lisping, stammering supplications of three country children who were doing the best they could to find Him through their humble little prayer meeting or Revival Service held in a fence corner.

In recalling this scene, as I have often done, I can but think of the differences in human lives of advantages and privileges, and the still more startling dissimilarity in these same beings in their neglect of utilization of opportunity.

Some people have everything done for them, and yet seem to obtain nothing. Others with the smallest help; or no help; or sadder still, with everything, against them, refuse to stay down, insist on rising in every scale, and in every realm of life, and succeed where thousands and millions have failed and given up in despair.

I see the principle referred to in the educational realm.

I have known children whose parents made every sacrifice and effort to have them secure what the schools and colleges can do for the intellect, and they would not consent to be thus benefited. I knew a father who spent large sums on his son, keeping him for years at a college, where the boy never left the Preparatory Department, but seemed to be satisfied to remain an ignoramus in his classes, a hoodlum at night, and a daily burden to the heart, and drain on the purse of his father.

At the same university were several boys who worked, as it is called, their way through. How they toiled, economized, studied, suffered and agonized, few who read these lines could credit. But each year they were advanced to the next class ahead, all graduating finally with honor, and one with first honors, and all today in positions of prominence and eminence.

In looking at the Financial History of the race I see the same thing transpiring. One set spending thoughtlessly, prodigally and selfishly what another body of people painfully and toilsomely accumulated.

I think of the business thrift and rigid economy of the first Vanderbilt and Gould; and notice today the outlay of these vast fortunes for the pleasure, sins and folly of their descendants. Castellane made merry with the Gould ducats, while a Hungarian Count, the husband of Gladys Vanderbilt, is at the present putting six million dollars of his wife’s inheritance into a castle and chateau that will be, it is said, palatial, magnificent and royal.

The sons of rich men as a rule scatter to the winds what their fathers made with herculean labors the same winds bring to them.

In addition the spectacle is on all sides of a single individual supporting a large number, who do not seem to entertain a solitary throb of appreciation of the long years of toil and sacrifice which kept them from want and beggary.

Sometimes the breadwinner is the father of the family; sometimes a son; and not infrequently the whole burden is on the shoulders of a daughter, who toiling as a stenographer and typewriter, receives a fine salary indeed, but beholds every cent going to a household who accept the life sacrifice as a matter of course and meriting neither commendation or return of any kind.

I knew a gentleman to present his wife with a very costly diamond necklace and earrings. She glanced at them and said carelessly, “Oh, yes, they are right pretty,” and resumed gossip with a neighbor while the husband walked away. The woman doted on diamonds, but she was too selfish and self-centered to stop to think what the man had paid out and deprived himself of to give her the gems.

On another occasion a man I know well, handed his household a statement in account form on a page of paper of what he had given for the family support that year. It amounted to over three thousand dollars. Not one examined it. And yet this sum laid aside each year for only ten years would have yielded the husband a handsome fortune, and proved an easy competence in old age. Then what that thirty-five hundred dollars meant to him in mental toil, bodily exhaustion, and personal sacrifice none but God knew.

Truly a Day of Judgment is coming. And just as certainly a Day of Retribution is approaching even in this life for all such people.

In turning to the Religious Life, and the Soul’s Salvation, I am struck with the same principle at work, and the same tremendous difference in the individuals of the human family.

Some people have everything done for them, and yet never amount to anything. Others have nothing done for them, meet adverse, untoward and opposing influences of all kinds; and yet obtain all that God has for them, and live to be His faithful servants, mighty messengers, spreaders of salvation, exponents of Christian character and life, and a blessing to multiplied hundreds and thousands of earth.

Luther read a Bible that was chained to the wall and he had to stand as he read. Millions today will not read the Book of God though unchained and found everywhere, and with rocking-chairs in abundance in which one may rest while he reads.

A man in England once, when copies of the Scripture were scarce, gave a wagon load of grain for a single printed sheet of the Gospel containing not quite two chapters. On the other hand there are men today who would not give a copper cent for the entire volume, nor accept the gracious, solemn Book of God if it were made a present to them.

Just as the Dying Thief was converted under four or five utterances of Christ as He hung on the Cross, while thousands who had heard His wonderful discourses on the sides of the mountains and by the shores of Galilee remained unmoved and unchanged, so still we see some individuals finding salvation under a single sermon, and holiness in one meeting; while others have heard preaching all their lives, been to scores of Revival Services, beheld thousands get to God right before their eyes, and yet are themselves in heart, conscience and spirit as hard as adamant.

A youth of twenty was converted at a camp-meeting in Tennessee. In all the sixty years which followed he never swerved in his Christian life, finally dying at eighty, full of the peace and glory of God, and honored by the church throughout the length and breadth of the South. But his own son, turned from all the helps and advantages thus given him, resisted every good influence, hardened his heart against a thousand sermons, turned from the godly example of his father and the entreaties of his father’s friends, and became a lazy good-for-nothing, and a drunken sot and vagabond.

In addition this same father had one of the crankiest and most crotchety of wives. She was forever getting off the religious track, and was a trial to him by her whims and notions beyond words to describe. But he bore the life burden faithfully and uncomplainingly to the last; and is at rest today in Heaven, and I doubt not, glad that he is in a world where there is neither marrying or giving in marriage, where the sting of ingratitude is no longer felt, burdens come no more, and the hand that betrays and wounds is with him no longer on the table.

Truly, this is a strange, jumbled-up kind of world. I could never understand, even portions of its history, if I did not go like David to the Sanctuary of God. There with the Word of God and the Spirit of God, I get some explanation and insight into many things that otherwise would remain dark and unsolvable but for the light and help of Heaven.

Moreover, what I see and what I feel, makes me say that I would rather be of the smaller company of the oppressed I have described, than the larger following, for reasons that touch both earth and Heaven.

I would ten thousand times over, rather bear the burdens of others than be a burden to the already overloaded and oftentimes sorrow-pressed children of men.

I would rather pull the wagon until I fell breathless, exhausted and dying in the harness, than to be one of a crowd sitting in the wagon; thoughtless, selfish, pitiless and Christless, laying the lash on the one in the traces, and saying with laughter and abuse, Why does he not pull harder!

The Bible tells us of one who had nothing done for Him, but who did everything for others. He went about doing good. He bore our sorrows, says the Book, carried our grief, and tasted death for every man.

This God-Man, the world’s moral standard today; should be an example, an inspiration, and also our consolation. Then the fact that He knows what we are doing for Him and Humanity, and sees what we are suffering, and the burdens we are bearing and have borne for many years truly this should keep us strong, sweet, brave, patient and faithful, in the face of all indifference, ingratitude, and opposition until we come to the end of the way.

Chapter 19: Kodak Pictures of Bishop Wightman and Dr. C. K. Marshall

At the close of my second year’s pastorate, the annual conference was held at Natchez, a beautiful old Southern city located on the banks of the mile-wide Mississippi.

As the Natchez Railroad was not then built, twenty-five or thirty young preachers, together with a number of the five examining committees, took the beautiful and majestic Robert E. Lee for the trip from Vicksburg down the river. This palatial steamer, one of the last of that class of large and magnificent steamboats which once plowed the Father of Waters, especially from Vicksburg to New Orleans, was destined to furnish me a few years later with two of the most striking illustrations that I have ever used in the pulpit.

Most of the younger clerical brethren took advantage of this trip to finally and forever settle among themselves certain mighty and long-vexed questions and problems of the world, if not the universe itself. Having been dipping for a year or so in the study of divinity, as well as paying some attention to various collateral branches of learning, they felt decidedly competent to expound any doctrine, elucidate every mystery, and clear up and settle, to the satisfaction of everybody, all matters biological, geological, theological, psychological and eschatological.

The older preachers looked with suppressed amusement upon these bantam rooster Sanhedrin gatherings, and could be seen glancing back with twitching facial muscles at the chair circle of disputants, with their hand wavings, head shakings and general Podsnappian deliverances of opinion.

The air of self-complacency of most of these young brethren, their perfect self-satisfaction, was enough to suggest the thought that it was fortunate for the interests of the church, and the welfare of the world itself, that they had come upon the scene of action at this very period of time. Perhaps they felt this. Certainly they looked it. One could but wonder how those same aforesaid great, grave questions could ever be discussed, much less doubted, again, after the floods of light thrown upon them by these profound young gentlemen, the oldest of whom had seen twenty-four summers.

Oh, the bantam chicken Sanhedrins of today! The adolescent philosophers! The omniscient boy preachers! The learned rabbis and doctors of law coming forth from the laundry, dry goods counter, butcher shop, note-shaving office and messenger boy desk, all of whom feel perfectly competent to sit in judgment on the writings and utterances of men whom the whole world has agreed to honor; and decide questions that the wisest of intellects and saintliest of characters have felt it best to speak upon with the greatest of caution, or even refused to speak at all.

On the following day the main body of the Conference, preachers, laymen and presiding elders, came down on the steamer Natchez, the rival in beauty, majesty and size of the Robert E. Lee.

Bishop Wightman, the polished Southern gentleman, the lovely Christian, and one of the most gifted pulpit orators in the church, took passage on the same boat. Everyone seemed to be glad that he was to preside over the coming assembly. At this time he was approaching, if not fully, seventy years of age. As a kind of companion and help, Bro. Cameron, the recording secretary of the conference, was chosen to be with the bishop in his stateroom.

The tiny apartment had two berths, an upper and lower, the former being just wide enough for one person, while the latter, in which Bishop Wightman reposed, was a few inches broader. Two parties might lie upon it, but the outside occupant would be in constant danger of falling out, while the insider, with a double compression of wall and lung, could have nothing but an experience of deepest discomfort.

The two gentlemen retired to their respective bunks, bade each other good night and proceeded to court sleep, lulled by distant sounds in the boat, the deep-toned bell, musical whistle, throb of the machinery, beat of the great side wheels and song of the deck hands.

Repeatedly through the night Bro. Cameron heard the Bishop turning restlessly and sighing, but fearing, if he spoke of awakening him, said nothing. When it was broad day, however, he in anxiety about the responsible charge committed to him, peered over the edge of his berth downward upon the one where the Chief Superintendent lay, when, to his amazement and consternation, he discovered a long, lank, gawky countryman in bed with the head officer of the Conference, and that he had crowded him into one-third of the space of the narrow cot and close against the wall.

The bishop was in a troubled kind of slumber, while the intruder was wide awake and seemed to be thinking. Bro. Cameron, after several attempts at coherent speech, such was his surprise, finally shot out the following sentence like a bullet:

“My friend, how on earth did you get in here?”

With the greatest composure of manner and evenness of speech, the unbidden guest pointed his finger and replied: “I came in there through the door.”

This simple reply acted so powerfully upon Bro. Cameron that he cried, “Oh!” and fell back flat on his pillow and did some lively thinking of his own for a while. In another minute he returned to the attack, and informed the man, who bewildered and misled by the long row of identically similar state-rooms, had blundered into strange quarters, that he was in Bishop Wightman’s room; and that he was not only, so to speak, in the wrong box, but was in the wrong bed; and that he had crowded the presiding officer of the Conference and jammed one of the chief superintendents of the church against the wall, and doubtless prevented him from obtaining a half hour’s sleep during the whole night.

Bro. Cameron had hardly concluded his earnest and eloquent exhortation, when the man was in part of his clothing, next caught up the balance of his garments and was off like a flash.

The Bishop, in his gentle, Christ like spirit, made no complaint. His haggard face showed how loss of rest had affected him, but his single comment upon the occasion was, “That he had not slept very comfortably, and that he did not feel quite as well as usual.”

Part of the Conference was indignant, and others were much amused over the incident. The culprit himself spent the rest of the day in dodging pointing fingers, curious eyes and laughing faces. As the bishop’s bedfellow, as a man with greatness suddenly thrust upon him, he was in a sense the hero of the hour. It was a dignity however, and distinguished consideration from which he would gladly have escaped.

Nevertheless, who can tell, but that after he had returned home and the soreness of the affair had passed away, he may have turned the incident so as to reflect great honor upon himself. How naturally and easily he would refer time and again in conversation with his children and grandchildren to his trip on the palatial steamer Natchez to the Annual Conference. In reply to the question, “Did you go alone?” the response would be, “No; Bishop Wightman and I traveled together.” And to the further inquiry, “Did you see much of the bishop?” would come the response, with a proper veiling of the eyes in humility, “We occupied the same stateroom and slept together.”

All this would be strictly true, and yet how far from the truth! But who has not heard the boast of pride that had no more foundation of verity than the claim made above, and similar speeches which all of us have repeatedly listened to in silence.

Bishop Wightman preached twice at the Conference; once on the Holy Spirit, and again from the text, “Thou that dwellest between the cherubims, shine forth.”

The recollection of the speaker’s reverent manner in the pulpit, his unconscious dignity and grace, his chaste, pure language, elevated thought and sweeping eloquence remains an imperishable treasure of the mind.

I have listened since to ranters, ravers, screamers and plungers in the pulpit, who were vociferating nothing and worse than nothing, and sighed for the Heavenly School which sent forth as messengers of God and ambassadors of Christ such men as Wightman and others whom I listened to in the early days of my ministry. How I do pray and trust that whatever other college may close its doors, that this same Institute referred to may continue to receive its applicants for good sense as well as Heavenly power, and turn out an ever-increasing number of graduates to bless the world.

A second prominent figure at the Conference was Dr. C. K. Marshall, of Vicksburg. As a preacher and pulpit orator he was the first in the South, and the equal if not the superior of the famous Bishop Bascom. The latter memorized his sermons, while Dr. Marshall, with his factory-like mind, turned out the rarest and loveliest textures and fabrics of thought while standing on his feet. He spoke from an inner sanctuary, and not from paper. It mattered not how long he preached, the impression would be upon the audience of great mental reserves upon which the speaker had made no demand. Repeatedly I have known him to hold an audience spellbound for two hours, and heard a sigh of regret arise from the people when he would close the Bible and say, “And now in conclusion.”

Walking up the aisle, every eye somehow would be drawn to him; and, standing in the pulpit, he was one of the most imposing, majestic-looking men I ever saw. His figure was commanding, his head massive, his face thoughtful and luminous, his mouth large, and his lips were mobility itself.

It was said of him that “he looked eloquent.” And truly the appearance agreed with the reality. No musician ever touched and struck the strings of an instrument with greater power than this man could sweep every chord of feeling in the human breast. He could have his audience in tears or laughter, on fire or in breathless awe, just as he willed.

I once heard him preach from the text, “Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself.” Under this wonderful sermon the church became a valley of Bochim, and the altar crowded with seekers.

Then he was a full man. His great head was literally packed with every kind of knowledge, and the gifted tongue knew well how to bring it out, so that wherever he appeared, whether by the fireside with a friend, in the social circle, at the preachers’ meeting, in the city mass meeting or great gatherings of the church, everybody felt the wonderful power of the man.

On the Conference floor, in matters of debate, the very riches of his mind would sometimes be against him, or he would be insensibly led away from the main point of argument and go to reveling in the treasures poured out by his intellect and wonderfully rich experiences of life.

A laughable illustration of this was witnessed at the very Conference of which I am writing. The doctor was speaking to some question, when one thought suggesting another, the first thing everybody knew the speaker was clear off from his subject. All that he said was edifying and delightful, but he had forgotten the point which he desired to make. Doubtless he himself realized what had happened, but he talked on in his matchless way, the Conference meantime listening, applauding and charmed, as usual.

There was one preacher present, however, who did not relish the idea of thus using up the time. He was for business, and for business alone. So after listening with a protesting countenance for quite a while, he suddenly arose and cried out: “Mr. President, what is before the house?”

Instantly Dr. Marshall whirled around upon the interrupter, and replied, with a stentorian voice:

“I am before the house.”

To this day I recall the burst of laughter and applause from the Conference, the unmistakable discomfiture of the interposing brother, and the triumphant look and bearing of Dr. Marshall.

Are not all these things written in the chronicles of the Annual Conference of Mississippi?

Chapter 20: My First Station — A Song in the Garden — The Ragged Coat

At the Natchez Conference I was ordained deacon by Bishop Wightman, and at the beginning of the third year of my ministry received the station appointment of Brandon.

This is the town in whose grassy fields I lay one starry night as a boy, with some campers, and listened to a brass band playing in the public square a mile away. The Civil War was nearing its close; regiments were camped around, couriers were galloping up and down the road; while the military band played “Old Dog Tray,” “Maggie By My Side,” and other pieces which I remember to this day.

I little thought that night I would ever be a Methodist minister, and the preacher in charge of that town.

Brandon in the last twenty years has greatly changed. In other days it was socially and intellectually among the first communities of the South. It gave generals to the war; two Governors to Mississippi; several judges to the district; the foremost editor to the State; and any number of gifted men to the Legislature at Jackson and to Congress at Washington.

I was sent to this place in the zenith of its glory, and never had any subsequent pastoral charge that possessed a finer body of men, or a greater number of superior and charming women.

The church was a beautiful brick edifice with tapering spire, and deeptoned, solemn bell. On the first Sabbath, a bitterly cold day, with alternate showers of rain and sleet, the audience consisted of about twenty people. My text was, “I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and him crucified.” God being my judge this I faithfully tried to do during the entire four years’ pastorate which followed.

Very lovely were many of the people whose acquaintanceship and friendship I formed at that time. And very striking were many of the incidents which crowded themselves into that period. Protracted meetings, revivals, pastoral labors, sick bed visits, death chamber scenes, flower-crowned marriage altars, and memorable occurrences of every kind followed each other in a strange and swift procession.

One of my stewards was afterwards Governor of Mississippi for eight years. He had six grown daughters, who were remarkably handsome women. When the father would take a trip to Jackson on legal business, and one of the six would request the privilege of accompanying him, his reply was, “If all six of you will come, you can go with me.” So frequently he would visit the capital of the State with his bevy of beautiful daughters surrounding him. The sensation produced, and the sight of gentlemen bowing and scraping around, and begging for introductions, can be easily imagined. Three of these young women were converted and joined the church during my pastorate.

Among the female members of my charge was a woman who was a devoted Christian and abounded in good works as well as good words. With her intelligent spiritual face in the audience, and devoted labors in the church, she was prized by every one of her pastors as they came and went, as one of the first in the foremost rank of the congregation.

In those days I knew nothing of the experience of sanctification, and never heard the doctrine preached. However I urged a perfect consecration upon the people, and by this Gospel unconsciously drove the woman to make a complete offering of herself to God.

One morning in her room, while waiting upon the Lord in protracted prayer, the fire fell, and she undoubtedly swept into the possession of full salvation. She did not understand what she had received, neither did her pastor. She insisted that she was converted for the first time. I knew that this was not the case, but at the same time did not comprehend the marvelous grace which had come upon her and filled her.

A great joy seemed to be constantly welling up in her soul. Her face literally shone. Her voice had an exultant ring. Her spirit was one of perfect love. Her life seemed to be unruffled by any kind of provocation.

Her presence in the congregation was an inspiration to the preacher. In the Sunday school her class grew so rapidly that the superintendent was compelled to take members from it, and give them to teachers whose classes were always diminishing. In my pastoral visits among the poor, sick and afflicted, I found she had already preceded me. She went into the store of a merchant who was blind, and exceedingly crabbed, and under pretense of buying a yard of cloth, tore off ten yards of salvation to him. Her life was one of such countless benedictions to those who needed her varied ministrations, that it seemed everybody loved her. Repeatedly I have beheld unsaved men lift their hats as she passed along the street, and heard them say when she was out of earshot, “God bless her.”

Here was a case where a person received the blessing of holiness or perfect love and did not know the name of the grace possessed. And here was an instance, rare as it is, where a preacher, though pressing a pure Gospel, and urging a perfectly consecrated life, brought a soul into a religious experience and life far higher and immeasurably beyond his own.

In connection with the little house I rented, I had a small kitchen garden, which I cultivated with my own hands at spare moments, in order to help along a slim salary.

One day, while working among the plants and vines, I commenced singing the following hymn:

“The mistakes of my life have been many,
But the sins of my heart have been more;
And I scarcely can see for my weeping,
But I’ll knock at the open door.

I know I am sinful and unworthy,
And now I feel it more and more,
But Jesus invites me to come in,
So I’ll knock at the open door,
But Jesus invites me to come in,
So I’ll knock at the open door.”

With a tender, melted heart and with now and then a half-choking utterance, I sang the piece over and over. To my astonishment and gladness I learned a few hours afterwards that the song had led to the salvation of a soul.

Another garden joined ours but separated by a high plank fence. Hidden from me by the wall and shrubbery, the woman who owned the property was at work gathering some vegetables. She heard the first lines of the hymn and then sat down to listen to the end. She was a hard-featured and hard-hearted woman, but the Gospel in the song broke through the icy crust around the soul, the tears began to pour down the furrowed face, and as the lines were repeated,

“I know I am sinful and unworthy,
And now I feel it more and more,
But Jesus invites me to come in,
So I’ll knock at the open door.”

behold! she knocked, with a piteous sobbing wail to God for mercy in the Savior’s name, and in an instant was soundly converted.

Since that occurrence I have more than ever appreciated the poem about the arrow shot in the air, and the song that was sung alone in an evening walk. Long afterwards, wrote the author, I saw the arrow in a tree, and later still I found my song word for word in the heart of a friend.

In the Fall of the year there was a District Conference, or some kind of ecclesiastical gathering in our church. To this assembly congregated quite a number of preachers. Among them was a young minister in the local ranks who came from the depths of the piney woods. He attended the meeting either as a supply to one of the circuits or as a lay delegate, we forget which. He was appointed to preach one afternoon and did not only well but remarkably well.

My heart, however fairly ached through the whole sermon, as I observed the ragged coat the man wore. A more threadbare, patched and torn garment I never saw before on the form of a minister of the Gospel.

The Committee of Public Worship announced that Bro. G. would preach again on Sunday morning, the next day. Meantime I had him assigned to my parsonage home as a guest.

Sitting in the study with him I had a nearer view of his time-worn clothing, when I saw it was in a more dilapidated state than when first seen.

As I sat talking to, and looking at him, a voice in my breast whispered,

“Why don’t you give him your coat?”

The immediate mental reply was, “Lord, with the exception of the everyday coat I have on, I have but one nice one, which I am keeping for Conference. If I give that away I have no money to get another, and Conference is close by.”

There was a silence of moments, and then the voice clear and unmistakable whispered again:

“If that was Christ sitting before you in that ragged garment, what would you do?”

My eyes filled instantly at the thought and I said to the inner monitor:

“I would go at once, kneel down before him and say, My Savior, won’t you please let me give you my coat?”

After another moment’s stillness the voice resumed:

“Did he not say when on earth that what was done in behalf of one of his poor followers or disciples, was done to him?”

There was another gush of tears, and rising up at once I approached the brother, placed a hand gently on his shoulder and said:

“Bro. G., I have a coat that I would be so glad if you would receive. Will you accept it, my brother?”

He looked up and instantly his face was wet with tears. He replied in a choked voice that he would. And in five minutes we had his rags off, and a nice broadcloth coat on him that fitted as well as if made especially for him by a tailor.

How happy the giver was! And next day, sitting before the preacher in a church crowded with nicely dressed people, how glad and how properly proud I was, that our friend in the pulpit looked as well as anybody in the pews.

As for my own well-worn, everyday coat, I never saw it look better, and certainly it never seemed to fit better than on that same Sabbath morning when another man had on his back the garment in which I expected to shine at the coming Annual Conference.

Nor was that all. Only a month later, and several weeks before the aforesaid Conference, a letter came to me from a wealthy man in a distant part of the State. He had not heard a single word of the matter mentioned above. The letter was quite brief and said, “Send me the measure of your coat.”

Ten days later an express package arrived containing a handsome broadcloth coat, an equally excellent vest, and a beautiful pair of doeskin pantaloons.

The Lord will never be outdone in the matter of giving. So not only was the principal of my donation returned to me in the shape of the coat, but a waistcoat and trousers were thrown in by way of interest.

A certain wonderful Book declares that he who giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord. And a certain marvelous Teacher said when he was on earth, “Give and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom.”

Hundreds who read these lines know both statements to be blessedly true, and that no institution of earth, nor all of them combined, ever allow such interest, declare such dividends and issue such coupons, as the everpaying, never-failing and eternally unshaken Bank of Heaven.

Chapter 21: The Young Lovers - A Dying Traveling Agent - A Photograph of Dr. J. B. McFerrin

It is strange that among all the many happenings of this period of my life one memory should cling with such tenacity to the mind, severed as it was from my immediate pastoral charge, while the parties to the scene soon left the town to come back no more.

The simple recollection is that of a young couple walking before me up a hilly slope towards the town. The sun was setting, and a church bell was ringing in the distance. Instantly the lines of an old ballad came back:

“When up the hilly slope we’d climb,
To watch the dying of the day,
And hear the distant church bells chime.”

The girl was one of the most beautiful in the State. Two young men loved her, and they were cousins. The handsomer of the two failed to win the prize, and there was a sad history whispered about the matter. The other cousin was the one walking that evening by her side, and whom she soon afterward married.

Two tragedies were waiting for them but a few years removed; and both were to especially wound and crush her. Then the handsome cousin met a sudden death, and under the most distressing circumstances.

I knew not what was coming. Perhaps the sadness was prophetic that stole over me as I watched them walking side by side up the sloping hill toward town, while the far away church bell kept ringing on in the misty light. Maybe it was the dying day, the solemn note in the air, or a partial knowledge of certain features of this life drama before me that produced the melancholy and stamped the memory of the evening scene so ineffaceably upon the mind. I do not know. I only know that this old world is full of sad histories, separated friendships, severed lives, disjointed occurrences, broken off connections, unexplainable hindrances and failures, unfinished labors, unfulfilled desires, and disappointments in time, and in people and in ourselves by the thousands and ten thousand.

We know from the loose end of things here, the fragmentary nature of life, the work just begun, the bitter partings, the crushing wrongs of earth, that there must be a better, sweeter, happier world and existence to come.

One day I was informed that a young traveling agent was dying at the hotel. He had come to the place on a spree, and this with an already overtaxed system, produced a sickness which proved fatal.

For perfect quiet, the landlord had moved the sufferer to a cottage room in the midst of a garden and vineyard. Here I found him, the stamp of death on his face, gazing through the window down a trellised walk that was fluttering with myriads of leaves. He looked as if he was expecting some one.

The distant wife had been telegraphed for, and was on her way. But Death also was on the way. Both were flying towards this man. Who would arrive first. Whose form would he see coming up the vine- covered walk?

I knelt down after a brief interview and prayed for him. I will never forget how I pleaded with agonized spirit but controlled voice for the soul of this unsaved man. I prayed over twenty minutes! I could not help it.

On arising I begged his forgiveness for having so trespassed on his strength and patience. His glance fell kindly upon me for a moment, and with a solemn voice he answered:

“No one can pray too long for me now.”

Then, forgetful it seemed of any human presence he turned his old wistful gaze through the window and fixed his sorrowful, expectant eyes on the arbor walk, as if watching for something or somebody.

Who would arrive first? Death or the young, heartbroken wife now rushing through the land on a train in order to reach his side?

I never saw him again in life. He passed away in a few hours.

Next morning I beheld the hearse with a coffin containing his silent form passing down the street on the way to the depot. In a carriage behind sat a woman dressed in black, with her face buried in her hands.

In the Annual Conference held at Jackson, Miss., at the conclusion of the year, the person who towered physically, oratorically, and almost every other way over the assembly was Rev. J. B. McFerrin, of Nashville, Tenn. He was one of the connectional officers of the church, and I think book agent at this time of the Publishing House. His work led him to visit the different Conferences, where he delivered business addresses before those bodies, and frequently preached at night. He had cavernous gray eyes, a retreating forehead and prominent nose and cheek bones. His voice in the great flights of his preaching would be at times high and shrill; in lower notes sometimes nasal, but at all times he was a wonderful speaker.

He was equally at home in pulpit, on platform or standing on the floor debating some motion or question before the house. He seemed to be a born orator, possessed most remarkable magnetic power, was full of originality, and had the rare gift and ability of sweeping his audience from tears to laughter, and from smiles back to tears again at his sovereign will. There was simply no resisting the man’s power as a speaker.

Had he gone into politics he would have been the idol of his party and been swept into the highest office. But he gave his heart, life and talents to Christ instead, and devoted himself to the work of doing good.

Two things kept him from being elected to the bishopric in our church. The one I mention was that it was the desire of his brethren to keep him in the field, actively employed as he was, rather than as a president over deliberative and business assemblies. So he continued to sweep as a pulpit and platform inspiration and benediction all over the land.

In one of his public addresses where he made his usual plea for a collection and a big one at that, a preacher told him that when he died the following Bible passage ought to be carved on his tombstone: “And it came to pass that the beggar died.”

Looking up quickly, with his eyes filling with tears, he said:

“I agree, provided you add the rest of the verse “and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom.”

The effect on the congregation of this quick turn of speech, given in a choking voice, would be impossible to truly describe. The echo of the laugh over the first picture had not died away when tears were seen in hundreds of eyes and sobs, amens, and hallelujahs filled the building.

He was wonderfully vigilant to preserve in perfect integrity the Discipline of our church with all its rules and ritual from the innovating iconoclastic hand of every preacher and lay member of the General Conference.

One of this class was trying with all his might of reason and eloquence to remove one of these disciplinary features dear to the Methodist heart of Dr. McFerrin. Being as astute as he was eloquent, the Doctor resorted to the expedient of crying out: “Louder!” “Louder!” “Louder!” that the speaker might be driven into screaming, and so become mentally rattled, speak unadvisedly and lose the undoubted hold he had at present on the audience.

Finally Bro. Innovator became quite vexed at such frequent interruptions of his speech, and breakages of the mental chain he was forming between himself and the crowd; and so cried out to the Bishop that Dr. McFerrin be allowed to bring a chair forward and sit near, where the Doctor’s deafness would be at the least disadvantage.

The idea of Dr. McFerrin being deaf was smile provoking, for he heard as well as any one. He was scheming to preserve Methodism in her old-time ways and customs. With equally deep design he took considerable time to get a chair, and locate it suitably, knowing all the while that the speaker was cooling and the audience with him.

At last, after stationing the seat about four feet directly in front of the speaker and almost under him, Dr. McFerrin put his hand behind his right ear, lifting it up, so to speak, and pushing it forward, and then cried out to Bro. Innovator with that rich nasal voice for which he was famous:

“Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth.”

In an instant the whole assembly was convulsed with laughter. Bro. Innovator was stricken speechless, and Dr. McFerrin won his case and the vote by a tremendous majority, and all without a reply to his opponent on the floor.

One night at Annual Conference he preached from the text, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

With his marvelous power he had been moving his audience for nearly an hour as a wind stirs a wheat field. Suddenly he changed and began dwelling upon the gloom and darkness which had been brought to this earth by death. No one who died ever came back from the other shore. When the sad messenger visited our homes the light went out from the faces of our loved ones and they never heard us nor spoke to us again. In a few months and years their bodies, which we had loved so dearly, had lost all form and semblance of what they had been, and gone back to the earth from whence they came.

He then spoke of having been sent by the church to bring the ashes of Bishops Soule and Early to the Vanderbilt Campus for burial. He described the digging of the graves, the complete disappearance of the coffins, and only a double handful of dust and bones left of these two good men and mighty servants of God! He said that he turned from the sight, and with his face buried in his hands cried out:

“Oh, my God! is this what is left of those you have made and redeemed? Is this the pitiful and final goal to which we are coming! Is this all, and is this the end!”

He stood for a half minute with face covered and head bowed, as if gazing in the grave; when suddenly he lifted his countenance Heavenward with a triumphant look, and with a voice that stirred and thrilled and fired every heart, he literally shouted the words of the text “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! which according to his abundant mercy! hath begotten us again! unto a lively hope! by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead!”

The voice, manner, attitude and cry of the preacher acted so together as to produce something like an electric shock, and a perfect wave of glory rolled over that weeping, shouting audience.

A few years later the Doctor, after a long life full of labors and victories, came to his death-bed. His son was absent hundreds of miles and telegraphed for. Friends then came in and told the dying father that his oldest born could not arrive before he himself would have passed away into the glory world.

The Doctor was propped up on five or six pillows to obtain easier breathing, when he received this information. Gathering up his remaining strength, while his face fairly shone with Heavenly joy and triumph, he replied: “Tell John he knows where to find his old father!” And he was gone!

Chapter 22: An Overconfident Preacher — A Sudden Death — An Humble Man of God

During the second year of the Brandon pastorate I received a number of invitations from the conference preachers to assist them in protracted meetings. Full of work myself I had little time to spare, but now and then would yield to an urgent call and give the place six days. In every instance I would see a revival break out in that brief period.

In one of these Mississippi towns where I was assisting the pastor in a protracted meeting, another preacher dropped in to view the battle. The night he arrived I preached and had as usual a full altar and a number of conversions. In walking to the parsonage with me, he entirely overlooked the success of the service and found fault with the sermon. He told me that I had not handled the text right, and how I should have treated the subject. I was much humbled, but took the correction gratefully and thanked him. I also begged him to fill the pulpit for me the following night. He instantly and cordially accepted the invitation, and gladdened my heart in so doing as I honestly craved to be instructed in all things, especially in the matter and manner of effective preaching.

The next night came in due time, and my friend walked into the pulpit with a most jubilant, self-assured and expectant air. He aimed and shot a regular forty-four-pounder at the congregation. He showed himself familiar with a number of the sciences, knocked over Darwin and Huxley, and left nothing of Herbert Spencer. His gesticulation was splendid, his pronunciation faultless, and his peroration fine and I thought overwhelming. He concluded, and I looked to see nearly the whole audience crowding to the altar, when lo! not a soul came forward. The preacher seemed surprised, and repeated his invitation, but not a single individual would budge under any kind of proposition, and not a solitary person was converted, reclaimed or blessed, that night. In walking back to the parsonage with me, my friend was profoundly silent. He seemed to be thinking. Next morning he left on the first train, taking his forty-four-pound cannon with him. I remained behind with my single-barreled shotgun, or pop-gun, as men of differing judgment would decide, and resumed the battle. Victory through the goodness of God came as usual, but I did not fully understand all the mystery of the situation for months and years afterwards.

One morning after the sermon, and while the after service was in progress, the Spirit of God fell like a flash of lightning on a lady who was at the altar. She was a member of the church and recognized as one of the best women in the town. In what character she presented herself as a seeker I do not remember; perhaps as desiring “more of Christ.” Her phraseology may have been defective in explaining her want, but God read the hungry, honest heart, there was a burst of glory from the skies, and the woman stood perfectly transfigured before me while uttering cries of holy rapture that linger in memory with me to this day. She seemed electrified, galvanized, literally charged with divine glory and power. She was so filled with the Holy Ghost as to appear almost in an agony.

Ignorant as I was then of the blessing of entire sanctification, I knew not what had happened, save that a woman had been overwhelmingly blessed by the Lord. And yet here was the second instance in my life where I had led a person into a religious experience which I did not possess myself.

Such an appeal as this woman gave the congregation, followed by additional waves of spiritual ecstasy, will never be forgotten by the audience of that morning. Her face especially impressed the people. And until her death fifteen years later, she never lost the holy, heavenly look which God gave her that hour.

In this same town there was a society woman who literally lived for worldly pleasure. No religion or revivals for her. She was handsome and young, and as physically frail as she was bright and pretty. She had contracted or inherited some affection of the heart that virtually placed her on the border land of eternity every moment, and yet this awful fact never stopped her a moment in the giddy whirl of social pleasure, and the unwearied pursuit of every kind of amusement.

Her physician, a member of the church where I was holding the meeting, warned her of her danger; told her that with such a diseased organ as she carried in her breast, she would be likely, under any strong excitement or emotion, to go like a flash into eternity. Her reply was a merry laugh.

One day he happened to be passing her home, when he was suddenly called in, and just in time by powerful heart restoratives, to save her life. But still she did not change her manner of living. One afternoon soon after the occurrence just mentioned, this physician was paying a professional call in the neighborhood when, as he was near this lady’s house, the front door suddenly opened, a servant rushed out, and seeing the family practitioner; cried out:

“Oh, Dr. K_____! Come to my mistress quick! She is dying!”

Dr. K_____, knowing the peculiar and imminent peril of the case, needed no second call. He told me that he leaped up the staircase three steps at a time, and literally burst open the door of the bedroom. The woman was sitting on the edge of her couch, and as the physician entered she stretched out her hands toward him, her great black eyes dilated with horror, and gasped: “Oh, Doctor, Doctor!”

And fell back lifeless on the bed. He said that he sprang to her side, but when he touched her she was dead. Even while he looked into the unconscious face, the soul of the woman was millions of leagues away in its long journey into eternity.

Here was the same town, the same Gospel, two women in the same social realm, and yet what different receptions of the Word of God, what morally opposite lives, and what a fearful contrast in their deaths and everlasting destinies.

It was during this year I attended for the first time the famous Sea Shore Camp Ground, located midway between New Orleans and Mobile. Situated in a vast grove of pine, oak and other beautiful forest trees of the South, and fronting the Gulf of Mexico, there is naturally no lovelier locality for such an annual gathering to be found in the whole country.

At this time the wooden cottages were of simple construction, and there was no desire or movement upon the part of the people to make it a summer resort or a Chautauqua assembly. Salvation was the chief end in view, and so every year witnessed for quite a while, a genuine revival sweep the camp, and tidal waves of salvation roll as high as I have witnessed since at any camp ground.

In those days not less than one hundred preachers attended this meeting. Sixty or seventy slept in a long, narrow building, whose furniture consisted of as many cots ranged in a double row, with a narrow passage between, perhaps a dozen chairs, two tin basins for washing purposes, and a small looking-glass a foot square hanging on the wall in the center of this airy, breezy tenement.

On these simple canvas beds, ornamented with a straw pillow and covered with a coarse domestic sheet, I have seen stretched in sleep or rest the greatest preachers in Southern Methodism. Not only were some of these men already famous but a number of the younger ones were destined to be distinguished. Out of that band came several bishops, nearly a dozen college presidents, four or five authors, and a cluster of preachers who swept upward to the largest churches in the connection.

In such a large gathering of preachers it was considered a great honor to be called on to fill the pulpit a single time; and the distinction was marked indeed for one to be employed twice by the Committee of Public Worship. Such men as Doctors Wadsworth of Mobile and John Mathews of New Orleans, were of course in great requisition, but there would be often sixty or seventy preachers who would attend the camp and leave without having had an opportunity to preach or lead a single meeting.

This was before the time that one or two men would do all the preaching; and so with an unused seventy there would be twenty or thirty of the one hundred ministers who would be called upon to divide the pulpit labors and honors.

For some reason this year the divine power seemed slow to fall. Doubtless there never had been greater discourses delivered at this camp on any previous year; but the heavens remained locked. So things dragged, or, rather, stood still until the seventh or eighth day.

One afternoon the audience assembled at the ringing of the bell, to this unpopular and undesirable of all the other hours of worship. It was just after dinner and the people were as a rule disposed to be drowsy, and no star minister of the Gospel cared for this appointment, but dreaded it, and some even refused thus to be sacrificed, as they so regarded the matter.

Taking my seat in the congregation I observed a preacher entering the pulpit whom I had not noticed before on the ground. His face was one of the meekest that I ever remembered to have seen. He a plain-looking man, commonly dressed, and seemed oblivious of himself and every one else. A minister near by whispered that he was stationed on a circuit in the Alabama Conference; that he was not much of a preacher, but was a good man.

A brief study of the person referred to, not only confirmed but added to the remark, that here was not only a good but a very pious man. The countenance I looked upon was not simply good; it was a holy face!

I was unaccountably drawn to and interested in this humble appearing person in the pulpit. I noticed he prayed on both knees in his private supplication, and that he remained bowed in this converse with God at least two minutes. Then I had another view of the shining face, saw the man’s reverent handling of the Bible, heard his simple, unaffected reading of a hymn, and listened to his quiet but solemn pleading face to face with God for his message and the people.

His text was 1 Corinthians 10:31, “Whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.” The sermon lasted exactly thirty minutes. In that time the preacher never said a single new, bright or smart thing; but from beginning to end he pressed the truth that we belonged to God, owed him every power of mind and body, as well as moment of time, and that every thought, word and deed of the life should be for his glory. I would never be able to describe the effect of this discourse. As the quiet-faced, solemn-toned speaker proceeded, a strange influence came from above on the congregation, and every soul seemed to be listening breathlessly to the simple, undisputed statements of this man, who looked like he belonged to another world and was pleading for a kingdom out of sight.

When he made the altar call scores upon scores of people rushed forward and fell down at the mourner’s bench with sobs and cries. There were twenty-five or thirty conversions in a few minutes. Nearly forty preachers were at the altar, most of them weeping bitterly. The writer was among the bowed down class. Even then I wanted holiness, but did not obtain the grace, as the preacher of the hour simply described the life, but did not point out the way of its obtainment. Perhaps, like others, he did not know how to lead others into the blessing which I see now he undoubtedly possessed.

Later in the afternoon several excited knots of ministers discussed the sermon, the preacher, and the wonderful results of that service. They all cordially agreed that he was no preacher; that his sermon did not deserve the name; that the text had not been handled as it should have been, either exegetically, homiletically, psychologically or theologically; but on the other hand, it had been treated improperly, shamefully, not to say diabolically.

After being fully agreed upon this, some one spoke up and said, “That may all be so, brethren, but he certainly got the souls.” Whereupon, seeing the people standing saved and rejoicing in their midst, they could say nothing against it!

Chapter 23: A Faithful Physician — Ten Dollars — The Yellow Fever

The main residential street of Brandon was called Silk Stocking. Whether the long, narrow shape of the avenue inspired this title, or it came in playful recognition of “quality folks,” as the colored people dub them, I do not know. During my pastorate it was never distinguished by any other name.

On this town boulevard resided a doctor who has ever remained in my mind as an ideal Christian physician and gentleman. He was not only a man of skill in his profession, inspiring perfect confidence in the sick room, but he commanded the highest respect of the community and stood first in the church of which he was a member.

In the practice of medicine he diagnosed, prescribed and administered remedies in constant reliance upon God. And yet with the spirit of faith and prayer he carried about with him, he was the most practical of men. He had the union of faith and works most blessedly agreeing and accomplishing together in his daily life. Repeatedly after he had done all that was possible for the body, he has been known to kneel down and pray for the salvation of the soul of his very sick or dying patient. These supplications sometimes accomplished what no apothecary or surgeon could ever achieve. Not a woman who employed him as the family physician but felt better and breathed easier when dismounting from his horse this man would enter the house of sickness or approaching death, with his medical case in his hands, or saddlebags on his arms.

In the very prime of his useful life, this most valuable citizen suddenly sickened and died. In the funeral that followed, the doctor’s saddle animal, a beautiful gray, was led fully caparisoned just behind the hearse. As the pathetic sight of that empty saddle and riderless steed following the dead master who lay still and white in the coffin just ahead, broke on the view of the assembled town, I do not believe there was a dry eye in the great assemblage.

Personally I felt that an irremediable loss had befallen the community. And in all the months that followed of my pastorate, I could not become accustomed to his absence. Even to this day, to think of the town, is to see that horseman with his grave, patient, thoughtful face, threading the streets and going in and out among the homes of the sick and the dying. He always appeared to me as a man who had some great private sorrow; but if he did, he never mentioned it to any one, but went on cheering other burdened lives and helping in his masterful way the suffering bodies of countless of his fellow creatures.

Two Scripture verses carved on his tombstone would well describe the character and life of the man. One would be the sentence, “The Beloved Physician,” the other, “He went about doing good.”

About this time my Board of Stewards secured a small rented cottage as a parsonage home on Silk Stocking street. Just in front of us was a handsome residence and large shrubbery yard owned by a family who were well-todo in the matter of earthly goods.

In the afternoon late, this household, in common with others, would take a constitutional promenade on our avenue. Their preparations however, were deliberate, protracted and solemn indeed. They owned handsome furniture and beautiful pictures, while costly rugs and skins and lovely bric-a-brac adorned the parlor and library. These articles were entirely too valuable to be left even for half an hour without securing the house. So the evening parade was always preceded by a great locking and barring of doors, pulling down and fastening of windows, followed by the unchaining and turning loose in the yard of a ferocious watch dog. Then after all this work and worry, this benevolent preparation for the reception of tramps and burglars, the household in question would come forth on the village boulevard to find what pleasure they could in a stroll of four or five blocks in length.

This performance was in such striking contrast to the custom of the little parsonage dwelling across the street, as to excite the profound amusement of any observer. In the parsonage home there was nothing a thief wanted; nothing worth stealing. So when we indulged in an afternoon walk, we left every window and door wide open, feeling assured that on our return we would find everything untouched; and so we did.

One month, after having been paid my salary, and in turn had settled all our little accounts and liabilities, had ten dollars over. That night on retiring my conduct might have been surprising and amusing to some individuals, but not to rich people. Most carefully I locked the door, and lowered and fastened the windows, though it was a warm night. My young wife asked with surprise what on earth I was doing. It was an embarrassing question. I hated to say that I feared somebody wanted and was after our ten dollars. I wished I could have remarked a change of weather. But there was no such alteration of the elements, and I could not tell a falsehood. My final reply was that we ought not to be so careless in leaving doors and windows open at night; that vicious characters might take advantage of it and rob us. The wife answered that we had nothing that anybody wanted. Evidently she had forgotten the ten dollars!

Twice that night I thought I heard burglars breaking into the house; and before day had a bad case of nightmare. I dreamed that we were not only being robbed but murdered! And all this disturbance was brought about by ten dollars!

From that day to this I have possessed an intelligent sympathy for the rich. I can understand now why they chain doors, bar windows, have electric alarms, keep dogs, and employ private watchmen. They have so much to lose. And from the identical principle that I could not rest by day nor sleep without the horrors by night because a ten-dollar bill was in the house; what must be the mental condition of people who have one hundred-dollar bills in their homes, not to mention tiger skins, Persian rugs, gold and silver plate and all kinds of valuables and treasure.

The next day the ten-dollar bill went the way that most money has of going in meeting certain necessities of life. That night I paid no attention to the doors or windows, went to bed peacefully, and slept the sleep of the just, the innocent, and the consciously secure. From all indications, if the money had remained a week longer in the house, I would have had something like nervous prostration.

This was the year that the yellow fever scourged the city of New Orleans beyond all precedent; swept far beyond its usual bounds and devastated the cities of Natchez, Vicksburg and Memphis, and then, contrary to all past history, left the towns and penetrated the country.

Those who could not and did not take refuge in the North, fled in great numbers to the piney woods and to the remotest rural districts. But the plague in certain places followed even here and pulled down its victims with relentless ferocity. A Methodist preacher living deep in the country lost his wife and eight children. The sight in his garden of nine fresh made graves proved a shock to the stoniest-hearted observer. The minister himself hovered on the edge of the grave for days; and his friends feared that even if he recovered, the spectacle of his desolated household would madden and kill him.

All the towns in Mississippi were quarantined. The inhabitants were scattered to the four winds who were fortunate enough to escape in time. The population of these places became a mere corporal’s guard, while countless thousands of city people boarded in farm houses, crowded the country churches on the Sabbath, and made the forests ring with their religious songs, hymns and anthems.

I stood at the union depot in Jackson one afternoon waiting for a train to go to Brandon. The town was quarantined, and had not yet been frightfully visited by the plague, as happened soon after. The whole land was filled with gloom. A great black thunder storm was gathering in the south. Just then a train from New Orleans, forbidden by the authorities to stop, swept by, sending forth a dismal roar from its whistle as it rushed past. The train had left the death-smitten city of New Orleans only a few hours before, and seemed almost to have escaped from the black, lowering cloud that was flashing and thundering in the distance, and was flying like a frightened fugitive northward with its note of alarm and distress.

Hundreds of people were at the station when this incident occurred. I have never forgotten the grave, troubled faces of that hour, the melancholy and awe produced by those rushing, moaning cars, while the coming storm seemed prophetic of a greater, blacker tempest that overhung the land.

In the town of Brandon all citizens who could go were requested to leave. Hardly fifty people were left, nearly every one of them men, and most of them unsaved. I determined to remain with this band and live or die with them. I placed, however, my young wife and our three children, Reed, Maude and Guy, in a pleasant country home at what was considered a safe distance from the town.

In the two or three months which followed, the silence and loneliness of the forsaken community was almost indescribable. At night not one house in ten had a light. During the day, hours would pass without seeing a single soul upon the street. A handful of men used to sit on a certain corner in the town square, whittle sticks, tell war stories, and look blue. Silk Stocking was utterly forsaken, and altogether unillumined after dark, with the exception of my lamp, which streamed out on the gloom until after midnight as I poured over my Theological Course of Study for the fourth year.

At last I saw that the yellow fever would not likely visit me, and offered my services to the sorely scourged city of Jackson. But Dr. Watkins, replying for the Board, refused, stating that not having had the disease, I would not only become a victim in a few days, but thereby add to the labors of an already over-worked band of nurses and physicians,

The gifted Chas. B. Galloway, then a rising young minister stationed at Vicksburg, contracted the fever. His life was despaired of. He had even the black vomit, which had been considered the invariable precursor of death. His wife, also smitten with the disease, being told of his rapid sinking, had herself brought from another room and laid by his side that she might be near him as he drew his last breath.

But hundreds, and we doubt not, thousands, of Christians begged God for the life of this brilliant, gifted, eloquent young preacher. Churches all over the land held special prayer meetings in his behalf, entreating the Lord to rebuke the disease and lift him up.

And God heard, and answered from Heaven. He touched the man who was considered doomed by the world and as good as dead; and raised him up from the portals of the tomb, not only to continue his noble fight against the saloon and intemperance, to preach the Gospel of the Son of God on both sides of both oceans, to be chosen editor of the New Orleans Christian Advocate, and to be elected one of the Bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church South.

Chapter 24: A Second Visit to the Sea Shore Camp Ground Stationed at Vicksburg

I was ordained elder in December, 1878, by Bishop Keener. After this completed my four year’s pastorate at Brandon, and was then sent to Crystal Springs, one of the Stations in the Mississippi Conference.

It was at this appointment that occurred the scenes described in the chapter, “A Pastoral Round,” in the book called “Pen Pictures.”

It was a very blessed year with many accessions to the church and many more conversions.

At this time there were a number of camp meetings in the Conference territory, at which gathered from ten and twenty up to one hundred preachers, according to the size and rank of the camp ground.

For quite awhile the larger convocations held their own with the smaller Feasts of Tabernacles, as to spiritual power and commensurable results in the line of salvation. But rival star preachers, and the summer resort feature slowly but surely sapped the strength and stole away the glory of the big camps, and the drift was finally unmistakably toward a mere summer outing and Chautauqua assembly.

Before this Ichabod condition had taken place, I visited the Sea Shore Camp Ground for the second time.

On the first occasion of attendance, mentioned in a previous chapter, I had been preaching several years, and being wonderfully well pleased with what was considered my ministerial success and what the brethren said about my pulpit ministrations, I was quite surprised not to say disappointed that the Committee on Public Worship did not wait on me immediately on arrival and request me to fill one of the leading hours. But these same individuals did not do so on the first day, nor the second, third, fourth, fifth and even the sixth; until I felt that some mistake was taking place, and that surely they had not heard how I had been in demand in a number of towns, nor how my preaching talent was continually developing.

Two more measures of time of twenty-four hours each rolled by, and it certainly seemed that I would not enjoy the exalted honor of standing on the historic platform of Sea Shore Camp Ground. But fortunately for my miserable pride, over fifty preachers left the camp for their charges, and so at last on the ninth day, the committee being short of workers, came to me and requested that I should officiate at the morning hour of eleven.

As my swollen sense of self-importance had been greatly reduced by its long delay, and I was quite contrite over my egotism, the Lord was pitiful and gracious and so used the young preacher, that there was quite a victory at the altar; twenty souls being converted. The pulpit subject was “The Four Looks Toward Sodom.”

And now again as has been said, after the lapse of five years I was visiting the selfsame camp ground. But what a change had taken place in the preacher! God had been busy with me in all these long months, and now with an humble heart and shrinking spirit I came on a scene where thousands of people were encamped by the sea, and an hundred preachers filled the platform or lined the seats in front of the altar.

I took a vacant place some distance back, glad to hear the Gospel come from the lips of others, and equally willing and even anxious to be unheard and unbeheld myself. As I recall that second visit, I was living close to Christ, felt like sitting at the feet of the brethren assembled there, and never had a single desire to come to the front and be put forward in any prominent way. I was perfectly content to listen, and be overlooked. Truly, a great transformation had taken place in me since my first attendance.

But only mark the unexpectedness of events and the strangeness of God’s dealings. I had not been on the ground one hour when I was invited by the Committee on Public Worship to preach. Surely the humble shall be exalted.

Each time I filled the pulpit at this camp that year, God was pleased to crowd the altar and save a number of souls; fifty in all. One subject was, “Walking with God,” and another, “The Retributive Judgments of God.”

At the close of this year’s pastorate I was sent by the Bishop and Conference to Vicksburg.

This is the most strikingly beautiful and historic city in the state. At that time the mile-wide Mississippi made a most impressive bend of ten or fifteen miles, by which the city could be kept in view for several hours. Built on a range of lofty hills, Vicksburg would appear by day with street above street like terraces, of trees and buildings; and by night long lines of twinkling lights rising from the river front to the brow of the highest eminence made the city even more attractive and beautiful. To see it rise up in the distance from the deck of an approaching steamboat, or fade away and sink out of sight, as the vessel swept southward towards New Orleans, was a spectacle never to be forgotten, and a picture worthy to be hung in the mental gallery by the side of the loveliest views and landscapes of earth.

Gen. Grant tried with his canal to deflect the big current and destroy this Bend; but what he could not do, Nature did. The great, imposing Bend is a thing now of the past. That mighty flood called the Father of Waters in the time of an overflow cut across the isthmus, ploughed a new channel for itself through the alluvial soil, and is now over a mile west of Vicksburg. It is still in view, but does not flow in front of the city, as of yore. I do not think that any earthly power could bring it back; and yet the disaster could have easily been prevented if the municipality had listened to the warnings of Nature and observant river men, and had taken the proper steps that were urged upon the people. But with characteristic Southern disposition to postpone, nothing was done, the calamity came, the Mississippi turned its face in another direction and Vicksburg sits forsaken and lamenting on the hills.

United States engineers have with great skill and large expenditure of means and labor changed the course of the Yazoo River, and by a series of canals and woodland lakes brought it to flow in its smallness past the front of Vicksburg where the Mighty Mississippi, a mile wide, once used to roll its vast turbid current to the sea.

But what a difference!

Truly here is a sermon in pictorial form of a most powerful and lasting nature, showing the effect of neglect, the departure of greater blessings and the life settling down to the enjoyment of Yazoo streamlets when we might have had mile wide Mississippi blessings, the very fullness of the Gospel of Christ.

At Vicksburg occurred the famous siege with Pemberton and thirty thousand half starved Confederates on one hand and Grant and seventy thousand well-fed and well-armed United States soldiers on the other.

Here the Government has a National Cemetery; and we doubt not, the most striking and colossal of all. In addition two military park-like roads have been run entirely around the city, following strictly and exactly the two lines of breastworks occupied by the attacking and defending bodies of troops. On these two roads the different States are erecting monuments in memory and honor of their dead who fell in this long, dreadful, fatal siege of six weeks.

Vicksburg was also famous for being the starting point down the Mississippi towards Natchez and New Orleans of that perfect fleet of magnificent steamboats called floating palaces, the like of which in size, beauty, elegance, comfort, luxury, with string and brass bands, and carrying the aristocracy of the Old South, will never be seen again.

Some of the names of the majestic and beautiful vessels still remain with me: the Charmer, Princess, Magenta, Magnolia, Ferd Kennett, Glendy Burke, Katie, Vicksburg, Eclipse, Natchez, and Robert E. Lee; but the steamers themselves have passed away with the old regime, like the Feudal Castle, Troubadour, Knight Errantry and Chivalry of other days that have left us forever with the centuries in which they flourished.

In this city I spent a year. God greatly blessed the twelve months’ pastorate, and there were friendships made and affections born that will last through eternity.

In this city and at this time I met “Mrs. Griddle,” whose biography is to be found in my book called “People I Have Met.” Event and incident abounded, but because so many of the actors in these scenes are still alive, it is doubtless best not to put the facts in print just now.

During this pastorate there came the great bereavement of life described in “Pastoral Sketches” in the chapter called “The Martyr.”

In the large, beautiful City Cemetery I have a burial lot where Reed and Guy are sleeping by the side of their mother. A brick wall with pilasters, an iron gate, a willow and two cedars mark the last resting place of half the family with which I came first as a pastor to Vicksburg. So the place has naturally a great hold upon mind and heart, and here I would like to end my days, and here at last I would love to be buried.

Among the members of my congregation was Dr. C. K. Marshall, a preacher already referred to, who ranked side by side with Bishop Bascom in splendid appearance, oratory and eloquence of the highest order.

In regard to the physical man he had a leonine face and the bearing of a king. He would be singled out in any audience and command instant attention. His fame as a speaker was so widespread and national in its character, that no church North or South where he was advertised to preach could accommodate the crowd. Times without number he had to be brought into the building through a back window or portal, so great would be the jam at the front door and on the street.

If he had stayed in the Annual Conference he would have been elected a bishop, and also proved the greatest of them all, but on account of family affairs and great property interests he located and lived in his own house in Vicksburg, a beautiful home surrounded with large forest trees and reminding one of Mt. Vernon.

When the writer was a lad of six or eight, Dr. Marshall visited Yazoo City and preached to an overflowing audience as usual. In the afternoon he was walking on the streets holding my hand, when the church bells began to ring over the town. He asked me what they said, and I confessed that I could not interpret the iron language, when with his eyes full of tears and face aglow he replied, they say:

“The Lord is risen indeed” — ”The Lord is risen indeed.”

It certainly seems very strange that I, long after this, should be the pastor of such a king among men, such a peerless prince among preachers

After I left Vicksburg and went to other cities he used to occasionally visit and write to me. In one letter he wrote a year before his death he mentioned a severe illness he had passed through. He said, “I went down to the banks of Jordan, brushed the dew on its grassy shore, looked over into the Heavenly Canaan and then — came back.”

He lost much of his property toward the last, buried many of his friends, and like the rest of us tasted a number of bitter disappointments. A tender, thoughtful and sweet melancholy came upon him. He would take his cane and walk frequently to the distant City Cemetery, and spend hours among the tombs and monuments. His devoted daughter regretted to see this, and said in a loving, chiding voice, “Father, why do you go out so often to the graveyard?” When his eyes gushed with tears and he replied with a choking voice:

“Daughter, I have more friends lying asleep out there, than I have here living in the city.”

A few months after that he went down to the brink of Jordan again, and this time did not come back. He crossed over I am told with a smile, and a great light on his face; he entered the city where the King knew and loved him; the gates of pearl closed behind his form, and as Bunyan would say, we saw him no more.

Chapter 25: A Steamboat Occurrence

The Robert E. Lee was the largest, swiftest and most palatial steamboat on the Mississippi River for a number of years following the “Surrender.” There were other magnificent steamers approximating her in size, elegance and beauty, but still the Lee was felt to be at the head of this wonderful fleet of river craft that plowed the waves of the mile-wide Mississippi from New Orleans to Vicksburg. Other boats of lesser size went to Memphis and St. Louis, but the flotilla of palaces we are writing about went no farther north than Vicksburg.

The Lee made weekly trips, and her departure from Vicksburg for the Crescent City near the Gulf always drew a crowd to the wharf. As the last solemn toll of the bell sounded, with her guards crowded with passengers, officers conspicuous on the hurricant roof, fifty deck hands gathered at the bow near the jackstaff, the mammoth steamer with majestic movement would sweep into midstream, and then with prow pointed southward, steam out of sight down the river with great black clouds of smoke pouring out of the tall chimneys, while the Negro roustabouts sang a wild, weird river song that tingled the blood and filled the eyes with tears.

While I was pastor at Vicksburg, this favorite steamboat of the public took its last trip. Hundreds on the wharf who watched her disappear around the bend a mile or more away, little dreamed that her stately form would never be beheld again and her river career would end in a few hours.

At two o’clock that night the telegrams began to pour in from Rodney and Waterproof that the Lee had caught fire and burned up at one o’clock.

Heartbreaking were the histories of that night on the ill-fated steamer, while to those who received the tidings from distant cities, towns and homes, sorrows came that time has never yet been able to heal. One of the melancholy happenings on the boat I have inserted in “Pastoral Sketches.”

But the object of this chapter was to mention an occurrence of that night which to us has always been freighted with deep spiritual significance.

It seems that when the boat caught on fire, Captain Campbell, seeing the impossibility of extinguishing it, sent the second clerk flying down the long saloon into which scores of staterooms opened, with orders to strike on as many doors as he could and cry out aloud that the boat was on fire.

As these great steamers abound so in the inflammable and combustible, both in framework and in cargo, large as they are they burn up in ten minutes. So the young man took his life in his hands when he started on his long run with so many stops to make.

It is evident that he did not have time to enter into an explanation or make entreaties or arguments; his one commission and duty was to strike a door and cry, “The boat is on fire!” Then fly to another, do the same, and so rescue as many as he could while trying to save himself.

Next day the happenings of that sad night were known all over Vicksburg, and especially the results of that clerk’s race with death, his loud hammering on the closed doors and his startling midnight cry.

One class of people aroused from slumber by the noise were very angry at having been so awakened. They freely expressed this indignation in their staterooms, and to one another through the thin panels that separated the tiny apartments.

They seemed to think the clerk was a drunken man and said it was an outrage that on a first-class steamer such a disgraceful thing should be allowed. That likely the captain knew nothing of the disorderly conduct, but they intended reporting the matter in the morning, the first thing.

Poor fellows! They never saw another morning. When the sun next arose, it shone upon their dead-bodies floating in the yellow waves of the Mississippi, or consumed to an unrecognizable mass in the charred wreck of the Robert E. Lee, while their souls were in another world.

A second class were highly amused at the rude awakening of the second officer. Like the others they thought it was a case of drunkenness or a practical joke. And so they were also heard laughing over the occurrence; and kept up their glee until the flames sweeping through the saloon and corridors and gangways, cut off their escape, and they sank with their suddenly arrested jollity and fun into a destruction by drowning or burning to death.

A third class heard the warning, believed the cry was true, sprang into complete or partial apparel and just escaped with their lives.

These were the ones who reported next day the sayings and conduct of the angry and amused ones on the doomed vessel.

A fourth class heard the warning, but waited to hear it again and more clearly. But as the young man was running, and every stride took him and his message farther away, the words naturally became more indistinct from distance; and several were overheard to say that they could not now make out what he was saying and so placing their heads in a kind of reassurance on their pillows, in another five minutes they were swept down into a frightful death, and joined the angry and amused ones in their entrance upon eternity.

A fifth class seem never to have heard a word of the clerk’s cry nor a single rap of his agitated hand. They were not even conscious of any imminent danger, but slept on and up to the moment of sudden death and opened their eyes in another world.

It is remarkable how these five divisions I have mentioned cover in their representative capacity the entire race of man as regards their condition and conduct under the call and warning of the Gospel and a true Christian ministry.

As we see how many are asleep on this flying boat of a world, and we know it is on fire, and rushing to a final moment of utter destruction, we feel the need of many second clerks sent out by the Lord to beat at the closed heart doors of slumbering souls. And not only should there be many, but faithful men at that who will strike hard at the shut portal, and call and cry out unmistakably what God would have the sleeping soul to hear and do.

Habits of resistance are formed so swiftly; character made so speedily; life is so uncertain; death is so sure; perils so many and imminent; that there hardly seems time and place for argument about such a matter as salvation.

It looks according to the Bible and the lives of great soul savers that there must be thrilling calls for immediate action, messages to make men awaken and do so at once, and if not they are certain to go down into destruction.

How we should pray for the second clerk in this kind of work. He, if truly sent of God, has a long run, lonely life and a hard, thankless task before him. Our supplications with our best wishes should go with him, that he may not weary in well doing, that he will not cease his warning cry because of anger or ridicule, that he will not be discouraged nor fail to knock at other doors because there have been individuals and places that would not arouse in answer to past faithful warnings and appeals.

Above all may the second clerk be saved himself. It would be sad indeed if after having rescued others he himself should be lost. As the great apostle has expressed it, “Lest after having preached to others I myself should be a castaway.”

Under the Gospel call of true men we find as we have said the identical divisions beheld on the burning steamer.

First there are those who become angry.

It would be impossible to number the multitudes in this unhappy class.

To be told that they are in sin and danger of Hell fire seems to infuriate them. Like Naaman they turn away in a rage from such messages, sermons and meetings. They believe, they say, in a quiet religion; they like a sermon that soothes them; they demand what they call decency and order in worship; they want no such appeals nor any warnings, and protest against excitement.

But the boat is on fire!

They tell us of their popular pastor who is instructing them with his sociological sermons; and informing them with his lectures and blackboard illustrations; and delighting them with his talks about his travels in foreign lands. They like that and enjoy that, they say.

Yes — but the boat is on fire!

Recently in one of my meetings the tabernacle was pitched in the public square on which the porches and balconies of a hotel opened. There was much loud agonizing in prayer for the salvation of people at the altar, and equally loud and fervent praises when souls got saved and sanctified.

It is wonderful how many traveling men in the hotel became angry at the noise they heard in the tent. The sound of preaching and praying, the noise of earnest supplication and fervent hallelujahs bringing warning to these spiritually sleeping souls seemed to infuriate them. On the verandah and at the table and in the office they fumed and fussed about it. They said it was all wrong; that it ought not to be allowed; that it was disgraceful, intolerable, abominable, etc., etc.

But the boat was on fire!

I said, on the platform, to them one night:

“You think there is too much noise over here. But only let that twelve hundred dollar house of yours catch fire and what a noise you would make! How you would cry out — bring a ladder — hand me a bucket of water — fling me an axe here. Quick! Quick! Quick!

“You say that kind of noise is all right. But here are precious immortal souls, each one worth according to Christ’s words more than the whole world. And they are going down to a burning Hell, and to an everlasting destruction, and yet you insist on our being quiet about it and unmoved. No, sir; the world itself is on fire! and rushing on to a day of fire, and men are falling into Hell fire daily by thousands and millions and we must and will cry aloud and spare not. We must awaken and save all we can. God has sent us out to do it and we will.

A second class are the amused ones. They are highly tickled at the fervor, rush and excitement of a genuine revival. They seem to get a horrible entertainment out of God’s way of warning and saving souls.

I have seen such people in their finery, jewelry and powdered faces grinning and giggling at the most tremendous utterances of divine truth and the heartbroken cries of convicted souls at the altar.

When a soul receiving pardon or holiness shouted the praises of God, I have seen them rush from different parts of the camp ground, or into the church from the street and sit or stand with their stolid animal faces criticizing and condemning sacred scenes of grace about which they knew no more than a creature of the brute world, until my soul fairly sickened within me at the revolting, idiotic spectacle.

A third class hear the warning, arise and put on the garments of salvation and escape a burning Hell.

I thank God that I find this division of mankind wherever I go. They are not as many as those who are angry, and who ridicule, and refuse to be saved. Christ said they were few compared to the multitude. But they are enough to pay for all the toil, difficulties, and sorrows that come to the true pastor and faithful evangelist. For their sakes we keep on knocking at the closed doors around us until suddenly some of the portals open, an illumined face shines upon us and the ransomed of the Lord exclaims with a happy smile, “I will go with you.”

A fourth division hear the warning — and then cease to hear.

There was a time when the Gospel was felt to be a message from God; then it began with them to lose its clearness and force; it seemed to be receding. After that it was a mere sound, and indistinguishable in its deliverances. Men thus left, in speaking of a messenger of full salvation, are heard trying to fathom what he said: Many in commenting on a clear and powerful sermon on holiness use language identical with that spoken in New Testament times in regard to Christ, “What did he say — we know not what he said.”

There is a fifth class that never seem to hear anything from the spiritual and heavenly side. No warning affects them. No thundering of the law moves them. But perfectly immersed in the pleasure or pursuits of this world, they do not seem to have a thought, interest, or anxiety concerning another world.

I find so many of this class in every place as I go around that at times I feel appalled.

Ranged in ranks and blocks of pews or seats, they turn faces upon the speaker in which there is not the slightest sign of the presence of a soul. Sometimes not even ordinary intelligence is present in that countenance, and we look upon lines and compact bodies of human beings where thought is not exercised, conscience is asleep, the soul dead and the Holy Spirit departed. The Gospel seems powerless to reach them. Every one of the different messages seems to fail. No matter who preaches, it is the same to the dull-eyed, heavy-faced congregation of the dead. The boat is on fire and sinking and they don’t seem to know it. The clear, faithful warning sent by God through men does not alarm them or appear even to have been heard. The sleeping company of the Robert E. Lee is beheld over again in every home, church, town and city of the land.

Truly in view of the magnitude and dreadfulness of the life and character situation, I say again, God help the second clerk as he makes his long, lonely, thankless run through the spiritually sleeping thousands and millions of the earth. May he not become discouraged and grow silent, or faint by the way, but in spite of anger, ridicule, indifference, spiritual stupidity and every discouraging thing of time, be true to his Captain’s commission, cry aloud and spare not; be true to the slumbering souls who cannot awaken themselves; and finally be saved himself.

How pitifully sad it would be at the Day of Judgment to find the name of the second clerk numbered among the dead; he who had saved others, had perished himself.

May Heaven smile upon and bless and safely bring through everything, God’s second clerk, no matter where he is preaching, living and toiling for the Master today.

Chapter 26: Stationed in New Orleans — Dr. W. E. Munsey — The Louisiana State Lottery

In December, 1882, I was sent by Bishop Wilson to New Orleans. My stay there was eight years; four at St. Charles Avenue Church, now known as Rayne Memorial, and four at Carondolet street, now called First Church.

Some of the incidents and events of these eight years in the Crescent City are to be found in Pastoral Sketches, Pen Pictures and Remarkable Occurrences. Much more has remained unwritten and unprinted for reasons that could well be imagined by the reader; for anyone can easily conceive how many deeply interesting occurrences would take place in this famous French-American metropolis in the long sweep of eight years.

I have only to close my eyes for an instant, and I am back again in this historic, dreamy old city. Once more I see that widest of streets, Canal; the broad, mile-wide Mississippi rushing to the Gulf; the shores lined for miles with steam and sailing craft of every kind, and great vessels from every part of the world; the massive architecture of other days and nations; the gardens crowded with roses, and the great magnolia trees abloom with white blossoms as large as snowballs. I once more hear the echo of hand-organs up distant streets, and feel again the glory of the nights, lustrous with stars, balmy with the soft winds of the Gulf of Mexico, and melodious with the unceasing song of the mocking bird.

The gentle, drowsy climate may have done much to give the musical drawl to the Southern woman’s voice, may have had something to do with the languid grace of the men, and put a charm besides on every thing the eye falls upon, from the winding river, the forest-rimmed landscape to the outspread expanse of Bay, Sound and the Ocean itself.

A pastor who had preceded me in my first charge in the city was Dr. W. E. Munsey. A more gifted, eloquent and remarkable man the South never produced. His sermons were pronounced masterpieces by all the critics, and the effect of some of them on a congregation, notably the one on “The Lost Soul,” was overwhelming. We have heard of audiences that on hearing this discourse and others of like nature would be in a stunned, bewildered condition, and seemed hardly able to leave the building.

An additional feature of surprise connected with this man’s oratory was that he had scarcely a single gesture; the polished sentences rolled from his lips, the thought in them doing the work while the body was usually still and the arms hung motionless by the side, But while the people were awed and even confounded by the marvelous word pictures the speaker created, no one that we ever heard of was converted.

Dr. Munsey wrote his sermons and memorized them. In view of their great length, elevated language and mosaic structure, this was a fearful tax on his mind and slowly but surely brought disaster.

Naturally, the man burdened with such a task as the delivery of two such lengthy masterpieces each Sunday, would be quick to avail himself of every excuse for not preaching. So that dozens of times in a single year the public would be disappointed, “Dr. Munsey was indisposed,” “Dr. Munsey had a headache,” etc., etc. But such was the charm of the man’s oratory when he did preach, that the crowd continued to throng his church no matter how often before they had been disappointed in hearing him.

In the intensity of thought in his study he had a way of twisting and pulling at his hair until finally his head was as smooth and bereft of hirsute adornment as a billiard ball. To keep up and rally from the effect of his great pulpit and platform efforts he resorted to drugs of various kinds, and little by little one of our greatest men came down in clouds and physical wreck, and some thought to the lost soul condition he had so wonderfully described in the days of his pulpit glory.

The last charge I believe to be untrue, for when his friends went into his sick room to visit him, they found him dead kneeling by the side of his bed. He had died in the attitude of prayer.

Our first protracted meeting in New Orleans was quite successful for that city. But a second effort in that line did not end so happily, as right in the midst of the Gospel battle I contracted a case of mumps. It was wonderful how this fact emptied the altar rail. My seekers and penitents were willing to come and leave their sins, but decidedly opposed to taking away a case of throat trouble in exchange. Thus abruptly ended one of the most promising meetings I ever undertook in the Crescent City.

I soon became conscious that all the churches were given to the practice of holding church entertainments for the purpose of raising money. Knowing well that there is scarcely anything which more thoroughly saps the liberality and deadens the spiritual life of any congregation than this, I fired a forty-four pounder at the evil from the pulpit, and published a booklet called “Twenty Objections to Church Entertainments.”

This led to the alienation of a number of ecclesiastical friends, but brought great blessing to our church, and the unclouded favor of Heaven upon my soul.

On being stationed at Carondolet Street Church, having completed four years at Rayne Memorial; I began to study the Louisiana State Lottery question.

It would be perfectly impossible to convey in this chapter the dreadful influence for evil, and the frightful power possessed by this corporation of Iniquity.

Only a few men constituted its supreme council, but the Lottery Company through them ruled the city and State as no dictator ever did in the dark ages. Most of the stockholders were not known to the public, but all the same the Company managed the commonwealth. The judiciary and both branches of the Legislature were alike sold out and owned by it; the governor of the state was either helpless or their tool; while lawyers by the score in the city were on their list of retained attorneys. It seemed to be a hopeless enslavement, and the conscience of the people appeared asleep or dead.

The Lottery Company, licensed by the State of Louisiana, had a Monthly Drawing (with a capital prize of one hundred thousand dollars) which drained the United States; and a Daily Drawing which financially bled and morally corrupted the City of New Orleans. The price of tickets in this daily gambling investment was such that the laboring classes, servants of the household and children of almost every home were enticed, became inoculated with the gambling spirit, and saved, scraped, begged and purloined in countless instances the quarter, or half dollar which would enable them to take a chance on “the turning of the wheel.”

There was as little likelihood of one’s drawing the monthly capital prize as a person’s being struck by lightning on a clear day; or of realizing a bonanza in the smaller daily drawing as of obtaining the traditional bag of gold at the end of the rainbow; because prizes were so few, blanks so many, and the ticket buyers numbered hundreds of thousands each day, and ran into the millions on the day of the Great Drawing of the month.

It was marvelous how the city became corrupted on this line. Servants intrusted with market money would levy on it for the Daily Drawing. Money given to children went straight to the Lottery in the same way. Poverty-stricken families in the wild hope of getting suddenly rich would deny themselves the necessities of life to buy a piece of paste board representing imaginary wealth, which hung in attractive rows and colors from hundreds of office windows in the city.

The Lottery Company becoming enormously rich; saw their shares of stock which cost originally one hundred dollars, run up to eight hundred dollars, nor would their holders sell them even at that figure. A few shares meant a handsome income.

At the same time the Company to awaken kindly feelings, if not a spirit of toleration upon the part of the community it was plundering, would now and then make a public gift to the city, which would not represent an infinitesimal part of the money they had taken from the people, not to speak of the moral injury they had inflicted, nor the public shame and dishonor they had brought on community and state.

One of these gifts was the Howard Library Building, which the city received with fulsome praises and thanks, licking thereby the feet that had kicked, trampled upon and degraded them. The people did not seem to see that it was a kind of hush money. Or that it was like the highwayman taking ten thousand dollars from a man and then presenting the victim with fifty cents accompanied with an air of great liberality and generosity.

Another gift was a bored well in La Fayette Square which was intended to be artesian and spout forth a beautiful stream; but the waters under the earth refused to be sold out like men on the earth, and would not gush and splash and flash for the legalized Board of Thieves in the city. Instead of shooting up in the air, a little dejected stream looking like dripping tears appeared. And this was the nearest approach to a fountain. I never passed it without a smile, and felt like going over and patting the iron tube on the head and uttering my approval and admiration.

The people as viewed at this time seemed either unconscious of their degradation, or apathetic, or had become hopeless and settled down to accept what they regarded as the inevitable and irremediable.

The pulpit partook of the same spirit of unconcern or despair. Not a line in secular or religious papers appeared against this monster, which Octopus or Devil Fish like, had stretched its great limbs over the United States, and then laid myriads of tentacles touching almost every town and home in the land, and began sapping the financial strength and sucking the life blood of all.

While multitudes were ruined, the Octopus thrived, grew stronger every day, wallowed around in its fat insolence, and breathed its defiance at any and all, until a great dread came upon the city about this viewless but all powerful Corporation that was not only able to crush an individual but could make governors, judges, members of the legislature and the whole legal force of New Orleans do as it willed.

I gave public notice that I would attack this Corporation of Iniquity from the Carondolet pulpit on a certain Sabbath. The big church was crowded, and many of my friends thought that I would be assassinated before the address could be delivered.

It happened to be the Chinese New Year, and so when right in the midst of the hour and a half phillippic, a fearful explosion and uproar took place on the street in front of the building, there was great consternation in the audience, and many thought that the attack on the speaker and congregation had commenced.

I was so burdened and wrought up with the subject in hand, that I scarcely paid attention to the noise outside until I heard a voice cry out from the vestibule to quiet the audience, that it was only the fireworks of the Chinese on their New Year.

I have thought more than once since, how this first sermon preached against the Louisiana State Lottery must have sounded to the ears of the community, and been commented on, upon the dark shores of Hell. There had been a stillness for nearly twenty years, and then came the boom! of a solitary cannon. It proved under God’s blessing to be the death knell of the Corporation that had reigned, over and crushed New Orleans and Louisiana so long.

Soon after the first attack, I made a second from the same pulpit to a large congregation, loaded down with additional facts, figures and arguments against the Louisiana State Lottery Company.

Then I had the two addresses published in book form, and illustrated by the best newspaper artist and cartoonist in the city. I sat by his side and suggested every picture This illustrated paperback book was scattered in great quantities all over Louisiana and Mississippi, then into more distant States, while numbers were sent to Washington City. Helped by some legal talent that remained uncorrupted in New Orleans, I showed up in these addresses and book the illegalities of the State Lottery; and assisted by overwhelming facts, proved its debauching influence on the public, and its hurtfulness in many other particulars. It was a black exposure indeed.

It pleased God to bless the two addresses and the book called “The Louisiana State Lottery Company Examined, Exposed and Condemned.” Preachers woke up everywhere and began to thunder against the legalized wickedness. Newspapers commenced training their guns. Meetings were called all over the state. Tongues and pens got busy everywhere, and a bitter war with an aroused public conscience on one hand and vast unscrupulous wealth on the other, started, that was to rage several years before victory would come at last to the side of right and a true citizenship.

The first meeting held against the Louisiana State Lottery consisted of seven individuals. Besides the writer, there was a merchant, an editor, a lawyer, a physician and two others. The meeting pledged to strict secrecy and held in a room near Common and Canal reminded me of a Guy Fawkes’ plot. I will never forget the anxious looks, the lowered voices and the unmistakable fear of that first gathering.

This council lasted an hour, and we parted, each one pledged to come again to the same place one week from that night accompanied with another person who could be implicitly trusted. The man I brought was Rev. J. T. Sawyer of New Orleans, one of the most fearless and aggressive members of the Louisiana ministry.

At the second meeting resolutions were passed, a policy adopted, the membership increased, so that from fourteen of the second gathering we had in attendance on the third over thirty determined men.

At the fourth assembly we numbered over seventy. The fifth coming together beheld fully one hundred and fifty resolute hearts. A public call was issued by them and the sixth convention revealed a hall packed with hundreds of citizens who were resolved that the war against the Lottery should not cease until that institution of corruption should be routed, the evil rooted up and cast out of their midst forever.

This sixth gathering was such an inspiration to the public, that meetings denouncing the Louisiana State Lottery Company sprang up on every hand; speakers and preachers fairly flamed from platform and pulpit, and the public arose en masse.

But even then, but for the United States Government, we never could have won the fight. The Lottery Company was so legalized by State law, so sheltered by power in high places, was so strong in its vast wealth, was so assisted by corruption of different and many kinds, that all the Reform Movements would have failed, pitted against such a hydra-headed and many-limbed monster.

But appeals and petitions were made to the Government at Washington, and the United States in vindication of her outraged Postal Laws, came down to our relief and wiped out from our city, state and country forever, the most impoverishing, enslaving, debasing Corporation that ever saddened the heart, darkened the home and disgraced the history of the people of America.

Chapter 27: The History of Two Cruelly Treated Children

In the absence of the light of full salvation, it is natural that a Christian worker would have his attention engaged and energies directed to striking at and cutting off branches of evil as seen in human life and conduct instead of aiming direct for the root of all transgression and iniquity — inbred sin.

So I warred not only against Church Entertainments, and the Lottery Company, but lined myself up against every outward and public thing that I thought degraded and injured humanity or militated against its best interests in every realm.

Thus it was I found myself a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Was speedily elected an officer, and entered heartily in the work seeking by platform addresses to arouse public sentiment, secure legislation that was needed, and when necessary by personal appeal on the street against brutality to God’s dumb creatures who toiled so faithfully for us.

Conscious that such inhumane treatment hurt the character and spirit of a man in a profounder way than the physical nature of the animal was made to suffer, I worked with this two-fold thought and motive in my mind for some months in this Society; of course, not neglecting my labor for the salvation of souls in the pastoral relation.

The organization had a small badge which bore a horse’s head and the letters S. P. C. A. in bronze against black enamel.

I was never partial at any time of adult life to wearing buttons, regalias, ribbons and such things. So instead of placing the badge on the outside, I wore it on the inside of my coat lapel, knowing I was not less the friend of brute creation, but simply hated going around looking like the side of a billposted fence. Nevertheless, the hidden button served me in excellent stead on a certain trying occasion.

At this time of my pastorate my heart was unusually tender towards children. One cause was the death of my son Guy, and the other the pathetic history of “Little Jack,” both of which biographies I have recorded in “Pastoral Sketches.” Any sight of cruelty and barbarity to a child was simply unbearable to me.

One day I was walking on one of my pastoral rounds through a part of the city south of Jackson street and only a few blocks from the river, when I heard such shrieks and screams proceed from a dwelling on the opposite side of the thoroughfare that I came to a sudden stop, feeling that I would be guilty before God to pursue my way regardless of the agony being inflicted by some one on another not over fifty feet from me. The shrieks came evidently from a little girl or child, and the blows were those of a cowhide, and the voice was, that of an infuriated woman.

A number of female heads were thrust out of a dozen windows near by, and addressing one of the women I said:

“What on earth do you suppose is happening over there?”

The lady replied with a solemn grief-stricken face, “It is a woman whipping her little stepdaughter of ten years of age. She does it every day of the world. It nearly breaks my heart to hear that cruel beating going on.”

“Where is the child’s father?” I asked. “And why does he permit it?”

The woman wiped her eyes and said:

“He doesn’t know it. She never punishes the child until he is away down town. And the little thing is so cowed that she is afraid to tell her father lest the woman should kill her.”

“Why don’t some of you go over and stop this horrible affair?” I pursued as new blows could be heard falling and fresh agonizing screams came from across the street.

“We dare not. We have no authority. And it is none of our business.”

“Well,” I cried, “I’ll make it mine, God helping me.” And with that I crossed the street and gave a terrific Judgment Day knock at the front door.

Instantly the blows ceased, and the screams subsided to wails not less pitiful to hear. Then as no one came, I gave several other bangs to the portal and heard reluctant steps approaching. Then came a hard defiant voice inside, “What do you want? And who are you?”

With every nerve tingling and keyed up, and feeling I could meet a thousand muscular angry Amazons I replied:

“I have come to stop your barbarous treatment of that child. Let me in at once!”

To this there was a voluble and furious negative response; when noticing that the window shutters opened to the floor and that the sash was raised I quickly drew back one of the blinds and stepping in the parlor with a stride, stood before the amazed, guilty-looking, and yet still defiant woman.

The child from a back room saw me enter and flew to me, a stranger, for refuge, sobbing violently. The marks on her half stripped body were as large as the finger in breadth and covered her sides, back and shoulders.

Completely ignoring the woman I asked the child why she had been beaten, and between her sobs and catches of breath she with a frightened glance at the ogress standing glaring by, said, “For pulling a flower.”

“And so,” I said, turning to the woman, “for a single flower you cut and slashed and beat and bruised this poor little helpless child. Are you a fiend in human shape? Have you no pity, no heart, woman?”

Drawing near to me with the cowhide in her hand as if she meditated an attack on me, she cried out:

“By what right and authority do you come into my house interfering with private affairs?”

She certainly had the vantage ground here in a legal and social sense. But “The Angel” that has redeemed me all my life and delivered me in the most perilous of times and trying circumstances, stood by me on this occasion.

Anyhow I have always attributed the thought that flashed and the quick act that followed to him.

Facing boldly toward the infuriated domestic Singe Cat in skirts, I quickly raised the collar of my coat and turned my Horse Head Badge upon her astonished and overwhelmed vision.

A more sudden and complete collapse of a person I never beheld in all my life!

The Badge was too far from her eyes for her to recognize the figure on it and the letters, but she felt it was the insignia of office, the symbol of some high police or detective authority whose headquarters were perhaps in Washington City itself; and here doubtless was one of its leading officers, if not the Mogul himself. And so there was nothing to do but to go down.

And down she did go in such humility of mien, real or simulated; such contrition, genuine or else, and made such promises, true or not, of never beating the child again, of being kind and motherly to it, that my own heart was quite melted, and I felt justified in finally walking away and even encouraged to believe that the woman would keep her word, and that I had accomplished a great work of mercy on that exciting afternoon.

As to the exact moral rectitude of drawing that Horse Head Badge on the woman I have had misgivings. I question if I could have done it a few months later when the light of full salvation came.

Still there are pleas that might be made for this emergency act. One would be, that while our Society was for prevention of cruelty to animals and not children, yet children possess an animal nature in common with the brute creation, and so our Constitution and By-Laws might have been stretched in order to cover this case.

Again we see Paul in a time of immediate peril rescuing himself by an appeal to what was not the real matter before the Council or Sanhedrin, and yet which resulting as he foresaw in a division, saved his life.

A still higher plea is in the fact that here was a case of inhumanity and brutality going on that should be stopped. Let the reader answer if this was not accomplished ? Then ought it not have been performed in a way to secure not only a present but future deliverance, putting an awe on the transgressor in such a manner that the offense would not likely be repeated? Evidently this was the case.

Then I put the matter before the whole jury of readers and ask how they would have acted, and could they under the like exciting circumstances have done any better?

And so we rest this case.

Some weeks later in still another part of the city I had another experience with a little one, with which I finish this children chapter.

I was on a street car one day in the residential part of the city when I saw a colored nurse, a woman of about fifty years of age, with a heavy slap of the hand knock a white child from the top of a porch down a flight of six or seven steps to the brick pavement below. The little thing was not over two years old and lay after falling a crumpled-heap of white muslin, on the ground.

I leaped from the car while it was in motion and walked rapidly towards the house. The Negro woman, alarmed at her deed, was picking the child up as I approached, and undoubtedly reading the indignation in my face began a crooning or low hymn singing, an invariable custom with her race when in trouble or perplexity from detection in guilt.

As I drew near, the child was giving low moans and stifled sobs while held in a leaning position against the aproned lap of the nurse. Stopping a moment, I said:

“What made you knock with your big heavy hand this little innocent child down the steps?”

The woman’s eyes fell before mine while she muttered:

“She wouldn’t min’ me. An’ I nuvver ‘tended to hurt her.”

“Is her mother in the house?”

“No,” was the sullen reply.

“Where is she?” I asked, and before she could reflect long enough to deceive me, she pointed to the neighboring dwelling.

I rang the bell and a lady presented herself. I lifted my hat and asked if I could see the lady who lived next door, and she replied yes, that she was in the parlor paying her a visit.

On being ushered into the room I saw a handsome young woman with fluffy blonde hair engaged in some fancy needlework. I introduced myself by name, and as pastor of Carondolet Street Methodist Church. I told her that in passing on the cars I had seen her nurse strike her child such a blow that she had fallen down the steps and I believed was seriously hurt. To my amazement the mother in her reply paid no attention to the news I had brought her, but seemed struck and pleased somehow with my name.

“You say your name is Carradine. Are you related to the Carradines of Natchez.”

I replied very dryly and with a sickened heart, “Yes, madam.”

“Is Alex Carradine your cousin?” she asked with an eager, expectant and pleased expression on her face.

“Yes,” I managed to utter; “yes, I am his cousin, but I came in to let you know that as I was passing on the car I saw your servant knock your child down the steps so that her head struck heavily the brick pavement.”

“Well, well,” the woman replied in a musing tone, “I didn’t think Aunt Dilsy would have done that. I will have to speak to her about it.” Then with her face lighting up with a gleam of some kind of reminiscent pleasure, she added:

“And so you are Mr. Alex Carradine’s cousin?”

She had scarcely pronounced the last word, when utterly disgusted with this sham and shell of a mother, this female gloating over early courtships and insensible to her own child’s suffering near by, I Suddenly arose, gave a very stiff bow and left the house.

About a month later while paying a pastoral call, a young lady member of my congregation said to me: “While I was at a Tea a few evenings since I heard your name mentioned by some ladies sitting in a group. I bent forward to listen and one was saying, that several weeks ago you were in a street car and saw a nurse knock a child down the steps to the pavement. That you instantly left the car, called on the mother and informed her as to the occurrence, and she seemed to feel no alarm. But that night the child went into convulsions and died the next day. This is what the lady said. Is it so?”

And I answered with a broken voice:

“It is all true about the cruel nurse, the unnatural mother, and what I said and did. But I did not know that God had taken the poor little victim to Heaven.”

The reader can well imagine, that while I had been fighting Church Entertainments, and warring against the Lottery, and making a campaign in behalf of animals, that not only now, but especially then, I was glad and thankful from my heart that I had taken time to make a kind of crusade in behalf of the children, and do the best I could for the little ones.

Chapter 28: The Street Cries of New Orleans

Next to the garden display of roses and flowers, the white bloom of the magnolia, and the yellow of the mock orange, that which will most impress the visitor is the street sounds and cries on the streets of New Orleans.

The hand organ with its Italian bearer and performer, heard on the distant corner, up shadowy thoroughfares on dreamy summer afternoons and in starry nights, makes one of the peculiar and striking features of the Crescent City. At such times the strains always produce a melancholy effect for some reason I can hardly explain. But on the Sabbath day, they seemed to be out in force and were most painfully disturbing to the church service and distracting as well to the would-be worshippers. It would be difficult to describe the mental torture produced on the preacher, when right in the midst of a sermon that was winning its way to the head and heart of the people, one of these wind instruments would suddenly blare forth in front of the church door, and fairly make the air quiver and the building echo and resound with Annie Rooney, Mary of Argyle, Two Little Girls in Blue, Wearing of the Green, and the more blithesome strains of Dixie.

As the eye took in the distressing fact that numbers in the audience were following the tunes played outside, as the brain stove to carry on a line of logical thought, while another part of the intellect was paying attention to the medley of organ melodies, and still another section of the understanding was wishing the musician would go, and wondering why some steward did not request him to move on, the voice would naturally rise on the suffering scale notes, and beads of agonized perspiration stand all over the forehead.

I was about to say that these street sounds created more annoyance and genuine mental distress to the speaker in the pulpit than any other of the distractions that did and could possibly take place at that hour. But a pastor in the same city told me of a disturbance which in its patience trying and equilibrium upsetting quality, he ranked above the hand organ.

He said that one beautiful April morning, with all the church doors and windows open to receive the balmy flower laden air, that just as he read his text and had opened his mouth to make his first remark, a strawberry vendor in a stentorian voice, just in front of the wide-flung church portals, cried out, “F-i-n-e S-t-r-a-w-b-e-r-r-i-e-s! Strawberries! Strawberries! Strawberries!”

The first two words were pulled out in a long, nasal India rubber like way; while the last three were quickly enunciated in a fourth of the time.

The pastor looked at his audience and every one, old and young, were smiling in the broadest fashion. The interruption coming when it did, and as it did, was too much for the gravity of a usually well behaved congregation.

Of course these were days before full salvation had been experienced and before the many varied trying experiences that belong to the public ministry of the evangelistic life had come to strengthen, toughen, fill with resources, and make the preacher steady and ready under every trying circumstance and an easy victor over every untoward and unexpected condition and situation.

In addition to the hand organs, the street cries of certain vendors and hucksters, most impressed me. I have never known a city that had such a variety as well as character to these thoroughfare business announcements. I soon found that in a sense they typified and classified various ministers of the Gospel.

One was the stentorian cry over something that was next to nothing.

The first time I heard this yell and whoop on the street I ran to the window to behold the finder and proclaimer of some great treasure. If I had been told that a gold mine had been discovered in the suburbs, or that a new star had burst on the sight, or any other astounding or gratifying intelligence, the whoop on the street was fully up to the magnitude of any such happening

Let the reader imagine the mental come-down on seeing a most ordinary looking colored person with a most extraordinary voice, whose stock in trade consisted of three “clothes poles” or some sassafras roots in a small gunny sack, the whole outfit not worth over a dollar.

We all know Bro. Stentorian, who makes up in noise what he lacks in grace and knowledge. There was a time when the big whoop greatly impressed me in the pulpit. The loud, resounding voice seemed to promise great things; but when the sermon was over, or the meeting had ended, we had a clear vision of the little mental gunny sack, and saw a great commotion had been made over a very small stock in trade, and over things that amounted to very little after all for our spiritual betterment and salvation.

Another was the indistinguishable cry.

The man so mouthed and mumbled the name of what he had for sale that one had to guess what it was, or run after him for explanation.

Not a reader of these lines but has heard Bro. and Sister Mumbler in the prayer or revival meeting. They may be crying the wares of salvation, and may be praying or testifying all right, but one thing is certain that we never hear them. Moreover it is not in order to ask them what they said, when the performance is over. We only know that with a thousand present and anxious to hear, the voice did not carry beyond the next two pews. Or, requested to pray, they immediately put a handkerchief over their mouths or bowed their heads clear to the ground under the seat, and while I doubt not the wares were good, we failed to hear their names or anything about them.

A third cry was one that tarried not.

This man reminded me of a distracted comet. I never knew when to expect him, nor where he was going, nor how to head him off. He whizzed around a corner so rapidly that one could not well overtake him. Sometimes I wanted to buy the very things he had for sale and was proclaiming, but it actually seemed from his conduct, that for all his calling, he did not want to sell. I found it was folly to try to overhaul him. I tried rushing to the window, and in unclerical haste bolting out of the door and gate in pursuit, but repeatedly all I had was a vanishing glimpse of his form as he turned the corner one or two blocks away.

It is no trouble to find this man’s fellow and likeness in the church ranks. The man who plants but will take no time to reap. The pastor who gives up a meeting too soon. The preacher who has delivered a good sermon, seen unmistakable signs that souls were waking up and wanted to buy the wine and milk of salvation that is so precious, and lo, he makes no altar call, gives no invitation, but so to speak, runs down the street of the last hymn, turns the corner of the benediction two blocks away, and gets out of sight of the church before it occurs to him what he has lost in the way of spiritual opportunity.

As I saw this running street vendor, failing so signally in spite of his activity, I made some promises to God. One of them was that hereafter when I preached presenting pardon and eternal life, and saw the souls of men looking out of their faces and literally waving a hand to me, that I was going down into the altar and let them have a chance at the mourners’ bench of obtaining what God sent me to tell them about.

A fourth cry was a most melancholy one.

Two different street hucksters had this mournful note and utterance. One cried “C-h-a-r-c-o-a-l!” with such a despairing kind of tone, that it made the hearer feel that he did not have a hope or friend left on earth.

The other lamentation had reference to blackberries. Usually this fruit was peddled by Negro women or girls; and they, with a high, chanting voice, pulled the word out as follows: “B-l-a-c-k B-e-r-ries!” the last syllable being suddenly elevated almost an octave, and the whole word uttered in a tremulous, heart-breaking way that defies description.

To buy charcoal after such a solemn funeral announcement seemed out of the question. It was like investing in the means of suicide. The suggestion seemed to be of death, and one would as soon have thought of purchasing a part of a funeral procession.

As for the blackberry wail, to have bought them after such a cry would have been like a species of cannibalism. How could one eat that whose very announcement had wrung the heart and filled the eyes with tears.

And yet Brother Mournful is oftentimes the most popular of preachers and evangelists.

We have men in the pulpit who are great on burial sermons. They are sent for from great distances to preach the funeral of people who have been dead for years. They are great criers as they preach. Their water works run easy. Sentimental deliverance, and reference to natural affections easily turn on the water; so they abound in what is called grave-yard stories and harrowing death-bed scenes. They cry themselves, and this makes others cry, and Bro. Mournful is said to be a mighty man of power, and is called a great preacher and wonderful revivalist.

How often we have heard the “charcoal” cry in the pulpit, and the “b-l-ac-k-b-e-r — r-y wail” in a sermon.

The people wept as they received the berries and coal, but alas for it, blackberries do not last but a short season, and charcoal soon vanishes into smoke.

All these lessons and many others were taken in, in my New Orleans pastorate; and yet Full Salvation still had not come to the great FrenchAmerican city.

It was coming, however.

One of our bishops, before its arrival, had preached a sermon on the sea shore camp ground, and claimed to have had three introductions to the Trinity, one to the Father, a second to the Son, and a third to the Holy Ghost.

I felt that he had indeed been well, if not remarkably introduced, and quite envied him.

Was it not strange that when full salvation came, and a number of us received the second blessing, that this bishop should have been so stirred up about it and provoked with us, and denied there was such a work. It always seemed to me that a man who had three introductions to God, might have allowed us to have two blessings; he being still one ahead of us.

But he resented our claim so bitterly that many thought that the “introductions” had not been good ones after all, that likely they were quite formal and not of a lasting nature. While still others were convinced after a bitter crusade he made on holiness and holiness people, that the bishop needed sorely a fourth introduction to God in order that he might finally die in peace and enter Heaven.

Chapter 29: The Great Revival in Carondolet Street Methodist Church

I do not remember to have seen or heard of a notable revival, one possessing the power, liberty and sweep of a Pentecostal character, that had visited New Orleans prior to the year 1889. Of course, there were the regular protracted meetings held in the different churches, with a few conversions and some accessions, but nothing that aroused public attention, stirred the crowd and aroused the fury of devils in Hell and men on earth until the time mentioned above.

Several years before, the pastors of the different evangelical denominations had invited Moody and Sankey to hold a month’s meeting, and they had done so. A large crowd of several thousand had packed Washington Artillery Hall. A big platform held about two hundred singers and one hundred or more notable city clergymen and laymen. Mr. Sankey, with his marvelously gifted voice, sang, “The Ninety and Nine,” “Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight?” and “My Ain Countree” until many eyes overflowed with tears of self pity, or through the vibration of sentimental chords touching the natural affections. Mr. Moody gave his business-like talk in a mechanical kind of way, and while his generalship was unmistakable there was not one particle of unction in the addresses he delivered. I had heard much of his spiritual power in his wonderful England and Scotland campaign, but evidently he had parted with it in the “seventies” somewhere and somehow. None of us criticized him, however, but worked faithfully.

There was a large inquiry room back of the main auditorium, and there one or two hundred would gather by invitation after the sermon. There were circles of chairs ten in number for the seekers after instruction and salvation, and one in the center for some appointed leader, generally a preacher. In this inquiry room I found a number of the best and most spiritual members I had in my church. One can imagine my amazement. I can see now that while regenerated, yet not having full salvation, they came into this inner room seeking blindly for the Upper Room about which they knew nothing as yet as an experience. Of course, after conversation and prayer with the different leaders, they felt better and said so; whereupon they were promptly put down first in note books and next day in the newspapers as so many new converts.

One Sunday night the crowd was so great than several overflow meetings were held. One at Carondolet Street M. E. Church South. The announcement was made by Mr. Moody from the platform that Dr. C. B. Galloway (afterwards bishop) would conduct the Carondolet Street church overflow meeting, and that Mr. Sankey would do the singing, whereupon hundreds arose and flocked to the place just mentioned. Dr. Galloway asked me to go with him and lead in prayer. As we entered, Sankey was singing and the house was packed. He sang two more hymns and said that he would proceed from there and sing at still another church a few blocks away. Immediately the scene enacted just before at Washington Artillery Hall was repeated and hundreds got up and left in a second chase after the singer. A mere handful was left to listen to a splendid sermon made under peculiar difficulties by Dr. Galloway. It looked like the “Ninety and Nine” had gone after the “One.”

The reader, from these hasty sketches, can already guess the character of the meeting as a whole; and why after it was all over that our churches were not only neither larger and stronger, but decidedly let down some way. There seemed to have been some kind of dissipation which left us weaker somehow, with fewer in attendance at the regular services and no sweeping in of a genuine and abiding salvation that we had all craved so earnestly to see.

In the spring of 1889 I determined to have a meeting of my own, where we could have the Holy Ghost to come down and do things I had read about in the history of early Methodism and especially in the book of Acts.

The man I selected to preach and lead the meeting was the Rev. W. W. Hopper of the Mississippi Conference. I had heard some strange reports about his way of preaching, etc., but I also knew that he always had a revival on his circuits, and so I sent for him. As he, on the morning of his arrival, sat in my Study and I looked on his face, I saw in an instant that he was living closer to God than I was. He had Full Salvation, and I did not know the name of the blessing nor how to get it, and yet I could see that he knew God as I did not.

A most remarkable fact came out in the course of the following week as stated to me by his own lips, viz., that I had been instrumental in bringing him into the Blessing of Sanctification. He said that years before I had left the Mississippi Conference he attended a meeting I was holding for some brother, when he saw by my face and preaching that I was living nearer to God than he was. At once he began waiting on the Lord for something better, and never rested until it came. (This life happening of his I have described in “The History of a Prayer” in “Remarkable Occurrences.”) And now here in the providence of God was the man whom I had unconsciously helped in other years to most consciously and ably help me.

As I was not that morning deep enough in the light to understand; Brother Hopper, as I have said, waited several days before he told me. But fixing his eyes steadily upon me, he asked: “Are you going to let me preach as God will lead me?”

My instant reply was, “Why, certainly. Do you think I would invite you as God’s messenger to lead this meeting and preach to my people and then tell you what kind of message you must deliver? This would not only be discourteous and lacking in confidence in you, but disloyal to God.”

And so the meeting opened, and Brother Hopper trained his guns, and, as I have often said, “He made the feathers fly in the day and the hair fly at night.” The reader will understand that very different animals wear hair and feathers. This is made clear in natural history. And the fact is confirmed when we study the matter, that in the moral realm as in nature the feather tribe appears generally in the day and the hair tribe comes forth by night. Hence the appropriateness and effectiveness of the discourses referred to in the beginning of this paragraph.

One night he preached on “Heart Purity,” and while a few came to the altars we never remember to have felt such a fearful attack made by unseen hellish forces upon the work about the altar and upon the meeting as a whole. Not only a thick gloom seemed to have come upon all, a heaviness, spiritual lethargy and lifelessness, but a kind of horror brooded on us. I could recall no such an experience at the Moody services, but it has come many times since in meetings I have held in different parts of the United States. It is thoroughly understood by me now, as the rush and settling down of infuriated devils on a sermon and service where a perfect and full salvation is being preached, offered and found. But I did not comprehend the power of spiritual wickedness in high places then as I do now. Glancing at Brother Hopper I saw him sitting on the pulpit sofa with his hand covering his eyes, while his lips were moving.

After a full half hour, God suddenly lifted the blackness by, I question not, a rebuke of devildom, and a great victory came to the Christian people about the altar, though the crowd before us remained like stone.

Walking together on the street, I told the evangelist that I had observed his lips in motion while the awful battle was on, and asked him if he was praying. He said, “No.” I rejoined, “What were you doing then, whispering to yourself?” His reply was: “I was exercising faith!” The lesson he gave me that night and in his explanation has lasted me already over twenty years, and that most profitably.

Several days after this the “break,” as I call it, came at the close of a morning meeting. There had been a blessed sermon, a lot of praying after the pleading order, and then at the request of myself a public acknowledgment from the two or three hundred members present as to whether they were consciously through strife, bitterness or wrongdoing in the way of a great revival coming to the church.

Then ensued one of the most remarkable scenes I ever beheld, as first a woman, then a man, then another and another and another got up all over the building and confessed with sobs, bitter crying and some with heartbreaking wails to histories of bitterness, rancor, hate, gossip, scandal and strife, and that they were in the way of the Holy Ghost. When right in the midst of these confessions to man and God, the Holy Ghost fell!

Over twenty years have passed since that remarkable morning, and yet the scene is as vivid and glorious as ever to heart and memory. It seemed like a hundred people were shouting at the same time. Some had fallen flat on the floor. Others were walking up and down the aisles, with shining faces, clapping their hands. The altar was filled. A number of God’s people were bowed over penitents, talking to and showing them the way to the cross, while one man in an ecstasy and with a stentorian voice cried out repeatedly in a way that thrilled every heart: “Jesus has come!” “Jesus has come!”

The meeting lasted two weeks, Brother Hopper remaining the first eight days. Before he left there had been one hundred conversions and twenty-five sanctifications. Nor was this all of the fruit, for out of the work came new Sunday schools, missions, street meetings, together with four or five preachers and over a score of active Christian workers.

I received my Pentecost on the fifth or sixth day. Some peculiar features of this history will be given in another chapter. The divine work of that morning already described ushered in a revival that lasted as long as I continued pastor. The Wednesday night prayer meeting filled the lecture room, the Holiness meeting on another night was on fire, the Sunday audiences crowded the auditorium upstairs, the collections were at high water mark and higher, the altar always had seekers and penitents, and salvation from Heaven was granted at every service.

One of the most memorable recollections of this revival is the beautiful glow and glory it seemed to put on the church and every one of the meetings. The people came with bright faces and almost a rush to the pews. Something had come to pass, and something was taking place all the time. The Lord was there, had appeared to Simon and a great many others besides; the heart was warm, the soul was being fed and was glad; and so every meeting was a benediction to God’s people as well as a victory over the world and the devil.

Some one may ask, did all your congregation get the blessing? was there no division? And the reply is there was a dividing of the people then and always will be as long as there are some in the church who are not willing to consecrate their all and do not desire holiness. We read in the Gospel that Christ invited five hundred of His disciples and followers to attend the first Holiness meeting held in Jerusalem. But we also learn that three hundred and eighty did not go for reasons that can easily be imagined. One hundred and twenty went, sought and found the blessing. So there was a division among the five hundred.

And there were those in Carondolet Street church who held aloof. Some would not attend to get instructions. Others looked mystified. Still others fought the doctrine and experience furiously. One of the most rabid of this class was quite a prominent man in the congregation. He fairly raged against me, the meeting, its results, holiness, and my preaching as he talked on the streets, hobnobbed in the aisles, penned squibs to the newspapers, and wrote to bishops. He said: “God did not have to do two works; that Holiness was a false doctrine; that it was dividing the congregation and ruining the church.”

Think of a church ruined by Holiness!

Six months later at the annual conference held in Baton Rouge, just before the hour of reading the appointments, Bishop Duncan sent me word that he wished to see me in a private office in the church. I found him there. He said, fixing his eyes upon me:

“Did you know that I have received a letter from an influential member of your congregation urging me not to send you back?”

With an intoxicating joy in my soul which God had given me a half year before, and with a happy smile on my face, I replied:

“Why, bishop, I do not ask you to return me to Carondolet; but wherever you think and feel under God that I ought to go.”

He turned a strange, surprised look upon me and said: “Well, I am going to send you back, anyhow.”

I then said: “Bishop, will you allow me to tell you the name of the man who wrote you that letter?”

The bishop made no reply, and taking silence for consent, I repeated the name of the prominent member who had raged so with tongue and pen against me and the meeting.

The bishop cleared his throat, stammered a moment, and before he could check himself admitted that I was right. Then hastily rising from the desk where he sat, he said: “As I have already told you, I am going to send you back.”

Concerning the melancholy and dreadful history of the man who wrote the letter thousands know today. He was living up to the eyebrows in the blackest of iniquity when he was fighting and trying to undo the beautiful work of grace God had sent to the people through Brother Hopper’s meeting. In his sudden death years afterward everything came to light about his life, so astounding, horrible and criminal that everyone knew why he raged so against the evangelist and preacher, and could not bear to bear such messages from the pulpit as “Be ye holy, for I am holy;” or listen to the death-knell-like sound of the words, “Without holiness no man shall see the Lord.”

Chapter 30: How I Obtained the Blessing

As I recall this part of my life now, it was while Bro. Hopper was giving his third Bible reading, that like a flash of light breaking on me, I saw the second work of grace, holiness received through consecration and faith, an instantaneous experience, clearly taught in the Word of God.

The instant I beheld the privilege and grace, I wanted it. There was no thought or desire with me to avoid the payment of the price or shirk and escape the difficulties that were in the way; but the dominant purpose and longing was how to get the blessing. The idea of arguing against a doctrine that so exalted Christ and honored the Blood never entered my mind. I wanted the blessing.

The evangelist gave general directions as to the obtainment of the experience that were true and Scriptural, but the Spirit, as He always does, led specifically.

As well as I can recall some of the steps taken which led me into Canaan, one involved my willingness to become an alien and outcast from the ranks of my brethren on account of the truth of holiness.

No one but a preacher who has lived for years in the midst of a congenial Conference or Church Brotherhood could appreciate the suffering and sacrifice attending such an experience. Yet this was clearly brought to my mind and remained pressing heavily like a conviction upon it, until I said, “Yes.”

Next came another vivid-like impression almost like a voice — ”Would I be willing to give up reputation for all time?”

It is true that very few individuals have really great reputations, and none have as much as they think they have, but the trouble with the unsanctified heart is that it believes it possesses a lot of things that it does not, and among them a great, enviable life elevation and distinction.

But be that as it may, whether a man is in high standing with his fellow beings or just imagines that he is; to secure the Blessing of holiness one has to place his reputation, real or fancied, on the altar, and be like His Lord who had none.

So again I said, “Yes.”

Following this was the inward query — ”Would I be willing to be misunderstood, all my life, and tread a path of human loneliness to the very portals of the tomb?”

Not a reader but is conscious of the domestic, social and affectional pull on our natures, and that according to law. There are divinely created movements of the heart and spirit that are legitimate and proper, and in them there is much of human happiness experienced. Now to be willing to be misunderstood in the household, ostracized from many a social and ecclesiastical circle, to be dropped as though one was contaminated, and avoided as if a leper by many or all, makes a sacrifice of a nature beyond words to adequately describe.

And yet with body prostrate on the floor and face wet with tears I answered the Lord once more “Yes.”

As I took other steps in the line of consecration, it soon became evident that I was rendering a full obedience to God as I recognized His will in His Word or heard His voice sounding in my soul calling to particular acts of sacrifice and service.

The words of Christ came back now with a profounder meaning when He said to His disciples, If you will love Me and keep My commandments I will come and take up My abode in you. At the same time the condition of spiritual knowledge was made evident in the utterance, “If any man will do His will he shall know of the doctrine.”

So I kept saying Yes, Yes, Yes, to all of the divine will and Word, to every call He made upon me, and I found a sweet growing consciousness that I was getting somewhere; that I was on the right road; and was in a way where the light was growing steadily brighter, evidently to some perfect day. I was three days seeking the blessing, and in all that period kept saying, “Yes” to God. Two of these acts of obedience I wish to call attention to.

Let the reader bear in mind that, during this period of which I am now writing, the War against the Lottery Company was still going on, and the revival meeting led by Bro. Hopper in my church was in progress.

In my membership there was a gentleman who was wealthy. The richest member of the congregation, he was also regarded as among the first financially in the city. He was a commission and cotton merchant, and a vacancy taking place in a bank he was promptly elected president by the directors.

In this bank the Louisiana State Lottery Co. had large deposits. One day I received a letter enclosing a lottery ticket, and the following lines with it written on note paper: “Did you know that your leading member, Mr. W_____, has his name on the back of every one of the lottery tickets and that he states over his signature that if said ticket should draw a prize that he will as president of the bank see that it is cashed?”

I placed the letter with the ticket in my pocket and wondered what should and could be done. The man was so wealthy and influential; he was in addition so reserved and chilling in his manner that no one was intimate or familiar with him, and no one would hardly dare to reprove him. One day I was in the heart of the French part of the city, the day before I received the blessing, when suddenly the still small voice I knew so well, most powerfully and sweetly directed me to return at once, and go to the bank of Mr. W. talk to him about his soul and urge him to give up his connection with the Lottery.

The prominence of the man, together with his cold manner, made this new command of Heaven a very trying test to my obedience. But the burning abiding sweetness of the impression on my soul could not be mistaken, so with a quick catch in my breath and a sinking feeling of dread in my heart I said, “I will go.”

Nevertheless, Gideon-like, I asked for a sign; saying to the Savior, “I will obey you; but grant as a confirmation of this impression sent me, that when I reach the Bank there will be no one in Mr. W_____’s office but himself, and that you will allow no person to interrupt us while I am employed with him on your mission.”

When I reached the door of the private office I saw that Mr. W_____ was alone; in addition not a soul, whether clerk or citizen, came in while we were speaking together. The time consumed was nearly an hour. The marvel of it all was that I never knew the like to happen before or since. The rule was always a perfect procession of people in and out of that busy apartment of the president of the bank.

It is needless to tell how God helped us to talk to this man in tenderness and yet firmness. As he and his wife had been growing cold, backslidden and worldly for years, I recalled to him what he had once been to the Sunday School and church. What an influence he could wield in the city and in his own congregation if he would only come out positively and devotedly as he once did to every meeting and interest of the church.

He replied that he could not do so, that he had served his time, and others ought to be brought forward.

I then most earnestly begged him to dissolve his connection with the Louisiana State Lottery Company. He responded that he did not believe in nor approve of it.

In answer I drew from my pocket the lottery ticket that had been sent me, and showed him his name on the back with the statement that if this ticket drew a prize, he the undersigned president of a certain bank, would see that it was cashed.

He became very white, and answered that this was simply an official notice and not an endorsement of the Lottery. I replied, “But here is your statement Bro. W_____, saying the ticket will be cashed if it is the right number. And your good name signed here encourages people to invest in the gambling concern, and so becomes an actual recommendation and endorsement of this great swindling business and iniquitous corporation.”

He rejoined with increasing whiteness and resentment, “That as the president of the bank he was compelled to give that notice as the Lottery Company made deposits in his bank”

My reply was:

“Then, Bro. W_____, give up the presidency of the bank rather than do this great wrong to yourself and your fellow beings.”

He answered stiffly and freezingly that he could not think of doing such a thing. I then said to him, as I saw he wished me to leave, “But I am compelled to tell you in all kindness that we cannot receive any more of your money in our church.”

I then spoke a kindly good-bye to the deeply offended man and went from the interview and building with a flood of divine favor and approval in my soul.

The man never forgave me. A few weeks afterward he left our church and joined Dr. Palmer’s, the First Presbyterian. He said in explanation of his departure that he could not stand my Holiness preaching. But the record in the Book of Judgment will not read that way in the Last Day. Instead of Holiness preaching will be found the words, “The Lottery — Bank — Presidential Salary — Ten Thousand Dollars a Year,” etc., etc.

A New Orleans preacher transferred to cities farther North in Missouri, Kentucky and Maryland, told it wherever he went that “Dr. Carradine had driven from the ranks of Methodism and from our church one of the best men, loveliest characters and truest members that the Southern Methodist Church ever had.” This speech was repeated many times, and firmly believed by many thousands, so that today it would be impossible to convince a multitude in New Orleans and elsewhere to the contrary. The record in the Book of Judgment which will be read aloud in the upper air one of these days can alone make this with many other unknown matters and histories clear to the eyes and convictions of man. I am willing to wait until that day.

As I left the bank, just as clearly the Spirit of God led me to go to another leading member of my church. He was a merchant in the fancy grocery business and had three stores in the city. In addition to groceries he sold wines and liquors of all kinds. He had been a member of Carondolet Street Church for years. I found him there as one of the leading stewards.

I had my interview with him in his wine or liquor room. Standing among the barrels and cases I talked to him kindly, lovingly, entreatingly and faithfully. I told him he had many excellent traits of character; that he was generous, hospitable and charitable; that I loved him personally; but he was in a wrong business. That God could not bless him in it; that instead His curse was on it. That the Word; of God said, “Woe to the man who putteth the bottle to his neighbor’s lips.”

I have not space here to describe the whole scene and occurrence. Can only say that Bro. M_____ flew all to pieces; the first time I ever saw him angry. He said that people would have wines, that he did not make them buy, etc., etc., all through the old stock arguments of defense of the wrong business.

Seeing that I had failed with him, and that there was no hope of the meeting reaching him as he did not attend it, I bade him a sorrowful good day, telling him as I had told Bro. W_____, that we could not accept his $200 for pastoral support hereafter.

As I walked away from this second and most painful obedience to God that morning, I had a most remarkable witness given to my soul that God was pleased with my consecration and that no more tests would be given in that line until the blessing came.

The other step of Faith remained, and this I took and kept taking. Scores of times I said, “The Blood of Jesus Christ cleanses me now. The altar sanctifies me now. Jesus sanctifies me now.” And all blessing to His name, I felt my faith growing. I was approaching the perfected faith talked about by Paul.

Then I prayed! And oh, how I prayed. Hours at a time I would be on my knees or on my face alone in my study or private room.

One morning I arose through the touch of God a great while before day and prayed until eight o’clock. My soul was full of peace, but that which I was after had not come. At 8:30 I could eat nothing at breakfast, and went to my Study up stairs.

It was nine o’clock, the third hour of the day, and I was sitting in my armchair yearning, and expecting. I was singing softly the chorus of “Down at the Cross,” when I got a heavenly telegram that the Blessing was coming. I felt unworthy to receive such grace sitting, and tried to rise and have it come on me as I stood, but He that makes comets fly four hundred miles a second is quicker than all motion, and before I could leave my seat, the fire fell! the blessing came! the Baptism with the Holy Ghost flooded, filled and rolled over my soul in billows of flame and glory!

The reader is referred to my book on Sanctification for further particulars of what took place in my room and in the church on that never-to-beforgotten morning.

That wonderful day is past; but the reflection still glows and burns in the sky. The storm of glory swept by; but it left Jesus walking on a stilled sea. The work abides. The witness remains. My soul is at rest.

I was born in the morning. I was born again in the morning. Was baptized with the Holy Ghost in the morning. And please God, I expect with a great multitude of God’s people to arise from the dead in the morning of the Resurrection when Jesus appears in the sky, and at His voice they that sleep in their graves shall come forth unto everlasting life and glory.

Chapter 31: The Revival at Centenary Church in St. Louis

I was traveling in the Holy Land when I was appointed by my Conference to St. Louis and placed in charge of a congregation whose house of worship was like a cathedral as to size and architectural appearance.

Rumors of what had happened in a spiritual way to their new preacher had reached Centenary Church, and while a few might have been glad, the ecclesiastical body itself was anxious and disturbed.

Some minutes before the first morning service one of the stewards entered the pastor’s study and with his two hands rolled together like a ball, stood a few moments with a sickly kind of smile, looking at the preacher, and then said:

“What kind of sermon are you going to give us this morning, something to build us up, and make us all feel good?”

With a glance I sized up the man, but replied quietly and gravely, “I am going to give you the Gospel.”

“Oh,” said the steward, with a surprised, anxious look on his face; and then revolving his hands rapidly together until they looked like a couple of propellers, he turned and steered his way out of the room. It was so much like a tug or little stern-wheel steamboat movement that I could not keep back the smiles. The little “oh” being the whistle for departure, the rapidly revolving hands being startlingly like a propeller, getting up headway, then the turn of the human vessel, which next chugged and puffed away out of the door.

But in a few minutes the tug returned, and anchored in the same place. This time the communication was to this effect:

“I came back to let you know that there are two doors opening from the hall into the auditorium; one, on the right, is the south entrance to the pulpit; the other, on the left, comes in on the north side. Dr. M_____, who preceded you in the pastorate, always came in at the south door. Our leading people sit on that side of the church and will look for you to enter that way.”

I took stock again of the individual before me, and the second inventory showed me that I had a small affair indeed to deal with. But with the same quiet manner I replied:

“I will come into the auditorium by the northern entrance. The people on that side of the church have been neglected long enough. I will show them that attention and courtesy.”

“Oh!” gasped Bro. Propeller. Then the wheels revolved, headway was gotten up, the little vessel was pointed toward the offing, and puffed and panted itself out of sight.

But be it recorded that the pastor, through this little morning scene, made a confirmed enemy out of the steward.

Over fifteen hundred people heard in dead silence the new preacher’s first sermon. The subject was “Personal Accountability to God.” It gave great offense. The leading members made little or no effort to conceal their disappointment and chagrin.

Why such a topic should have so displeased them remains for the spiritual character student to answer correctly. One prominent member said to another as they walked away from the imposing looking sanctuary:

“He will never preach any other way; we are in for it now.”

That night I presented salvation in such a manner that a few were somewhat mollified, but not enough so, to come up and shake the pastor’s hand, as had been their custom with all preceding ministers. The fear that “they were in for it” would not down, no matter how and what the new man preached. They had heard he had received the Blessing of Sanctification; and had he not preached on Personal Accountability to God in the first pulpit message? What had they as a hope to cling to in view of these melancholy facts?

On Wednesday evening, the prayer-meeting night, I would give thirty to forty minute talks on the Christian life and experience. At the first service my subject was Christ’s Style of Feasts, and spoke of what the Savior had said as to a certain kind of guests. How we had drifted from the Lord’s conceptions and directions; so that if a man gave a feast today and invited the classes Christ mentioned, people would regard him as mentally unsound; while that person was considered well-balanced and all right who issued his summons to the rich, great, prominent and distinguished, who could return invitation with invitation, and requite favor for benefit.

This talk aroused special indignation; for there were present just such leading members whose hospitality only went out to bishops, star preachers, distinguished men, and people of their own plane and class.

The second Wednesday evening the topic was, “The Right Kind of Giving.” The Savior’s words were carefully quoted and dwelt upon, especially His direction that we give expecting nothing in return.

The fury aroused by this talk went beyond anything yet that had occurred. It seemed that I had stirred up a hornet’s nest unconsciously. I had all unwittingly uncovered something that the Board of Stewards had done.

It developed that they had a poor man in the membership to whom the church granted a monthly allowance. Recognizing that he was frail and could not last a great while, the Board had his life insured, and on his death got back even more than they had ever given him.

Hence the indignation over the talk. It looked as if some one was informing the new preacher, and telling on the congregation. And yet such was not the case. I had no conception when I gave the talk that such a thing had taken place.

And so it went on, and no matter what subject was handled; what phase of sin was shown up; the dislike and anger of the leading members steadily increased. It verily seemed to me that I could not take any text, or preach any kind of sermon, but there would be uncovering, and consequent explosions.

In addition to all this, realizing the great dread of the large city congregation to holiness, I conceived the plan wisely, as I thought, of confining the doctrine and experience to the first floor of the great second story building! That is, I planned that the Blessing should first burn and glow in the four class meeting rooms and large lecture hall down stairs, and thus gradually affect, warm and bless the great audience up stairs in the auditorium.

This brilliant conception and effort failed owing to the character of the Blessing of Sanctification, and the nature of people obtaining it. The experience is a holy fire and has a way of spreading like any other fire. Then it has a style of setting people in a flame who get it, and they naturally ignite still others.

Still another fact that must be conceded by all observers of conflagrations, that when fire breaks out in a lower story, it invariably reaches up and travels for the floor or floors above. I mention this phenomenon because I was much blamed for not keeping the holy flame and fire down stairs. It would not stay down stairs! Anyhow it acted that way in a sky scraper cathedral.

One night I took about forty men into one of the class rooms, and together we prayed through the entire night, begging God not only for personal blessings, but pleading for a great revival in the church.

In this all-night prayer meeting, five men were sanctified, and two were reclaimed. Sparks from this nocturnal blaze fell on many hearts and homes the following week. The glow was reflected, and even a measure of heat felt in the great auditorium up stairs the following Sabbath morning.

But great also was the indignation among the leading church members, and all their satellites and general following, that such a disgraceful noise and racket should be kept up all night in their beautiful and stately temple. And that these unseemly proceedings should be heard by people on the street, and in neighboring houses. Why, it was said that a policeman banged at a side door of the church on account of the loud praying, weeping and rejoicing, and demanded to know what on earth was the matter.

In view of all this they felt the church building had been dishonored and the congregation put to an open shame. To think of an Irish policeman being compelled to hammer with his club on the oak grained panels of their chapel portal and ask what was the disturbance, and that, in a building that had been so respectable and quiet ever since the day of its dedication.

After this remarkable night, the Spirit of God fell in converting, reclaiming and sanctifying power so often in the lower rooms, and the interest became so deep, and the congregation so large, that I felt profoundly moved to announce a protracted meeting; and the auditorium up stairs, because of its larger size, was thrown open to the crowd that could not be accommodated in the lecture room.

Again the deepest offense was taken by the leading members of the church. First by the Board of Stewards, who said that the pastor had not consulted them, nor asked their consent to hold the special services.

I informed these brethren at the regular Monday night stewards’ meeting, and did so gently and firmly, that it was not the pastor’s duty to ask their consent; that neither the Bible nor the Methodist Discipline required such a thing; nor did my call and commission from God to preach include as a feature the necessity of obtaining the consent of any body of men to preach salvation to lost men; that the Board of Trustees were to take charge of the church building in the material sense of keeping it in good repair; that the Board of Stewards looked after the financial needs of the preacher and the work; but that the pulpit and the spiritual interests of the church were committed to the pastor by the Bishop and the Annual Conference to which the pastor belonged.

This was said in such love, gentleness, and kindness that every one of the Board of thirty stewards yielded without another word.

Then came the anger of the Ladies’ Aid Society. Its principal women were disgusted and indignant. To think that their beautiful auditorium should be opened, and their lovely carpet, which they had just finished paying for by a series of church suppers and entertainments, should be walked over by the public herd, a crowd of anybodies and everybodies and nobodies, and that, too, every night for a month or six weeks! Oh, it was too bad for anything! They felt they could actually sit down and cry over this piece of vandalism, such was their vexation and indignation.

I told them with a sick and sorrowful feeling of the heart, that they ought to be glad to have an hundred carpets walked over and trodden into shreds as long as precious immortal souls were being saved.

Their rejoinder was that I, the pastor, did not know what a time they had, with church suppers and entertainments, in raising money for the carpet.

In reply to this, I told them that if the covering for the floor had been purchased that way, the sooner it went, the better. That such a method of raising money for the church was unscriptural and indeed anti-scriptural. That it spiritually deadened the congregation, and dried up the very Fountain of Liberality or spirit of giving which they wanted to see open and flowing in their midst.

This was so contrary to their views, so upsetting to their practices, and so condemnatory of what they had construed as religious activity and good works, that for the rest of the interview they scarcely treated me with civility.

Several hours afterwards I heard a great hammering going on in the auditorium, and walking in from my Study beheld a number of workmen engaged in tacking some coarse white canvas down over the much lamented carpet, while a group of members of the Ladies’ Aid Society stood around, giving directions, and looking very much like people who are arranging the parlors, hall, and furniture of a dwelling for a funeral. In spite of this and everything else which took place at this time, the revival came! The great altar would be filled day and night, and swept clean at almost every service. With the exception of five days, I preached twice a day for six weeks, and met as well as I could the other demands of the pastorate upon me.

There were four or five hundred conversions, reclamations and sanctifications, bright, clear, and many of them very remarkable and powerful. Fully twenty preachers were sanctified who were in the pastorate; while out of the mixed audience attending, there were a number saved who are today in the ministry, or some kind of active Christian work.

The scenes of power and glory which took place during that month and a half would fill a volume. God’s seal of endorsement and approval was on every service.

It mattered not how the world ridiculed and scoffed; nor how the leading members of the church held off, turned rigid forms and frozen faces upon their pastor and the work going on, and on one occasion called me down while I was preaching — still, all the more God smiled upon and blessed every service, the Holy Ghost continued to fall upon pulpit and altar, and the revival swept on. The holy fire was now burning in every room of this beautiful, stately temple of worship.

Chapter 32: Called Before the Sanhedrin

At the close of the fourth week of the revival, and while salvation was rolling like a flood at every service; one day I received notice that my Board of Stewards desired to see me in the business room or office of the church, where these officials met each Monday night, and where the quarterly conferences of the church were also held.

I was very busy with two sermons a day, requests coming from every quarter for visits at the homes of the people, and for interviews in my Study. Then there were calls from the sick and the dying, and appointments for funeral services in homes, and burials at the cemetery. But I replied to the messenger that I would be on hand at the hour appointed in the afternoon.

As I approached the imposing looking edifice several hours later, the Savior so filled me with His Spirit that my heart felt like a ball of fire in my breast, and my soul seemed perfectly melted with love. I could scarcely keep from shouting aloud on the street.

Entering a side door, passing down a hall, I entered the council chamber, where the Sanhedrin was assembled.

About fifteen stewards were ranged around the wall, sitting stiffly and angularly in chairs, and looking for all the world like the stone figures we have seen in pictures of ancient Egypt. For cold, rigid, unbending lines the Egyptian images had but little advantage over the group of church officers who had summoned their pastor to appear before them, and sat awaiting him.

As I walked into the Stone Age or Period, with a glance I saw there was trouble of some kind ahead for me, as was easily indicated by the set, gloomy faces, and the lack of greeting which courtesy alone, aside from Christianity, demanded that they should extend to a man of God, and their own pastor as well.

I said to the silent circle, or rather square of statue-like figures, “Brethren, I do not know why you have sent for me; but whatever may be the business or object of the meeting, let us first kneel down and ask God’s blessing upon us, and upon all we say and do.”

All knelt, and I prayed. The Spirit filled me, and at the same time powerfully moved upon nearly all the rest of the company. Heaven drew near, and the Holy Ghost undoubtedly endeavored, with His gracious influence, to end, then and there, a wrong course begun by these brethren which later would take on darker features, a fiercer and more Satanic spirit, resulting in great harm to the church, much suffering to innocent parties, dreadful spiritual disaster to some of their own number, and the loss of hundreds of members to Methodism.

But there was an immediate consequence, which took place the instant all arose from their knees, totally unexpected by the called meeting, and showing most unmistakably the presence and work of the Holy Spirit, as has been mentioned.

Full of perfect peace and gladness, I was about to ask the stewards to state why they had summoned me into their presence, when one of the most prominent men in the room approached another leading official, and asked him in a broken voice and with tears, that he accept his advance, and that they would be at peace and in brotherly love with one another. This overture and prompt acceptance by the other side, quite broke up most of the brethren present who witnessed the reconciliation, and tears, smiles and handshakes abounded. Three or four were not of the melted and moved group.

To my amazement I was informed by a steward standing near me, that these two reconciled members of the church had been at bitter enmity, and had not spoken for seven or eight years!

And now lo! and behold! here in a meeting called to censure the pastor, and give him orders that he must behave to suit the Board of Stewards, here the Lord had broken in, upset the plans of men and devils, and had a long standing quarrel which had brought trouble to scores of people and reproach upon the church and cause of Christ, fixed up, wiped out and healed perfectly and completely!

It was simply impossible, on account of the lovely spirit now prevailing in the room, for the stewards to carry out the original program and say and do as they had intended.

As I found out afterwards I was to have received a regular setting down and going over, and also the most unmistakable orders about myself, my preaching, the present meeting, etc., etc.

And yet the Savior had in the most unexpected way disconcerted their plans, locked their jaws and brought two of their number to make friends, and caused eleven out of the fifteen to shed tears, shake hands cordially with one another and say, “Bless God!”

It was laughable to hear the eleven trying to give me some kind of explanation for having summoned me in such an autocratic and even Inquisitional way to appear before them.

One said with a decidedly foolish expression on his face:

“You set us aside and don’t use us in the meeting. We are made to feel that we are nowhere”

“Why, brethren,” I replied, “you won’t let me use you. I have done my best to bring you forward around the altar, and you will not come.”

“Well,” almost whimpered another, “you do not call on us to pray. Strangers are coming forward and praying in public, and working about the altar, and we feel that we are ignored and not wanted.”

“My brethren,” I returned, “nothing would please me more than to have you pray in the services, and identify yourselves with the work, but I cannot get you to pray. Repeatedly I call out, ‘Who will now pray for these penitents and seekers,’ and not one of you will respond. Seeing your aloofness and marking your silence, others, filled with a great desire to help souls, and to push the work of Christ, come forward, take up the work and help press the battle. This is not done to reflect upon you or to displease you, but some one must and will do these things for Christ and souls if you will not.”

And so the meeting ended in a much better spirit than it began.

But there were four of these fifteen men who were not among the softened and kindly ones. So, after the pastor got into his buggy and rushed away to meet some distant call, the four remained and conversed an hour with the eleven.

That night, as the pastor walked into the pulpit, and his eyes fell upon his official members, he saw with a mere glance that something had happened. The ecclesiastical world, as represented by his stewards, trustees and leading members, had for some reason rolled back into the Stone Period or Age, and there was a feeling that with but little search and investigation, old arrow heads of flint, and rock hatchets could be discovered in the heart and life strata all around.

One afternoon of the next week, the stewards held another meeting. This time they did not notify or summon the pastor.

The devil, who plainly saw his mistake in the first assembly, did not propose to repeat such a blunder. Doubtless he thought and planned — ”No preacher filled with the Holy Ghost shall come to this next gathering of the officials, or just as likely there would be another reconciliation, and a general melting time.”

So the meeting, now a conclave, was held two miles from the church on what we will call Millionaire avenue. Only seven of the original fifteen attended. The other eight stayed away, giving different excuses, but two saying plainly — ”No, we will have nothing more to do with this matter against our pastor.”

But the seven met, among them the original unmoved four, one being Bro. Propeller, and another a Mason in high standing.

That night they doomed their pastor. He was sentenced to what is known as Ministerial Death. The mode of execution to be Ecclesiastical Decapitation. The Executioner to be a bishop. The time of demise to be on the assembling of the next Annual Conference in the coming September.

Immediately Bro. Propeller was told to write a letter to the Bishop acquainting him with these proceedings and what they desired and expected him to do. The document was duly penned in their presence, and mailed that night.

The Bill of Charges in the letter against the pastor was that he was dividing the congregation and ruining the church.

The counter facts in the case were that the building was crowded at every service; the finances ahead of anything ever known before, and that, too, in the face of complete discontinuance of wrong methods of raising money; while a revival was in progress wherein hundreds of souls were being converted and sanctified; and the church roll showed at the end of the year that there had been nearly three hundred accessions.

The victory in all these results and figures becomes all the more remarkable in recalling the fact, that through the entire year, the great influence of the Official Board and leading members of the church was against the pastor and his work.

Between the lines of the Bill of Charges were other sentences which will be brought out in the Day of Judgment, and which really describe the trouble with the writers of the letter and the real cause of offense.

The actual reason for their indignation, and consequent determination to get rid of their preacher was, that his preaching had dug them up; and that in a genuine Holy Ghost revival they could do nothing; and keenly felt themselves, and were plainly beheld by others on the outside to be simply nowhere.

After the Bill of Charges had been written and committed to Bro. Propeller to mail down town, then the seven, like a certain famous ten individuals in the Book of Genesis, sat down by the side of the pit, to eat bread.

None of the proceedings of this caucus were known by the pastor for a full month.

One night, while walking home from the church to my home in company with one of the city preachers, my companion stopped under a lamp-post and told me what the stewards had done on the night already described. He added the words:

“You are doomed. There is no hope for you. The stewards have demanded that you be sent away; and the Bishop has consented.”

The informant being a man who lived in continual dread of the powers that be in the church, expected words of lamentation and protestation on my part. Perhaps he looked to hear me groan, and fall down at the foot of the iron post there under the gaslight. If so, he was disappointed.

I replied with a happy laugh, “That is all right. When I sought the blessing of sanctification I put churches, bishops, stewards, good appointments, poor appointments and everything else on the altar. I died to all this when I got the Blessing, and do not have to die over again.”

Chapter 33: The Clash with Free Masonry

While I was at Centenary Church one Sabbath morning my subject was such that I was led to speak of the enemies of the home life, and among others mentioned the club, the fraternity and lodge. I drew a picture of a father neglecting his child, taken from life; the waiting of the little fellow until after 10 o’clock at night that he might see the parent then at the lodge; his sudden illness that night, and death next day without recognition of any one. That when the father was told how the child, already sick in body, had sat up long after his usual bed-time that he might hear a story the parent had promised to read to him; how the little fellow went to bed reluctantly, talking about his father; and how in his prayer he had drowsily lisped out — ”God bless papa.” When these things were told the man, he nearly went crazy with grief and remorse.

As I related the life scene or incident, tears gushed into the eyes of the people all over the great auditorium. Then in a stillness that could be felt, I lifted solemnly my right hand and said, “I arraign the lodge before God and man as one of the great enemies of the church and home.”

In the audience was a steward who was a leading member of the church, and a Mason of the highest rank and standing. As the audience filed out of the broad portals of the cathedral he stood in one of the entrance ways, with several other of the stewards, and shaking his fist, said, “I will never rest until I put him out of this church as pastor because of what he said about Free Masonry.”

In the man’s fury he repeated his vow to others until finally quite a commotion was raised, and rumors reaching the reporters of the city journals, they always quick to obtain anything sensational, announced to the public next morning in the papers, “That Dr. Carradine had made an awful attack on Masonry, had deeply wounded the feelings of his congregation, and that a grave split and division had already begun,” etc., etc., etc.

Indeed, so much was said about the matter; so many misrepresentations were made of what had been said; so many letters were written to me begging me to go on in the matter, that I had simply uncapped a bad thing, that I had struck the fraternity and Free Masonry in one of their greatest strongholds, St. Louis; that the rage of the lodges and the city papers against me was simply the howl produced by having been struck, etc., etc., that finally I announced publicly that on the following Sabbath I would preach on the subject of the Lodge and Secret Fraternity.

Before the day arrived, several things happened of a notable nature. First came a petition from the Board of Stewards begging me not to preach the sermon concerning which I had given notice; that unitedly they requested me not to say anything against lodges and orders, but to drop the whole matter.

My reply was that, since I had publicly declared I would show up the hurt and peril of the Fraternity and Lodge System, that my soul had been flooded with the sweetest assurances from God that I was going right, and the very thing Heaven wanted.

The committee representing the Board took leave, gloomy-browed and barely civil.

A second occurrence was a visit from a leading lady member of Centenary Church. I had just come in to luncheon when a carriage drove up, the bell rang, and a servant brought in the visitor’s card.

As I walked into the parlor I felt by laws we can hardly understand that an icy atmosphere filled the room. The lady to whom I bowed and offered my hand did not arise from her seat, but gave a look out of her eyes that actually stabbed. They were dagger thrusts.

Then followed one of the most remarkable short visits and interviews I ever had from what is called “Heaven’s best gift to man.” The woman made desperate efforts to control herself, but could not. She grew white and red by turns. At times she trembled as if she had an ague. She came, she said to me with a pale, set face, to “warn me”; but she evidently forgot her mission and gave me a bitter tongue lashing.

She informed me with that deadly white face of hers, and shaking voice, that the church would no longer put up with the kind of preaching they had been listening to for three months. That the Board of Stewards had resolved to appeal to the Bishop and one had already been written to who had sent me to them. That if I did not completely and at once alter my pulpit subjects and style of doing things, that I should be moved in a hurry.

After this mouth-scorcher, the woman burst into tears. Whether it was the weeping often indulged in by angry women, or was the result of a lashing of her own conscience, or the rebuke of God on her soul for “touching His anointed, and doing His prophets harm,” I cannot tell. It may have been a combination of the three. But after being an iceberg and volcano several times alternately, with occasional freshets and floods from her eyes; she left as suddenly as she came. She went away with the quiet but firm assurance made to her by me that I would continue to preach and work under the leading and blessing of God exactly as I had been doing for the last six months.

The third happening was a letter from the Bishop who had appointed me to Centenary Church. The epistle was a remarkable document. It was an exclamation, protestation, accusation, excoriation and fulmination, all in one, winding up with a most fervent interrogation and lamentation. “Why on earth are you trying to ruin and tear to pieces such a grand old church as Centenary?”

I not only loved, but greatly admired the Bishop who wrote the mistaken letter, and answered him fully and as I hope satisfactorily with one of twenty pages. In it I informed the Bishop of the true state of things in the Cathedral Church; the spiritual deadness I had found in it; dissension and estrangement among members; wrong methods of raising money; worldliness; and the lodge and many other things standing in the way of a genuine revival. That I was abusing no one; but simply presenting the great Gospel facts of repentance, restitution, faith, regeneration, consecration and entire sanctification; that I was warning men about sin, and calling them to holiness; that I was preaching with Christ in my heart and the Holy Ghost honoring every message, and yet no matter what I preached, it seemed to raise a fresh storm in the congregation; that the latest attack upon me now was from Freemasonry and the Lodges and Fraternities that filled St. Louis, and seemed to dominate the church as well.

To this rejoinder, no reply was given. The Bishop, doubtless thinking with others that I was a hopeless case, and the best thing for me was an ecclesiastical decapitation.

Finally the Sabbath arrived, when the sermon in regard to lodges and Secret Societies should be delivered.

The Church with its main auditorium floor and spacious galleries, could seat two thousand people. But that morning not only every pew was filled, and galleries full, but hundreds stood in the outer aisles next to the wall. The pulpit platform was packed with women who sat down on the carpeted floor. The preacher had only a space of several square feet left him on which to stand.

Five shorthand reporters were inside the altar rail with small tables and chairs. Some long-headed friend had warned me that the papers, through their reporters, or the city editor in the office, might play some kind of trick on me in misreporting, misquoting, or leaving out things I said, so that through his most timely suggestion I employed, a special shorthand reporter, one of the best in the city, and gave him $25 to put down every word. I likewise counseled the man to bring plenty of paper, as I was not going to give a sermonette.

That day I spoke one hour and twenty minutes; and stirred with the subject and helped of God, spoke firmly, rapidly and clearly, so that I was heard by every one in the large audience. I presented the subject in what is called the cumulative argument form. I began with the least strong points, passed on to the stronger reasons of objection to the lodge, and in my half hour home stretch brought in my most forcible arguments against the evil that hurt the soul, the home and church alike.

The four reporters sent by the papers of the city came expecting to hear a talk of thirty or forty minutes, and as the reader can see, ran out of paper about the middle of the sermon. After that they could do nothing but scribble fugitive expressions and sentences, gnaw their pencils and look foolish. Meantime the reporter I had engaged swept on with flying stylographic pen and got every word of the discourse.

Now look at some of the results. The next morning and afternoon the city papers appeared, and announcing in head lines the full sermon against Masonry and Secret Societies that had been preached the day before in Centenary Church by myself. The instant that I read the reports I saw at a glance that only half of the discourse appeared, and that the stronger arguments, which were in the latter part of the sermon, did not appear at all.

Taking a friend with me, I called on the editor of one of the leading city journals, directed his attention to the way that I was wronged before the public, and requested redress.

The editor said he was confident that his reporter had brought in the whole discourse, I told him of my own private reporter, and that it could be proved that his own man had not given over half of the sermon.

The editor looked worried, and sent for the reporter. In a few minutes he stood before the group, and as his eyes fell upon me, and listened to the charge made against him, his countenance fell and he admitted that the complaint was true.

The editor said to him, “Why did you say that you had made a complete report? Why did you not give the entire discourse as you were sent up to do?”

The man replied, “I ran out of paper about the time he was half through.”

At a signal from the editor, the faithless servant withdrew; when, looking at the editor, I said, “Will you not do me the justice of announcing in your paper tomorrow these facts, and state that my strongest arguments and half of my sermon were not reported.”

The man’s curt reply was, “I could not think of such a thing. It would be contrary to all rules of journalism.”

I rejoined, “Col. M_____, would you for a mere rule or custom, do a man in public life, the gross injustice your journal has done me, and refuse to rectify the wrong, when the wrong has been made plain to you?”

Col. M_____ arose from his seat with a flushed face and angry manner, and replied, “I have said all I have to say about this matter. I am very busy, and have no more time to lose. I wish you a good morning,” and walked away to his desk. My friend and I retired to see the man no more on earth.

Several years afterwards Col. M_____ met a horrible death by falling headlong out of a third story window on the frozen ground beneath, and lay there the last half of the night. As I read the shocking intelligence, I dropped the paper, and said, “May he in his appeal to the Great Judge of the Universe, find more justice and greater mercy than he showed me when I stood a wronged and pleading man before him in the office of his great and popular city journal.

Chapter 34: Skirmishes and Battles

It all happened as Bro. Informant had said under the lamp-post. The stewards had Bro. Propeller elected in the Quarterly as a delegate to the District Conference. There this smiling, hand-shaking brother influenced the other lay delegates to elect Bro. Mason, as a delegate to the Annual Conference. Bro. Mason was not present but Bro. Propeller had him “put through,” as it is called, and duly elected.

Five months later the Annual Conference convened. The Bishop went down on the train with Bro. Mason, who seemed to have full possession of his ear.

A petition, in spite of my request and protest, was sent from Centenary Church, signed by over eight hundred members, asking that their present pastor be returned. It was presented to the Bishop by a member of Centenary Church, who was a visitor to the place of assembly. But the Bishop placed it on his table, and never took the trouble to open the document, though he was told it contained over eight hundred signatures of good Methodist people.

Just as Bro. Informant had said, the pastor was doomed, hopelessly sentenced, six months before the meeting of the Annual Conference.

On Saturday night the appointments of the Annual Conference were read by the Bishop to an assembly of over one hundred preachers, thirty lay delegates, and a large company of the citizens of the town where the session was held.

I sat quietly among my brethren with a honey-like peace, and a depth of tranquillity in my soul that was indescribable and unspeakable.

My District was reached last, and I heard another name read out for Centenary Church, and my own in connection with an appointment that was considered the weakest financially and numerically among the dozen Methodist churches in the great city covered by the St. Louis District. Hundreds of members had left it for other more desirable places of worship; the congregation was a handful; it had to have a missionary appropriation for several preceding years; while there was a movement then on foot among the official members left, to have the building sold, and the small membership left to be absorbed by other Methodist churches in the neighborhood.

As the Episcopal Axe descended upon my head, and I was ecclesiastically beheaded in the presence of the large crowd filling the building, the honey experience was instantly changed into a flame of Heavenly fire, and the peace became a wine-like joy, almost impossible to keep under control.

I learned afterwards that a number of eyes were fixed upon me to see how I received this Conference humiliation rebuke and overthrow. But at the moment I was expected to exhibit surprise, grief, mortification, chagrin, and possibly resentment, my soul was fairly reeling and staggering under a blessing poured upon me by the Son of God.

Fully seventy of the preachers went up next morning on the train speeding northward to St. Louis. Hardly any of them drew near me, some doubtless regarding me as a man under Episcopal disfavor and so doomed, while others perhaps thought I was crushed with sorrow and desired to be left alone. These sat off like Job’s friends, and silently and mournfully contemplated the being who had been hurled in a moment from the largest to one of the smallest appointments in the District and Conference.

But while this divided opinion existed about me, I myself, was already full of plans about the new charge, had decided upon a big protracted meeting, knew I would have a great revival, and determined that under God’s blessing I would bring the old church back to days and times of former glory and power.

The city papers were brought on the train a few stations up the road, and I read my own name in large type, followed by editorial comments to the effect that I was guilty of teaching heresy, had nearly ruined Centenary Church, that the stewards and membership had appealed to the Bishop, and he, the agitator, disturber, church splitter, and propagator of false doctrine had been properly dealt with, and a better man put in his place.

That grand old Centenary Church, so well and favorably known to the public, was to be congratulated on its deliverance, etc., etc., etc.

I knew as I perused these lines that millions all over the land would read this same long column of misstatement, misrepresentation and slander, and that my side of the case, and vindication would only come out at the Day of Judgment. There was a minute or so of genuine heart sickness, but the next moment came another smile from God, another touch of the hand of Christ, and my heart swelled with joy that I had been permitted to suffer shame for the name and sake of the Son of God. I found out that day that God’s favor was like life, and His loving kindness better than life. My heart burned in me like a ball of fire, and my soul was literally melted with a great tender love for everybody.

On arrival at home two white servants employed in the house gave notice that they would quit next day. They were under the impression that I had committed some crime, as the papers were down on me, and had been degraded by the Bishop, and so on the principle of rats fleeing from a falling house or sinking ship, they proposed to leave the man on whom so many misfortunes were descending.

That afternoon I went down town. To my surprise I noticed as I went among the stores that men who formerly met me with cordiality and the greatest respect, now avoided me, walked back into office and counting room when I approached, and showed in the most unmistakable ways that the pastor of Centenary Church was one thing, and the preacher in charge of a Down-Hill Church was another being altogether.

This was quite a blow to me, and the heart and throat felt sore for quite awhile until I could get on my knees and talk it over with the Lord. After that it was all right again.

Returning to my Study to get up some notes for a farewell talk at the prayer meeting, I was so blessed with an outpouring of the Spirit on my soul, that I threw the pen down and begged God for the first and last time in my life to stay His hand, that I could not stand more and live.

A prominent preacher visited me just before the evening service, and asked me for the sake of Centenary Church to advise my friends to remain there and not follow me to First Church. This request was inspired by the fact that a large number of the membership were indignant over the highhanded, unjust removal of the preacher, and were threatening to leave not only Centenary Church, but Methodism itself. They said that when a few rich men and a Mason could take matters in their hands of such grave import, and completely ignore the rights, requests and petition of eight hundred of the other members, they did not care to stay any longer in such an Ecclesiastical Despotism.

At the conclusion of my talk that night, I urged the people who were my friends to remain at Centenary. I told them that by leaving they would bring reproach on the Holiness Cause, and by remaining they could push as well as preserve the work begun, while I opened up a new field in the central part of the city.

The next day I received a note from the Presiding Elder requesting that I would call at his home on a certain avenue. I did so, and found Dr. Elder in his study enveloped in a cloud of tobacco smoke.

The Doctor was very gracious to me, and assumed a pitying, compassionate manner without indulging in like words. He also seemed anxious to communicate something to me, but apparently was hindered and prevented by the cool, collected appearance of the preacher before him.

I was perfectly aware that Dr. Elder had been present at the “Conclave of the Seven” on Millionaire avenue, and had been prominent in my removal at the late Conference. So the attempted air of sympathy was all lost on the visitor.

With much puffing of his Havana cigar, and clearing of the throat, and restless, inquiring glances at my quiet, impassive face, Dr. Elder informed me in a most disconnected manner that I had a number of warm friends among the moneyed members of the various Methodist churches in the city, and that if my preaching — ahem — would be such as to suit them — ahem! ahem! — these brethren — ahem — the preaching — these brethren — ahem — their liberal support — the preaching — ahem! ahem! ahem!

Poor man! he still had some sense of shame left, and still had some respect for the preacher before him whom he had with others tried to crush — and it was hard to add insult to injury and actually try to bribe him to change the character and matter of his preaching for the sake of the silver and gold shekels of certain wealthy men down town

I acted as if I did not understand, and soon arose to go. Then Dr. Elder stood up and putting his arms around me, gave me a warm hug and advised the departing visitor not to preach on Holiness, or have any Holiness meetings at First Church, where I had been stationed for the ensuing year.

Sickened with the tobacco breath, and tobacco-saturated clothing of Dr. Elder, and still more sickened at what had transpired in the study, I took as hurried a departure as the laws of politeness would allow me.

I went directly to a large carpenter shop and ordered a billboard eight feet long and two feet wide, on which I had painted in gilded letters the various meetings of my new station, or appointment.

On Friday the handsome sign was up, and Dr. Elder, who had called at the church office to see me on a piece of business, was attracted on leaving by the ornamental bulletin board. He stood before it admiringly. Taking out his eyeglasses, and pointing with his ebony cane, he read through the Sabbath services; Stewards’ meeting Monday night; Woman’s Missionary Society on Tuesday afternoon; Wednesday night prayer service, and then came the radiant, glittering notice:

“Holiness Meeting Thursday night, at 7:30 o’clock.”

He gave a gasp; quit reading; put his eyeglasses in his pocket, grasped his stick, and, turning around, pegged his way up the street without another word.

I doubt not that he gave me up that afternoon, finally and forever, as being incorrigible and as a hopeless case.

Sunday morning the spacious auditorium of First Church was packed with the largest congregation it had ever seen. Not even at the dedication had such an assembly gathered. The stewards were kept in a trot trying to seat the crowd; while the old colored sexton in his amazement forgot to pump wind in the organ, and almost fell off his stool craning his neck to notice the steady inflowing of the people, while he cried out; “Look yonder! de house done got full!”

Both of the Sunday services, morning and evening, were remarkable for unction, and the presence and power of the Holy Ghost. There were forty accessions by letter that day, twenty-five from Centenary, and fifteen from other churches.

The next morning at the Preachers’ Meeting I reported forty accessions by letter, when Dr. Elder, who listened with evident annoyance, broke in with a most disgusted look and tone, and said:

“That is no gain to Methodism.”

Filled with an ineffable peace, I gave a tranquil smile and made no reply. I felt inwardly assured that God would vindicate me at that point, as he had at all others.

When later in the year I reported hundreds of accessions to Methodism not by letter, but by profession of faith, the vindication came, and Dr. Elder sat lockjawed listening to a report that could not be slurred at or denied.

But now it soon became evident in the Preachers’ Meeting, that the Monday morning report of First Church in the total of conversions, reclamations, sanctifications and accessions went ahead of the combined figures of all the other twenty charges in the District.

As these reports appeared in the St. Louis Christian Advocate each Thursday, naturally everybody who read the paper saw the comparison and contrast, and saw that First Church was leading far ahead in the race, and behold, there was much smiling on the part of a large number of people, and much frowning indulged in by perhaps a still larger company of men and women.

Whereupon Dr. Elder moved one morning in the Preachers’ Meeting that separate reports of the different charges in the District should not be published, but they should be lumped together, and be printed as a total of the District, so as not to create any insidious comparison and thereby engender bad feeling.

I gave a quiet, glad laugh which I had learned in Canaan, and felt a happy smile belonging to the same country stealing over my face, said “Glory” and voted with the rest for the change.

What more shall we say?

During my pastorate, there were over seven hundred and fifty accessions to First Church, so that it became a leading appointment. One hundred chairs were bought and placed in the aisles to accommodate the big audience. A great revival broke out and, what is more, steadily remained. Five class meetings blazed between Sabbaths. I preached four times every week with salvation at every service. The number of conversions during the pastorate went over one thousand. There were hundreds of reclamations, and hundreds of sanctifications. The finances kept pace with the spiritual life and power of the church. A dozen preachers and evangelists went out as an additional result of the work, while a Down Town Mission, and a Home for Fallen Girls were started at this time, that have never closed their doors, nor ceased to be blessed and used of God from that day to this present hour.

Time would fail to tell of all the wonderful happenings of divine grace and power that took place in First Church, at this time and period. These events would fill volumes.

Chapter 35: The Victory and Revival at First Church

First Church, in the very heart of the city of St. Louis, was a large stone edifice, and had been the pastorate at one time of Bishop Marvin, of the M. E. Church South. But unfortunately for its numerical and financial interests three other churches of the same denomination had been built within a short distance on different sides, and had tapped its membership and injured it in numerous ways. Hence the charge was now quite a weak one, the congregation a corporal’s guard, and a missionary appropriation had been made by the annual conference to help it along in the time of its waning influence and power. So little hope had the small band of members remaining of any future for the church, that a petition as has been said, from the official board had gone up to the proper authorities asking for the sale of the building, when, of course, the congregation would be merged into the membership of the nearest Methodist places of worship.

It would seem that in such a condition, that a Down-Hill Church would have grasped even at a straw, and welcome any change, for as the appointment had about struck bottom, it stands to reason that any alteration would be for the better.

This I believe was the feeling of a number, but certainly not all; for on the second day after my appointment, I received in my mail, application for fourteen church letters or certificates of dismissal.

I was not at all dismayed or overwhelmed. By checkered ecclesiastical and ministerial experiences I had learned already that there was light on the other side of a lot of discouraging things. I had developed nerve and moral muscle through many tests and trials in the course of my ministry, and above all had learned to write church letters under Gideon. This interesting Bible character wrote twenty-two thousand on a single occasion, and nine thousand seven hundred the next day. This left him with a small membership of three hundred, but he had a congregation worthy of the name, and with them he had overwhelming victory.

So, when I received the fourteen applications, I instantly sat down at my desk, wrote out the certificates of dismissal and mailed them at once so that the applicants could receive their discharge the very same day.

The conviction on me was that God was going to do a great work, and wanted the right kind of people to be in it; that cowards, compromisers, man fearers, ease-lovers, and worldlings would be a burden and hindrance in the hard momentous campaign to follow, and so it was best and even blessed for these to go.

In return for the fourteen who fled at the incoming of a Full Salvation pastor, and at the prospect of a real Gospel war that was to take place, God sent me over seven hundred and fifty to take their place. Most of this last named company came as the result of the Holiness Revival which followed.

Still among those of the old membership that were left, there were individuals who with words and deed, tongue and influence, set out to bring to naught the Gospel teaching and work that was inaugurated by the new pastorate.

Prominent among these opposers were four women. Two of these females were married, were about the age of thirty, and possessed the same name, although they were not related in any way.

Their opposition lasted just about one month, when I was called upon to bury them, and that, too, in a few days of each other.

I have no comment to make on this, only as the women had some social as well as a strong church influence, it would appear to some as if God was clearing the way for the great revival that broke upon First Church in two or three months, and that lasted without a break one year and nine months.

The third woman while literally raging around from house to house, criticizing, fault-finding and condemning every sermon, service, meeting and spiritual result of the new administration, slipped one day on the frozen pavement, injured her spine, and was confined in great agony to her bed four months, before she died. I visited her almost every day, and saw her become a penitent over her conduct, and die in perfect peace with God. The fourth woman was smitten with an illness about the same time the other three were afflicted, which confined her first to her bed, and then to her room for nearly a year. In that time so much kindness was shown her by the Holiness people; and I was so faithful in pastoral attention, reading the Bible and praying by her bedside, that not only another anti-holiness gun was spiked, but when she was restored to health and returned to church, she came as the friend of her pastor, and the well-wisher of the revival which had by that time swept everything before it, was in possession of the field and had come to stay.

I never for an instant believed that God had afflicted these four women because of their personal enmity and opposition to me, but I did feel deeply impressed that the God who had smitten the Philistines for their mistreatment of His Holy Ark, and scourged individuals as well as communities for their opposition to and rejection of His truth was repeating His dealings at First Church appointment. I felt that God was standing by His truth rather than a mere man, and was preparing the church for the battle, and getting the field ready for victory.

Before the revival came, I did everything I could, and urged my membership to the observance of every condition and the performance of every duty that I felt was necessary and incumbent upon them that the Holy Ghost might fall upon us with power, and a genuine work of salvation take place and abide in our midst, before the eyes of all the people. One thing I did was to request as many of the congregation as would and could, to meet with me in the church for an all-night prayer meeting to supplicate God for a genuine, old time, New Testament revival of religion.

In response to this request one hundred and thirty of my members started in at nine o’clock with a prayer meeting that lasted until the breaking of the day.

This service became historic in the church and monumental in the lives of a number who were present. Somewhere between two and three o’clock in the morning there was a perfect downpour of the Spirit on the assembly. Seven or eight were sanctified, several were converted, and Mrs. M. E. Otto received her call and anointing for the Rescue Work in which she has been engaged ever since in the city of St. Louis.

I also started a holiness meeting and five class meetings, and urged the people in my preaching to the obtainment of full salvation if they ever expected to see backsliders reclaimed and sinners converted to God.

This with constant pastoral visiting, praying and talking with the people about their souls at their homes, caused flames of spiritual life to spring up in individual hearts and fiery circles that soon precipitated the general blaze.

Among other means adopted, I appointed a prayer meeting composed of sixty or seventy of my most spiritual members, and held one hour before the Sunday night service, the object of which was to implore the blessing and power of God upon the sermon to be delivered.

This prayer meeting was remotely located on the third floor of the church building, but such was the hold this company got on God, and such the Spirit’s power upon them as they stormed the Gates of Heaven, that not only the sound of the voices but the glory of the meeting was felt over the house of God.

At the same hour the Epworth League, run on deeply spiritual lines, was singing, testifying and praying in the lecture room on the first floor. This placed the people who were gathering in the auditorium on the second floor between two fires, so to speak. And here I often beheld hundreds of men and women sitting thoughtfully and solemnly as they listened to the prayer meetings going on, one above and the other below them.

Then when the two assemblies, prompt to the minute came pounding down and sweeping up into the auditorium, their faces ashine with the light of Heaven, their souls aflame with the love of God and souls, and all of them expecting victory, who needs to be told what kind of service followed, how powerful was the battle and how glorious the triumph of the Cross.

There was not a Sabbath night, but after the sermon had been preached, and the call made, the long altar would be lined with seekers for pardon and holiness. Sometimes it would be double lined. Then while volumes of sacred song would fill the building, experienced ones would instruct and labor with the penitents, and men and women gifted and mighty in prayer would prevail with God, move three worlds, and bring down billows of glory and tidal waves of salvation on the people. Such crying, laughing, shouting, clapping of hands and rejoicing over reclamations, conversions and sanctifications, may be imagined, but could never be adequately and perfectly described.

Meanwhile, a great body of the audience sat looking on, interested, sympathizing, convicted and troubled, and would not leave until the final doxology had been sung. It was a rare thing for this dismissal to take place before eleven o’clock on Sunday night.

A German Christian who lived in Louisville, Ky., attended the service one Sabbath evening. He did not understand all the words of the English language. So in meeting me some months afterwards in another city, he said:

“I attended your church one Sunday night. After you finished your sermon, your altar was filled with penitents and seekers. It was soon emptied, and you made another call, and it was nearly filled again, and cleaned up again before you dismissed the congregation at eleven o’clock. “Oh!” he exclaimed, rubbing his hands and smiling all over his face, “It was beautiful SCENERY that night!”

The revival had come! And it was on in power, prior to my annual appointed and advertised protracted meeting; and long before the engaged singer and evangelists had arrived.

I conclude by saying that evidently the adversary again overreached himself. He thought he would gag silence and crush a messenger of God, and stop the sweep of the holiness Movement by a Conference appointment. So he employed Bros. Propeller, Free Mason, Banker, Wall Street, Stock Dealer and Dr. Elder to carry out his scheme. And lo! and behold! by the execution of their plan, a broken-down church was brought back to life and strength, many hundreds of souls were saved and sanctified, and a greater, mightier and farther reaching revival occurred in a Down-Hill Church than ever would have taken place in Sky Scraper Cathedral.

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