Woodard.Tech

Revival Incidents

289 min read

Revival Incidents

by Beverly Carradine

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Contents

Chapter 1: First Experiences as an Evangelist

On adjournment of the St. Louis conference, the members of that body started northward on their journey to friends, loving expectant families, and to the various pastoral charges awaiting them.

I, for the first time in many years, parted from my brethren; and journeying southward, turned my face, steps, heart and life into the lonesome and toilsome life and work of the evangelist. God only knows the sense and weight of isolation that fell upon my spirit that morning at the parting of the ways, when, leaving a host of friends, the pastoral charge with all its close, loving ties, and the certain support accruing to the preacher in regular conference relations, I set my face toward the new field and work, and pressed on into the future which held for me toil, battle, trial, difficulties, and experiences of every conceivable character. Perhaps if I had known all that awaited me in the nineteen years that have since passed, I might not have had the faith and courage to have gone on. I cannot tell. I only feel that the wisdom of God is great in hiding the tomorrows from our eyes.

My first appointment was a town in Arkansas, a place of about three thousand inhabitants.

At this period of time many of the striking events of that first battle cannot be recalled, although one fact can never be forgotten, that on the sixth day what I call the “break” came, and I saw at the close of the meeting of ten days over one hundred souls converted and sanctified.

My entertainment at this place has abided as a recollection, not so much blistered as frozen in. I was sent to stay at a small cottage home of an aged couple. The man was not only good but deeply spiritual. The wife, a woman of sixty or more, had a face that looked like it had been carved out of hickory wood, and then soaked in vinegar. She was usually as mum as she was grum. She insisted, however, in the testimony meeting at the church that she was saved. I did not contradict her, but felt that if she was correct in her statement that she had taken the salt or acid route to Heaven, and was not sugar-cured. She was pickled, but not preserved.

The small bedchamber they gave me for my accommodation had no stove in it, and the weather was cold. The dining-room adjoining had a diminutive heater but whose warmth could scarcely be felt even when the door between the two apartments was open. When I closed the portal on account of rattling dishes, or I was in prayer, meditation, letter writing or preparation for the pulpit, I became so chilled that I wrote, or prayed, with my overcoat on.

Nevertheless God kept the soul warm, and the praises of full salvation were continually bubbling up from the heart and overflowing the lips.

Little dreaming that my sour-faced landlady was in the dining-room listening, or forgetful of the fact of her presence in the next apartment, a regular apostolical succession of, “Praise Gods” and “Bless the Lords” flowed from the abundance of my heart through the mouth, filled the room, penetrated the keyhole of’ the door or its ill-jointed seams, and fell upon the listening and amazed ear of our salt-cured sister.

It pleased God to put her under terrible conviction over these words of the Canaan Life and Experience, spoken as they were in a cold, cheerless little room and in utter unconsciousness of any human hearer. As she afterwards narrated the matter at the church:

“When I first heard him, I said to myself as I stood wiping dishes at the table, ‘Listen at that man praising God for nothing.’ But in a few days more of listening and wondering, I felt all through me that this evangelist had something I did not have, that he knew God in a way that I did not, and so I became so miserable that I could not eat nor sleep. Then you remember how I fell down here at the altar and got the blessing. But I was started by hearing this preacher praise God in a cold room over nothing.”

Dear heart. God had sent me down there among other things to do, to awaken her from spiritual sleep, to show her also the difference between a title to Heaven and fitness for Heaven. To reveal to her the more excellent way. To get her out of her salted state into a sugared condition. And indeed to prepare her for her burial.

A few years later she passed into the skies. She died not only in perfect peace, but in great joy. She rejoiced to the last that she had heard of Holiness in time.

Among the large company that came brightly through at the altar, I beheld in the person of a young woman an illustration of self-forgetfulness, an unconsciousness of surroundings, which is generally conceded to belong to the deathbed. Where an individual really “goes through,” as we term it, and dies out to the world, to all human favor, criticism and opposition, to all that men think, say and do, there is a most remarkable suggestion as well as likeness to death and the deathbed in the language and very appearance of the person.

The lady in question had been seeking the blessing of sanctification for days. Her approach to the grace was marked by a corresponding unconsciousness of the presence of people about her, watching, whispering and commenting. She was too much absorbed in dying to notice those who stood around the deathbed, so to speak.

Suddenly one morning she received the blessing. It came like a lightning flash. In a second she was on her feet. If she had been dying and dead, she surely now had a resurrection. Some One with all power had said, “I say unto thee, arise.” And she arose, with her face radiant, clapping her hands, uttering the most heart-thrilling praises to God, walking swiftly up and down before the altar, and only stopping now and then to embrace one of her female friends.

In her excited movements and by reason of the fervent handlings given her by her sisters, by and by her hat was pushed to one side of her head and finally hung over the left ear. But she gave not the slightest attention to this millinery disaster, and went on shaking hands in this adorned, or rather unadorned, state, with her lips overflowing with praises.

After a little a lady came up from behind and shoved the hat with great expertness up on the top of the head, but our rejoicing sister went on just the same, as indifferent to that appearance as to the other, until the hat finally fell over on the other ear. But by this time the people were so deeply moved at what she was saying and so impressed with the glory shining in her face, that I am confident that not a soul in the house cared a snap whether she had a hat on at all or not, and would have listened to her just the same regardless of any millinery array or disarray whatever.

My second appointment was in a Tennessee town of 12,000 inhabitants, in the First M. E. Church South. And here was a battle indeed from beginning to end.

The board of stewards seemed without exception to be men of the world. They were not even saved. Reinforced by the presiding elder they met me with a most tremendous opposition. In addition, a number of the leading women, arraying themselves against the doctrine of holiness and the meeting itself, tried my patience and faith to the utmost limit.

This combined hostility and resistance, however, could not keep the audience away. The lecture room in the morning was well filled, while the auditorium on the second floor, where the night service was held, was crowded, and many people were turned away unable to get entrance.

Still the bitter antagonism of the leading members of the church, the stand of the stewards who were nearly all prominent business and professional men, the influence of the presiding elder in offices, homes, and on the street, confused the outside world as well as a large body of the congregation, and made what might have been one of the most glorious revivals, one of the hardest and bitterest battles in which I was ever engaged.

Such was the power of God on the Word as it was preached, and such the growing conviction all over the community, that could the meeting have gone on beyond the allotted days, we are convinced a mighty work would have been done. But the pastor was one of those men in the ministry who feared ecclesiastical authority and human coldness and wrath more than he did God. So the meeting was closed when and where it never should have ended.

Only forty souls were converted and sanctified in these services, but they were clear, bright cases, and through them many others were afterwards brought to God, and a holiness meeting ran for years with great grace and unction at every service until finally, through a series of Conference appointments, it was wiped out.

Among the forty who were reached in this meeting was a case the recollection of which has always peculiarly appealed to me. The party referred to was a colored man and the sexton of the church.

I first observed him listening intently to the preaching, or, rather, to scraps of the sermon, for he was kept so busy with the duties of the janitorship that he had to hear on the jump and run.

Repeatedly I saw him lingering at a door before closing it, or stopping a moment to catch some word or sentence before taking up some pressing duty. As he would close a window, feed the fire, bring in fresh water, or open a door to leave, just before going out I would see his hand go up to his ear, his head bend in strict attention to take in the pulpit utterance and then turn away with a most thoughtful expression of countenance.

One morning as I walked down the steps of the pulpit to the main floor, he caught my hand in his, and with tears running down his black face, he choked out the words:

“I done got it, Doctor.”

How I was melted under that simple speech can be imagined. But I was also made to wonder and adore God’s ways with men. While clearer than ever I saw the meaning of the words of the Savior, when He said, “I thank Thee, Father, that Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and revealed them unto babes.”

My third appointment was a city of 18,000 people in the state of Mississippi. Here the Lord gave me over one hundred souls.

The result of this revival would require a volume to describe fully. Out of this work came directly and indirectly men who have been stars of the first magnitude in the Holiness movement in the South. A gentleman visiting the place several months later on business, told a friend that he struck the most remarkable community, in some respects, that he had ever beheld in his life.

He said he had taken a meal at a restaurant where the white man who had waited on him, after refusing a tip, said:

“I have brought you food for the body, but if you would let Him, Jesus Christ would give you the Bread of Life that would cause you to live forever.”

The gentleman said, as he noticed the kindly eyes and serious face of the waiter, he could see there was no spirit of fun or guying in him, and walked away too surprised and affected to make a word of reply.

Later, on the corner of a street, he asked a policeman to direct him to a certain business house. After the officer had done so, he turned a remarkably clear-looking and good face toward the gentleman and said in a kind, respectful tone:

“I have shown you to a certain street and number; I wish you would let me point you to the way of salvation.”

The gentleman thanked him, but hurried away more amazed than ever as well as disturbed.

In a barber shop he got a third shot stronger than any received before, until the man thought, as he said to his friend, that he had struck a corner of the Millennium or gotten into a religious colony, or was walking around in his sleep, dreaming.

A final surprise awaited him when, leaving a hack in which he had been driven to the depot, the driver said in parting:

“Good-by, sir, a bigger trip is waiting for you, that ends in Eternity at the Judgment Bar of God. I hope to meet you there safe and sound on the Right Hand Side.”

This time the gentleman fairly blurted out his astonishment, which had been gathering all day.

“What on earth is the matter with this town? Has everybody gone mad? Or got religion? Or am I crazy? Or dreaming in my bed somewhere?”

How he solved the problem I do not know; but many times since he has told the story of a town he visited once where everybody had religion, and where bootblacks, barbers, dentists and policemen knew enough theology to have become presidents and professors in any church college in the land.

Chapter 2: A Remarkable Revival

In company with my singer, Professor Rinehart, I once opened a ten days’ meeting in an Alabama town of several thousand inhabitants.

The services began on Sunday. At the conclusion of the first sermon seven people presented themselves at the altar for pardon and holiness. On the following day one of these seven gave up seeking and dropped out. On the third another fell away, so that each successive day I beheld the spectacle of a thinning altar without anyone obtaining salvation, until on Saturday not a soul would come forward. Perhaps discouragement was the cause with some as they saw no one getting victory, or perhaps the growing opposition to the meeting may have chilled or alarmed them. Anyhow they did not come, and I, who had watched this unprecedented spectacle of a diminishing altar for a week beheld it utterly stripped as already mentioned on Saturday.

All this was naturally very trying, and could hardly have been quietly and patiently borne, if the Spirit of God had not constantly filled my soul with a deep, sweet peace, and a strange assurance that all was going on well, though human eyes might not see as yet the full work of the Almighty.

Another reassuring fact was the size of the crowd, which came to hear the Word. The outer vestibule had been given to the colored people in order that they might listen to the preaching, but the white audience became so great that they had to vacate this position and stand outside and hear as best they could. Repeatedly, in glancing outward, I would see them in a dark mass on either side of the church, standing in the midst of the weeds, hearkening in fixed attention to the sermon as it came to them through the open windows.

A half dozen of these Negroes had been sanctified in a meeting in the country, led by a godly man of their own race. They interviewed me, saying that they were glad indeed at my coming. That since they obtained the blessing of sanctification their own families and church had turned against them. That they were counted to be beside themselves, and actually crazy, both by white and black people. And that they were rejoicing that I had come to explain to, their critics, judges and persecutors, that they were not lunatics, but possessed a religious experience which God had promised His people, and which Christ had died to bring to the church.

No words can describe the pathos of this scene, as these humble followers of the Savior gave in their simple language their experience, their joy in the Lord, and yet the difficulties and trials they had to meet on account of the very blessing they possessed.

On the second Sabbath I preached in the morning with a blessed sense of the presence of God, and the power of the truth I was declaring. At the close of the sermon I made a call in spite of the stripped and forsaken altars of the day before, and instantly there was a rush, and over fifty people fell at the chancel rail.

That morning twenty-five souls were converted, reclaimed and sanctified. At night fifteen were added to the number, making forty in one day.

Something may be imagined of the startling effect this had on a town of three thousand inhabitants. Conviction became general, and there were more at the altar the next day than on the Sabbath. Quite remarkable, also, was the fact that exactly forty souls were regenerated and sanctified in the Monday services. On Tuesday thirty-five more swept clearly and powerfully into the experiences of justification and holiness. So here in three days we had one hundred and fifteen new witnesses to the grace and power of the Son of God.

Compelled to leave at the close of the Tuesday night service for a North Carolina appointment, I telegraphed to the Rev. U. E. Ramsey to come on and continue the meeting. The people would not hear to its closing. Under Brother Ramsey’s preaching as many obtained pardon and sanctification as in the earlier part of the services.

The noteworthy happenings and gracious results of this meeting would, I verily believe, fill a volume. Some were of such a private character and sacred nature as could not be told. A few occurrences that may be referred to out of the many, I mention.

The pastor of the church where the meeting was held was sanctified. Full of joy he wrote to his wife, who was in the other town composing his circuit, telling her what God had done for his soul. Her reply, in a few chilling, angry lines, was, “That if it was so that he had obtained such a blessing, she hoped he would never put his foot across the threshold of their home again.”

A father dragged his son of eighteen years of age bodily from the altar one night. The youth at once became in a manner desperate and frenzied. He said he now did not care what became of his soul, went to drinking and into sin of every kind, and died within a year. The father fell dead on the street soon after his son’s death.

Another citizen of the town stood on the street one day and cursed the doctrine of holiness. In a little while he was smitten and bedridden with a strangely diseased tongue. The doctors cut into it, and worked on it in vain. In a brief period he died from the malady, and was buried in the cemetery near the man who had dragged his son from the altar.

These were a few of the dark occurrences of this wonderful revival. The gracious results were far more numerous and much of the fruit of that meeting abides to this day.

Only lately a Methodist preacher whom I met for the first time was telling me of workers in the field, and other fruits of that meeting that I had never heard about. I myself, swept to another part of the country, beheld only part of the victory.

The meeting stirred, quickened and blessed every denomination. The town became so spiritual that no theatrical company could secure an audience. The building which had been constructed for that purpose and called the Opera House, was advertised for sale. The citizens bought it, and presented it to the Christian church, the one religious body that possessed no place of worship in the community.

There was a hunter’s club in the place whose members had regularly their spring and autumn outings in the woods in search for such game as turkey and deer. Previous to the meeting, they on these occasions would take playing cards and jugs of whisky and have what they called a jolly and carousing time.

In the revival, every one of these men were converted or sanctified, and in their next camp hunt took with them Bibles and hymn books, and had a camp meeting time of it. This was not all; but they never had a more successful hunt. They said on returning that it seemed to them God actually drove to them all the game they wanted and could pack away.

In addition to the many scores of people who were converted and sanctified, God gained a number of workers for His vineyard, most of whom are in the field faithful to this day. Consecrated money was set to flowing which has never ceased for nineteen years. Other revivals sprang up as a consequence of this meeting, and camp grounds were established where hundreds of other souls have been and still are brought to the light and peace of pardon, and to the joy of full salvation.

One would think that any branch of the Church of Christ would rejoice over a work of grace, that was so manifestly of God, and which brought such blessings and blessedness to individual, family and community.

The disciples would have sent down their Johns and Peters to strengthen and establish so great a spiritual movement among the children of men. Mr. Wesley would have visited the place immediately, appointing leaders and preachers to nourish, protect, defend and perpetuate such a glorious income and outcome of grace.

But the denomination in which this wonderful revival occurred, sent men clothed with ecclesiastical authority, conference after conference, to crush out this work of God.

It took them years to accomplish their purpose, but they succeeded at last. While the distinct fruits I have mentioned cannot be destroyed, the work in the church itself was obliterated, the holy people were grieved, discouraged, scattered or overcome. The ark disappeared, and a deader place of worship could scarcely be found anywhere today than the sanctuary I once saw filled with eager, hungry throngs, while salvation rolled like a flood, and the building resounded with the happy cries and exultant shouts of penitents finding pardon, and of seekers sweeping into the blessing of entire sanctification.

I once sat in a chapel on Sunday morning in the city of Jerusalem. A more formal, lifeless service I hardly ever attended. And yet the place of worship was on Mt. Zion! and not over two hundred yards from the spot where the Holy Ghost fell in power on the one hundred and twenty, and where on the same day, three thousand souls were converted to God.

I did some thinking that morning, and I indulge in a similar kind of thought in these days whenever I sit in a cold, dead church, where once the Holy Ghost had right of way, where salvation free and full swept every service, and yet, where the chief priests and the sanhedrins of our day have ruled out the Word and Work of Almighty God.

At such a time I seem to see the word “Ichabod” written on the pulpit; on the choir; on the walls; and in the pews. I think of that chapel worship in Jerusalem, and going out of the desolated place I say with a heavy sigh in the heart and on the lip, “The glory is departed.”

Chapter 3: Difficulties Overcome

According to appointment, I met my singer in the waiting room of the large union station of St. Louis. We had both come from distant points, and, arriving first, I purchased my ticket, checked my trunk, and then walked about through the multitude looking for my friend, and waiting for the hour to arrive in which we would depart together for a town fifty miles away in Illinois, where the next meeting was to be held.

After a little while I beheld the familiar face, greetings were exchanged, and then my helper, drawing me aside out of the crush, with an anxious expression on his countenance, said:

“I am flat broke; can you lend me enough to reach our next appointment?”

There was a quick, big fear in my heart that I did not possess the full amount required, but assuming an easy, courageous bearing, I replied, “that I thought so,” and diving down into a vest pocket and pulling out all I had remaining, I discovered, after counting, that there was enough to purchase the ticket and leave three copper cents over.

Getting on the train soon after, we sped through the night feeling that in a couple of hours we would arrive at our destination, get into bed by eleven o’clock, have a good rest, and be ready for our first service on the next morning.

But at eleven o’clock we were still on the train, and not hearing the name of our town called, asked the conductor how long before we would arrive, when we were struck almost breathless by the statement that we had passed the place an half hour before.

I begged to know in a most aggrieved tone why we had not been called. His reply was that the station had been announced loudly, but that we must have been asleep.

I insisted that we had not closed our eyes, and that we had been overlooked, and were so genuinely distressed that the conductor told us he would take us on fifty miles farther, when we could stop off at a station and take the returning train, which would deposit us in the town we wanted to reach at about daylight; that he would give us a note to the conductor, thereby saving us from additional expense.

And so we were landed at one o’clock at night at a small, box-like station, a half mile from the town. The omnibus driver advised us to go to the hotel and wait for the express, which passed some hours later; that the depot was small, dingy and poorly heated. But we did not care to tell him that we had only three cents between us, and could not pay the bus fare up town, and so finally said we thought it best to remain.

The suffering of the next four hours I can never forget. The night was bitterly cold, the thermometer being below zero. My singer wrapping himself in his overcoat, and curling up on a hard bench, sought oblivion in sleep.

I paced the dreary, icy little room many times, read the notices of excursions which had taken place weeks and months before, studied an old railroad map on the wall, tried walking in front of the station with its lonely switch light shining in the distance, only to be driven back by the bitter wind into the cheerless office again, where it seemed I would certainly freeze in spite of my constant motion, before the train arrived.

It finally came. We boarded it and at sunrise were landed at the town of our appointment. We were ushered into fireless rooms at the house of entertainment, and all exhausted fell on our beds and slept like logs for two hours (it seemed two minutes), when we were called to breakfast.

After that came the morning service.

The reader will observe that we had only met with discouragements and discomforts thus far. We encountered many more, and are careful to tell some of them for the encouragement of others; for numerous as were the hindrances and trials, I never had a more remarkable and successful meeting.

Two preachers of different denominations took part in the meeting from the beginning, in the sense of attending and sitting, one on our right and the other on the left. One was named Doctor Cole, and the other Doctor Frieze. Religiously and spiritually their names correctly represented their condition, as well as their influence on the services. Meantime the weather outside seemed to be trying itself, and when it was not snowing, there would come a drop in the mercury and we would have sleet, hail and ice everywhere.

If the Adversary is the power of the air, and was trying to freeze out our meeting, he made a mistake in sending the mercury down to 20 degrees below zero. This made the two feet of snow so hard that people came to the meeting in their sleighs and sledges from every direction. Some came twenty miles, and would return home after eleven o ‘clock at night. Such people wanted the truth, and got it.

There was a row of ten middle-aged men who sat on the front pew. They had formed the deplorable habit of looking around every time the church door was opened. In doing this five would suddenly turn to the right, and the others to the left, and this accompanied with the falling of ten pairs of shoes on the floor together, brought a feature to the meeting that was as ridiculous as it was trying to the evangelist and many others sifting around them. It looked like a sudden parting of hair on the brow of the congregation. Then as they fronted back, the part would be lost, but only suddenly to appear again with some newcomer.

But when the power of God came down, and every one of them was sanctified, the neckbones of these brethren became established, and the opening and shutting of the door was completely disregarded by them. Another door had opened, and some one had come into their hearts whose presence and communion so satisfied and blessed that their poor bobbing heads got a rest as well as their souls.

Doctor Frieze, in the interim of the meetings, day and night, was busily engaged in preparing a chart by which he intended to demonstrate the improbability, the impossibility, and the utter folly and nonsense of the blessing of entire sanctification.

But the very day on which he completed the chart, the sixth day of the meeting, his wife got the blessing. So on the seventh day he rested from his labors, and it proved a rest that remained. For he was confronted with this great embarrassment, that if he admitted the truth of his wife’s experience, his chart was useless; and to go around lecturing on his chart and say that his diagram was true, would be to say his wife was deluded and in a false experience, and so poor Doctor Frieze disappeared from our midst, and, as Bunyan would say, “We saw him no more.”

Doctor Cole said he had caught a cold, and he likewise departed.

Meantime the crowd kept increasing, as salvation came down and scores were getting saved and sanctified. The house, which seated five or six hundred, would be filled before the ringing of the first bell, and yet the sexton, from long habit, most religiously rang the first and then the second bell.

One day I had to be put through a window to get in the building, I walked over to him as he began to pull the rope and asked him what he was ringing the bell for? Was it to let the town know that no one else could get into the church? That for my life I could see no other reason in giving those forty or fifty tolling sounds.

He looked up, then around at the packed audience, jammed aisles, and crowded vestibule, and saw the point. With a foolish looking smile he let go the rope and sat down with an air of profound thought on his wrinkled face.

It is well for us to remember that the invention of church bells came after the church lost full salvation or the Baptism with the Holy Ghost. It was to ring up the people and ring back vanished congregations who needed thus to be reminded of the meeting, and stimulated to return. It required two bells.

Whenever holiness as an experience comes back to a church, the summoning chime becomes a back number; it is a needless affair; for the people are that anxious to be in the house of God that they come ahead of time. What evangelist whom God has blessed with genuine revivals but can testify to this fact. The congregations fairly rush to the place of worship, not because of an outward bell, but because of a sound of inward bells hung and swung and rung in the soul of the sanctified.

Fully one hundred and thirty people were regenerated, reclaimed and sanctified at this meeting. Many more were convicted, but refused to yield.

It was, as is the case with every such series of services, God’s last call to some individuals. I firmly believe that a real gospel meeting is sent of God not only for the obtainment of the different works of grace, of pardon and holiness, but also to head people off from life blunders and crime; it is to deliver from temptation, save from an approaching heart-breaking sorrow, and come in between them and the penitentiary, the grave and the Pit itself.

How little some of the gospel rejecters dream of this, as they coolly keep their seats under every proposition, harden their hearts under every appeal, stalk from the church with increasing indifference, and ridicule, criticize and condemn the evangelist and the meeting to the end.

The meeting finally closes. The pillar of fire and cloud passes away under the horizon to appear in other and remote communities. The angels go by the tent. The resisting individual, family, and congregation have the same solemn look of displeasure and doom turned upon them that was cast on the lost cities of the plain by the Almighty. And then, after a few days, weeks or months, a fearful judgment or life calamity falls suddenly and frightfully upon those who turned their backs upon the light, throttled conscience, grieved the Spirit, and hardened their hearts against God.

In this town there were numerous dealings from Heaven of this order. One alone filled the newspapers for weeks.

The man in question heard us with sullen brow, bitter tongue and resisting life through the whole meeting. He had light enough through Sunday school, church, a religious family connection and previous revival meetings to have turned a heathen nation from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God.

He got his last call in our services. Had he accepted the salvation offered him, his own redemption would have been secured, a present and everlasting happiness would have been his portion, and the history of the church at that point, and that of the whole community would have been altered and that for good and God.

But he turned down this divine plan, voted no on every proposition, took the wrong road, and went forth to commit three or four horrible murders, bring life mourning into a number of households, separated scores of families, literally blighted the church of which he was a member, and fastened a stigma, as well as a memory of horror, upon the town in which he lived for all time to come.

Chapter 4: A Sabbath with a Formal City Church

Once in a very successful meeting held in a Southern Methodist church, through an engagement made some months before, the building was not at our disposal on one of the Sabbaths. For awhile it looked as if that day would be one of enforced idleness. But the pastor of one of the largest churches in the city having been called to deliver a couple of addresses in another place, sent me a request to fill his pulpit.

On entering the cathedral-like building I was escorted by an usher with great ceremony to the lofty mahogany stand where I was to hold forth; and after a prayer on my knees of a minute or so, I took my seat and glanced over the richly dressed and crowded audience.

Not a sound was heard but the rustle of silk, the swish of trailing robes and the soft closing of doors. A few of the congregation bowed their heads in a graceful way on two or three fingers, the rest sat stiff and straight, even as they had walked unbendingly up the aisle and sat down in the pew.

The atmosphere was severely respectable, and decidedly frosty. I called on Heaven, however, for help, read an unctuous opening hymn, which was at once frozen to death by the choir, and then prayed against six or seven hundred human icebergs that were in lines before me reaching to the door. The janitor, leaning near the entrance coldly looking on, well personated the north pole.

I was the only one who knelt in that great audience. The icebergs from their nature could not be expected to be getting up and down. They had also now become a frozen mass, presenting a Labrador front, only to be broken in pieces later by the doxology and benediction.

Just before the sermon, the secretary of the church conference or of the official board read the announcements for the coming week. It took fifteen or twenty minutes to run through the list. A final announcement was that the following persons were requested to meet immediately at the close of the morning service in the northwest corner of the auditorium of the church for a few minutes. The names of these parties were proclaimed mellifluously and sonorously. I will never forget this personal pronoun reading; the fact that a large number had titles; and, above all, that though this proclamation took an additional seven minutes and seemed to give eminent satisfaction to all hearing their names so clearly and resonantly and impressively sounded forth, yet the meeting never took place! The sermon and the altar service which followed, all unwittingly by the preacher, knocked the beautiful programmic arrangement in the head and out of the ring.

The personages who were to have met, and did not, were Judge A. and wife, General B. and wife, Colonel C. and wife, Major D. and wife, Captain E. and wife, the Honorable F. and wife, Doctor G. and wife, Mrs. Judge So-and-So, Mrs. Captain So-and-So, Mrs. Doctor So-and-So, and so on, and so on, and so and so, and so and so, until my head fairly reeled.

But, oh! how that audience listened to those cognomens, appellations and titles as they were rolled forth by the important-looking little secretary of the church conference. The gospel which followed was powerless to bring up such a pleased expression on their countenances. The names were like melodious chords, and as each musical note broke upon the ear it seemed to empty a mystic kind of sack of sweetest bonbons upon the palate of the soul. And as not a name was missed by the reader or unheard by the hearer, so not a head was turned, and the attention was intense until the Book of Numbers about A. and his wife, and B. and his wife, was finished.

As I stood up to preach I never felt more dependent upon God in my life. And I am thankful to say that I never realized at any time or place more profoundly the fact of the Divine presence, comfort and assistance.

I preached on the “Rest of Holiness,” showing that the analysis of it was an abiding sense of purity, a perfect submission to the will of God, and the constant presence of Christ in the heart.

The Spirit of God was present to apply the Word, and a number seemed impressed and others deeply moved and convicted.

When I finished the message of an hour I did a most unprecedented thing in that church of lectures, addresses, fairs, festivals and stereopticon exhibitions. I asked all that wanted salvation and holiness to come to the altar; and fully twenty-five came.

I then began the regular altar work, with instruction, singing and prayer. The great majority of the congregation left, some placidly, others disturbed and dissatisfied at the unusual kind of sermon and service, and not a few indignant. The secretary, stewards and ushers all vanished. The after meeting for Mr. and Mrs. Judge, Mr. and Mrs. Colonel and Mr. and Mrs. Doctor did not materialize. Just how much was lost to Christianity and the general progress of the race will not appear until the day of judgment. But be it known that all the loudly-announced individuals disappeared, as did the secretary who called them. The janitor seemed perfectly infuriated, and went around slamming doors and shutting windows with such a noise that many words I spoke to the seekers could not possibly be heard.

In spite of everything, Satanic rage and human hindrance, four hungry souls were filled with the Holy Ghost and found the pearl of great price. One, a young lady attending a Training Institute, received the blessing, and is today a foreign missionary. Of other fruit from the convictions of that morning we may not know until the history of the nations, churches and individuals is declared at the end of time. But God was there in the assembly in power.

At night I preached a dark sermon indeed on a Christian becoming entangled again with the world and sin, and finally being lost.

In concluding I made my usual altar call, and seven men and three women came forward and bowed for prayer.

A deep gloom seemed to rest on the audience, and I made no effort to lift it, but let it soak in the minds of the people in a salutary way. Two souls were reclaimed at the altar. I finally dismissed the people with the benediction, and they walked away in profound silence.

I heard afterwards that the silence was broken on the street and in various homes, and people who were angry in the morning were simply infuriated at night.

The case as it seems to stand with the careful critic and judge is that God had honored His Word; the Holy Spirit had put conviction on many and saved others; salvation had visited the place for the first time, or for the first time in many years. But alas! the building had been employed for a most unusual purpose. Strange people had bowed at their beautiful altar. There had been quite a commotion, if not noise. The membership had been stirred, troubled and made to feel badly instead of being complimented and soothed, as usual. Then the janitor had been kept three quarters of an hour longer than customary in the morning service and a whole hour later in the evening. His dinner was cold at noon, and his rest broken at night. Finally the Mr. and Mrs. Judge-Colonel-Doctor meeting which was to have gathered in the northwest corner of the auditorium never gathered!

Truly the big church had a great grievance. Its — its — its — dignity had been insulted. It had been wronged and ill-treated somehow. They hardly knew how to describe it or put the wrong in language, but they had been mistreated, and their burden was greater than they could bear. So, not being able to endure it, they talked about it, and excoriated and lambasted the messenger of God who preached about holiness in the morning and a lost soul at night.

I have held many ten-day meetings when, after the battle was over, the strife of tongues would die down and clearer views and kindlier judgments come to the front. But in this one day’s meeting, although eighteen years have passed away, there seems to have been an animosity aroused that time is powerless to soften and remove. Year after year the writer hears directly and indirectly from that congregation about those “Two terrible sermons preached, and outrageous services held, that Sunday their pastor was away.”

The utterers of this speech, while church members, have never been regarded as pious, we are informed, or made any claim to spirituality. The two sermons seem to have exposed and doomed them.

A man claiming the experience of holiness declared himself to be much chagrined, and brought the evangelist to task for the night discourse. He informed me then, and said many times afterward to others, that I had missed the opportunity of my life in securing admission as an evangelist into the largest church in the city.

This same so-called holiness man was involved then in fanaticism, and later went into far greater darkness.

I left the place with the smile of the Savior on my soul, and with the heavenly assurance that, if I had not won the favor of men, I had pleased God, and that all was well and should be well with me.

The board of stewards sent a note to me next day asking what I charged for my services. My reply was, that I asked nothing, that what I had said and done I freely gave unto them.

The pastor returned from his Chautauqua engagement to be informed how near his church had come to being torn to pieces. But he soon smoothed the tangled hair and ruffled feathers of his people, the judges and the judgesses, the captains and the Mrs. captains, the stewards, ushers, secretary, janitor and all; from the least to the greatest; behold, he smoothed and soothed them all.

As for the church, it still stands, an imposing structure, ifs elegant pews crowded with unsaved members, its polished altar rails never wet with the tears of repentance, its walls never echoing with the wail of the convicted and the glad shout of salvation, and thus utterly failing to do what the Son of God designed, prayed, lived and died for in the founding of His Kingdom on earth.

Like a certain Southern railroad famous for its slow-moving trains, and winning for itself the public judgment spoken in smiles and laughter, “That it had never hurt a traveler or declared a dividend,” so with this cathedral. Its policy is that no one’s feelings shall be hurt’ in their ecclesiastical car if they have any moneyed influence with the ministerial conductor in the pulpit cab, and they succeed. But the trouble is that the other side of the judgment goes with them, that they never pay a dividend of regeneration or sanctification now; and it is to be feared will not be able to point to a single saved soul in eternity.

Chapter 5: A Presiding Elder’s Wife

I was invited to hold a meeting by a Methodist pastor in a Southern city of twenty thousand people. The presiding elder of the district lived in that community, and by some strange coincidence left town the same hour I arrived and by a similar curious coincidence as it must have seemed to some, he returned the day I departed.

Evidently anticipating the gloomiest results, and feeling unable to stand the sight of the ecclesiastical ruin he dreaded, he packed his grip, took a train, and journeyed fully sixty miles southward and buried himself so to speak, in the piney woods in one of the circuits of his preachers; and so out of the sound of the melee, contest, wreck and disaster that he apprehended, he waited forebodingly to the end.

He had a bright, gifted wife whom he left behind to attend the meeting, hear what I said and report to him daily by letter the damage which would be done, and observe where the various fragments of Methodism in that place fell, so that later they might be gathered up and nothing be lost.

I saw the lady with note book and pencil in her hand quite busy for several days. She was quite a superior woman and soundly regenerated. As she listened from day to day, the truth took hold of her mind and heart. She soon saw that I was preaching God’s truth, a Methodist doctrine, and presenting a religions experience taught both in the sacred book and in the standards of her church.

So on the fourth day she suddenly arose, left her note book and pencil on the chair, and coming with a rush to the altar knelt there with sobs, cries and fast flowing tears.

And behold the husband in the piney woods received no report from the battlefield that day. Nor did he get one on the second or third day which followed; for his convicted wife was in too much trouble to write any more bulletins. She was too busy with her own case and too hungry for the blessing to stop for anything short of full salvation.

And so there was silence in the piney woods for the space of three days; when lo! here came a report that he did not expect; a letter from the wife, saying:

“I’ve got it! I have received the blessing of sanctification which you so much dreaded.”

The tableau in the woods made by the husband with the letter in his hand can, I think, be imagined by the dullest of minds.

The meeting in the town went on, and sitting forward with parted lips, shining eyes and eager face the presiding elder’s wife drank and swallowed thirstily and hungrily the precious truths of full salvation which she had so often longed for, but knowing not what she craved nor how obtainment could be had.

Meantime there was quite a number of whisperings going on about her.

Finally I went to her and said: “Sister M_____, the people are talking about you.”

Taking her thoughts as it were from Heaven itself she asked simply and sweetly:

“What are they saying about me?”

I replied:

“They say you have not eaten a morsel of food for several days.”

A beautiful smile passed over her face, and she answered without the slightest sign of annoyance:

“I don’t care to eat; my soul is feasting on what I never thought was possible in this world.”

I could but smile myself at this response and that most sympathetically; but I returned to the question box again and said:

“They are saying something else about you.”

With a half amused yet patient expression of countenance she replied:

“Well, what else are they saying?”

“They say that you have not slept any for three nights.”

Her face fairly shone and eyes filled with happy tears as she replied, “I don’t want to go to sleep and lose consciousness of this wonderful blessing in my soul.”

I answered, “Don’t think, Sister M_____, that I misunderstand or criticize you. I know all about how you feel, and haven’t it in mind or heart to blame you. I simply would warn you against injuring yourself physically. You know God has put natural laws on us and about us, and we must keep them or bear the penalty. In spite of the happiness in your soul I can see your body is not receiving right treatment and you are thereby injuring God’s temple. While in the flesh we must eat and take rest and sleep or we are bound to go down under such violation of physical obligation.”

With a wistful patient smile she said, “I know all that.”

“But that is not all,” I continued. “Your appearance is hurting the cause of Christ and Holiness.”

“Oh!” she said. “I would not do that for the whole world.”

“Well,” I replied gently, “you are doing it just the same. Your face is deadly white, there are black circles under your eyes, you look haggard, and those who love you are getting uneasy about you. Your sleepless nights and long fasts are telling on you. Then Jesus, you know, said when the bridegroom was present we should not fast; and you know He has come to you.”

“That is true,” she responded.

“But that is not all the people are saying,” I said.

Raising her eyes with a surprised but smiling look she said, “What else are they saying?”

I replied, “They are saying that you will land in the lunatic asylum in about six months.”

To this hour, and it has been now over sixteen years ago, I cannot forget the flash of light in her face, the exultant ring in her voice and the triumphant gladness in her manner as she said, “Oh! if that is so, then I am so glad I got the blessing before I went to the lunatic asylum.”

Right then and there I gave up the job of showing people who are full of the Holy Ghost how to conduct themselves in a way to suit and please the outside, observing, critical world. If anybody desires this kind of employment he will find our discarded staff and mantle on that line somewhere down in a certain town in Mississippi.

If they succeed in the business I would like to hear from them on the subject, and might, if they desire, use my influence to get them to address perhaps a single time, one of the schools of the prophets held at some of our holiness camp grounds during the summer months.

This woman I have been writing about soon became established and feeling that God had not given her such a blessing to run away in a corner or secluded place with; set her candle on a table that it might give light to all the in the household, her social realm, and her church.

She proved by her after life that she did not believe in putting the meat in one barrel and the salt in another, but that the salt must be in contact in a saving sense with the meat or the latter would spoil and the former would lose its savor.

She never gave up a single church service, but threw her beautiful glowing life and experience into every one of them. She transformed the Ladies Aid Society into a spiritual, prayerful gathering of women. She attended the Sunday school conventions and missionary meetings of the district and conference as well as her local church calls. And yet in no instance was there compromise of any kind. In testimony meetings and in private she told the people what she experienced, while in the various boards, societies and gatherings, she felt it her duty to attend, she, without being dictatorial, tried to guide and shape properly and lift all of them to higher spiritual planes as far as it was in her power.

Like her Savior she had to endure the “contradiction of sinners” and the misjudgment of friends, but she kept sweet and remained steady, and demonstrated clearly to thousands that a person with holiness can live in the church, need not leave the church, and whether understood or not, or whether rewarded by man or not, can keep the experience and be a downright, outright and upright blessing in the midst of all the people.

But to return to the husband in the woods.

When it came to pass that my meeting finally ended in the town before mentioned, the news of my coming departure reaching the presiding elder, he immediately took the train, and, as I have said, by a curious coincidence entered the city as I left.

He arrived at about two o’clock in the morning. As he walked up the silent streets the town clock was pealing forth the second hour after midnight. The sound, the silence, the night, the loneliness were all favorable to the mood he was in. He was returning in a different frame of mind to that with which he departed. He was now thoughtful, troubled, convicted.

He reached his house, entered the front entrance with a night key, walked down the hall and stood before the door of the bedroom of his wife and himself. A light was gleaming through the crack at the bottom of the portal. He tapped softly, the door gently opened, and an angel stood before him!

One glance at the holy, shining face of his wife smiling upon him, and with a groan he fell upon the floor and on his face crying out, “Pray for me.”

She knelt by his side and poured forth her soul to God in his behalf. For hours they prayed. And then like the scene in Jacob’s life, just as the sun was rising, the Lord blessed and sanctified him there.

“What knowest thou, O wife, whether thou shalt save thy husband.”

Chapter 6: Antics of the Old Man

It is impossible to please the carnal mind, or the Old Man. Its very nature, not subject to the law of God and being enmity to God, is evidence enough in itself. Besides as a work of the devil engrafted in a human soul made for holiness and Heaven, the property of the Lord, we see of course an interloper, and thereby can account again for its restlessness, discontent and general recalcitrancy.

The Savior referred to this sin principle or nature operating in men, in the words, “Whereunto shall I liken this generation. It is like unto children sitting in the markets, and calling unto their fellows, and saying, We have piped unto you and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented. For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say he hath a devil. The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous and a wine-bibber.”

This is Christ’s own description and picture of the Old Man in people, causing them to be dissatisfied with everything and everybody, and to strike at truth no matter who brings it and how it is presented.

Many are the pastors who have brought upon them selves nervous prostration in the perpetual but hopeless effort of trying to placate people in whom inbred sin resided. If they had endeavored still harder, and tried even more numerous ways the result would have been the same. It is impossible to please the carnal mind.

The soul with inbred sin or the old man in it, is like the body with a dislocated limb. Not only the member is in pain but so is the whole physical being through the law of sympathy and intimate union of the other parts. Every movement brings a pang, and every touch extorts a cry of suffering, protest and resentment.

God sent every kind of prophet to his people; but they found fault with each one of them. The trouble was not with the messenger or the message, but was in Judah and Israel to whom the servants of God in their divine missions came.

They thought Elijah was far too severe; Elisha too gentle; Samuel too strict; and Jeremiah too sad. John the Baptist had a devil because he did not eat; Christ had a devil because he did eat. Truly it is not possible to please the old man.

When a president of our nation is elected and inaugurated, he is quite popular for a month or so. Then come the uprisings of the old man in the people who proceed to find fault, criticize, judge and doom until the quadrennium is over. Washington himself did not escape. Many were his enemies and great the clamor against him. He now being dead is quite popular.

Every new pastor stands in high favor with all the congregation until after the first sermon. One true message from the pulpit will, however, bring the old man up and out in force against him in the form of a company whose feelings he has hurt.

How graciously the evangelist is received; and how every face beams on him before the first service, and ere his artillery has been heard and felt. So many desire to be introduced to him. A number want to tell him how badly he is needed, and how they prayed for his coming. But lo! after one or two searching gospel messages, they fall away from him, as did the disciples from the Savior when He preached that great holiness sermon in the gospel of John.

In one of my meetings a man said to me after I had preached on the Baptism with the Holy Ghost, “If that is the blessing you have described, I haven’t got it.” I preached next on heart purity, and he said, “If that is the experience, I haven’t the blessing.” I preached on perfect love; and he said with a dark face and gruff speech, “If this is holiness, I have never received it.” I preached on abiding inward rest, and with poorly concealed anger, he said, “According to your preaching I haven’t got anything.” Poor fellow, he did have something, and that was the old man. It was this that made him kick at every sermon. Other people in the audience who had the experience of holiness, received strength and comfort, and rejoiced over the very utterances and truths which had so offended him. Truly we cannot please the old man.

Once at a certain town the people raised a great commotion at having been kept too long in the service. Then next evening I told them they could leave as soon as we began the altar work, and behold they stirred up a still greater racket at not being allowed to stay longer.

The words of Christ came home when I heard of the grumbling: “Whereunto shall I liken this generation. We pipe and they will not dance, we mourn and they will not lament.” If we keep them in the church they do not like it, and if we permit them to retire earlier they are angry over that. Verily, verily we cannot please the old man.

When a child I have seen the cook wring, or chop off a chicken’s head, and then I have stood nearby profoundly interested and impressed at the sight of the bouncing and flouncing of the headless body of the barnyard fowl. As the bird had no head to direct its movements, there was considerable convulsive activity, but no harmony or consistency of movement. The poor, misguided or rather unguided body seemed to charge at every point of the compass. There was never any certainty as to what would be the next direction of the jerking, jumping bunch of feathers and claws. Here it would come tumbling and fluttering where no one expected it, and there would be a consequent agitation and scatteration among the bystanders.

In recalling this domestic scene of the past, I suddenly remembered that Paul’s synonym and additional name for the old man is a body of sin.” He did not say a “head of sin,” but “body.”

Maybe there is a significance in this figure that men do not at once perceive and appreciate. Certainly sin itself in its stupendous follies, in its short-sightedness, and no-sightedness, appears to have no sense, or head on its shoulders. God himself has spoken of the ignorance, foolishness and insanity of sin. It seems to have no head, but is just a tumbling, floundering, convulsive old body.

Just as certainly then we can account for the bouncings and general flounderings around of the old man. The poor thing has no head! It is simply a nervous fly-about and fly-to-pieces old body! We never know where it is going to flop next. It hits yonder, and strikes out here, and whirls back there, and lunges over this way, and plunges back that way, until many stand amazed and dazed, and almost crazed.

If the old man was not so mean and hateful; his kaleidoscopic changes, boxing the compass, acrobatic stunts and vaudeville versatility would be really entertaining. But the show and circus the old man puts up, admission free, brings such discomfort and even terror, as we see the snake getting out of his box, the gorilla breaking his chain, and the lion escaping from his cage, that all, with any regard for their own peace of mind and the rights and comfort of others, prefer to hold aloof from the menagerie exhibition, and study zoology, especially the headless kind, at home.

But still this free show of the headless body, which is the old man, tumbling around and knocking people right and left, is to be beheld at home as well as in public. Some of the most remarkable bodily exercises of this kind can be viewed under the sacred shadows of the family roof tree. Of course if company is announced the concluding services are finished at a later hour!

Then it is most edifying to see the motions of this headless sin-nature thing in the Ladies’ Aid Society. Behold a certain woman was mad because she was not elected president; then mad again because of the way she was elected next time; then mad again because not reelected; then worse mad because her friends let her stay mad; and then mad with herself because she was mad. And finally mad, because she was mad that she was mad!

What an interesting book could be written on this line if we studied the movements of the carnal mind in every realm and department of life. The title should be “The Antics of the Old Man;” and the sub-title, “Or The Flounderings of the Headless Spiritual Chicken.”

Among the many instances that recur to my mind of the cuttings up and the queer ways of the headless body, or the old man, I select one which occurred in San Francisco.

The pastor of a large city church invited me to hold a two weeks’ meeting for him. He sent the invitation, as afterward appeared, mainly to please a prominent holiness woman. Here was antic number one.

After the invitation he purposely neglected meeting the preacher at the boat pier. This was a flop in another direction. Antic number three was to allow the evangelist to find out for himself at what hotel he was to be entertained. A fourth movement was a formal freezing call of less than five minutes. A fifth plunge was not only neglect but a refusal to advertise the meeting in the papers that the public might attend.

A sixth movement was to sit in the choir and whisper and laugh in a suppressed manner with the young people there. The choir was like a huge box in mahogany with sides rising so high that when the singers sat down nothing could be seen but the tips of some rooster tail feathers and ostrich plumes. These just beheld above the walls of the “Song Box” revealed in their various quick movements and different agitations that a lively time was going on there, though hidden in the main from the audience. The reader can well imagine the mental and spiritual suffering of the evangelist at this sixth jerk and plunge of the old man through the person of the pastor of a large city church.

The seventh jump of the headless body was seen next morning, when the pastor told me that it would be impossible for him to attend the ten o’clock Monday service as he had a sick parishioner and must visit him. This particular leap or flop the old man repeated six times that week. On Tuesday the invalid was no better. On Wednesday he was worse. On Thursday still worse, so that the pastor could not possibly attend the morning meeting. On Friday the man died, and the pastor had to visit the family and comfort them. Saturday the corpse was buried, and so the preacher was again absent from the services going on in his own church.

In recalling this circumstance and comparing it with other events, I do not remember to have ever seen or heard of a man that was as diligently and faithfully used, as the pastor of this Southern Methodist church utilized this sick member to keep away from a holiness meeting. In a word I never saw the old man manipulate a sick, dying and dead man as actively and purposefully as he did this humble member of a great city congregation.

Thus far there had been thirteen antics cut up by the old man in our restless and disturbed brother in the ministry. But this same headless body had not exhausted its program of stunts and so executed a few more, and all in the same individual.

One evening at church the pastor appeared with his large, handsome mustache cut off. The next day he bought and wore a pair of blue goggles. He was so transformed that a number of his members were aghast. Asked if anything was the matter with his eyes, he said no, he liked the color. Perhaps he felt blue!

In addition to all this he kept in his pocket a bag of peppermint drops, and was crunching away on them continually, in the house of God, and everywhere he went.

I heard one of his leading lady members say, “I don’t know what to make of the conduct of Dr. B_____; he acts like he is beside himself.”

Standing on the front steps of the church with him at the close of the night service of the sixth day, he, with his mustache gone, his goggles on and crunching away at the peppermint drops, was gazing upward at the western sky where a young moon three days old was hanging its silver crescent over the Pacific.

The pastor seemed about to speak, and I listened for some beautiful sentiment or some religious thought happily and strongly expressed, for he was a very gifted man; when instead he uttered the following words:

“Humph! Don’t that new moon look curious? It looks just like a slice of cantaloupe!”

I walked away without a word, and about hopeless as to his seeing, much less obtaining the great blessing.

But meantime God was working not only on the man’s conscience and soul, but moving him by the sight of the great work going on in his own church, and the additional fact that his best members were sweeping into the experience which he had declared he did not believe in.

The first week day meeting on Monday morning had only twelve in attendance. So the pastor despised the day of small things and visited the sick man. But on Tuesday there were seventy people present. On Wednesday over two hundred. Each succeeding day saw a steady increase; so on Saturday, the seventh morning of the meeting, the pastor, having finished with the sick man, who was now dead and buried and could not be utilized any more, walked into his church to confront an audience of nearly five hundred people.

The holiness sermon which he heard dug up the already unhappy running Jonah. Then came a prayer from the evangelist which offended him, as he thought it reflected on his consecration as a minister of the gospel. And so that headless body, or the old man, cut up one more antic. It came in the form of a loud, commanding tone:

“Doctor Carradine, will you allow me to lead in prayer, sir?”

“Certainly,” I replied.

Then followed a number of rolling periods of supplication, given in the most felicitous way as to choice and striking language, and as only a man of superior intellect, eloquence and great gifts could offer. It was delightful to hear such a beautiful and impressive intellectual offering as he was lifting up to Heaven — when suddenly the man faltered, hesitated, and broke down! God had met him and as quickly unhorsed him as He did Saul of Tarsus. In another minute I heard sobs, the sound of weeping, while with soul thrilling cries to the Lord, the preacher confessed his unworthiness, laid his all on the altar, pleaded for acceptance, begged in Christ’s name for the Baptism with the Holy Ghost and fire, and while he was agonizing in language that a raptured David might employ, God met him again and gave him what he asked for.

There was a great shout of joy, and the next moment I saw the handsome fellow leaning against the wall, glasses gone, candy gone, moral perverseness gone, with his face lighted up with a holy peace and triumph, while scores of his congregation stood around him, some laughing, some weeping, some shouting and all rejoicing.

God electrocuted the old man in Brother B_____’s case after its rendering of the seventeenth antic.

Chapter 7: Two Remarkable Subjects of Grace

In one of my meetings in New Mexico, two men who were citizens in the place, were touched in different ways by the revival and furnished a couple of lessons to be found in this chapter.

Number One had been an outbreaking sinner for years. He did what seemed to him good, and of course that good was bad. He drank steadily, and would punctuate and emphasize even that kind of life with what intemperate men call big drunks.

His wife was as godly as he was ungodly. Her love for him and devotion to Heaven went hand in hand. If her heart had not been made of something like India rubber, the man to whom she was wedded would certainly have broken it with his carousals and the shame and suffering that he by this course threw upon her.

But she held on to God for the transgressor, and hoped and prayed for his change for over fifteen years. Meanwhile the husband, in his course of iniquity, derived a certain kind of consolation from the fact that while he was sinning, his wife was praying for him. Awful to state, this consciousness that a good woman whom the Lord loved was living in supplication for him, actually sustained him in his guilty course. He somehow felt safe in his wicked career. He reasoned that the Lord would not strike him down through his wife’s petitions and tears, and so he made a pious wife a shield for an impious husband. Under cover of her godliness he practiced ungodliness.

Translated in unmistakable language his conduct would have read, “Wife, I want you to pray on, while I drink on. You shelter me with your prayers while I go on breaking the commandments of God.”

Let me say right here that I have beheld the greatest abundance of this kind of doing in the land today. Men who are running from duty, riding on Sunday trains, dodging the church and revival services, drinking on the sly, and breaking the commandments generally; and yet comforted and sustained in such a life with the thought of a devoted wife at home praying for them. On the other hand we have women that are as signally failing in the duties of wife, mother, daughter and member of the church of Christ, yet trusting that their existence of duplicity and iniquity will be overlooked through the faithfulness of a consecrated father or husband.

Doubtless God does spare some on account of others. Doubtless there are cases where the tare is allowed to remain because of the presence of the wheat in the same social and domestic clod. But think of one using the faithfulness of a child of God to protect the misdoings of a follower of the devil.

In the revival I speak of, the wife of the perverse man got sanctified, and with the coming of the great new joy, every burden left her, and with them all the worry, grief and concern about her husband. She actually seemed to forget that she had possessed such a life load and old man of the woods as he had been to her.

Moreover, the man himself marked this happy change, this bright, joyous spirit, and especially this forgetfulness of himself with great chagrin. It was not soothing to his vanity to be so completely set aside, nor comfortable to his feelings to be allowed to press on his way to hell unnoticed and unlamented.

So one day the joy-overflowing woman was putting on her hat, preparatory to coming to an afternoon meeting I had appointed, when the gloomy-browed husband asked her where she was going. She replied, “To the afternoon meeting.” His rejoinder was, “Don’t forget to pray for me.”

The radiant-faced woman turned from the lookingglass to him, and said, “George, for fifteen years I have been breaking my heart over you, and wearing out soul and body in praying and agonizing over you and your sinful life. I want you to know today that I am done with it all. If you have made up your mind to do wrong and go to hell, you will have to do so. I have washed my hands of the whole matter, and turned you over to God. I refuse to be burdened any longer about you. I am going to Heaven glad and happy every moment from this hour.”

The man’s amazement at first was unspeakable, and then gave way to consternation. Why, here his life shelter was gone. His license to sin, so to speak, was lost. His shield between him and an offended God had been knocked down.

Rising up, he stretched forth a detaining hand as she was leaving the room, and said in a frightened, awestruck voice, “Wife, let us kneel down together here, and pray.”

In the same meeting was case number two. A man lived in the town for whom his wife and her mother had been praying for twenty years. He drank steadily, used tobacco immoderately, swore continuously, never darkened a church door, and seemed to have made up his mind to be lost. Absorbed in politics, bound up with lodges, he had left no time in which to prepare his soul for judgment and eternity. Among other things I heard of him was that he took fourteen secular and political newspapers, and read them all diligently and devotedly.

The two women prayed on with now and then a hope fluttering in the heart, but usually a kind of dull despair over the case.

My meeting opened, and the man came from curiosity. He heard of some of the illustrations of the preacher with an overcoat and chair, and came to behold the unusual proceeding himself.

Not an illustration was used that night, but the sermon, full of solemn thought and convicting power, reached his soul, and he awoke from the sleep of a lifetime.

The next night he was powerfully converted. Five days later he was tremendously sanctified. I use the word tremendous in the endeavor to convey to the mind of the reader the clearness, brightness, gladness and thoroughness of the work of grace that he received that day. It took him completely out of the hospital. I never heard of his returning to the repair shop. He became an “Inhabitant of the Rock,” and had nothing more to do with the grounds in any and every sense of the word.

I do not remember ever to have seen a clearer case of holiness received and lived. The man’s face literally beamed with light. His every breath was one of prayer or praise. He seemed saturated with the presence of God, and talked religion and only religion to everybody and all the time.

I met him again six weeks after the meeting, and in that time he had read the whole Bible through once, and the New Testament through three times. He had also completed the lives of Carvosso and Hester Ann Rogers. The staple of his conversation was Christ first, and after Him, Moses, Joshua, Carvosso and Hester Ann Rogers. He refused to be led away into conversations and discussion about polities, war, crops or anything else. His eye would wander, his manner become abstracted, and then suddenly he would break into the talk in a musing tone and with reverent, awe-struck speech — “Wasn’t that wonderful that Jesus did; or that Jesus said!”

A day spent with this man in a trip across the country, made the writer richer forever with the inspiration and strength given him through the grace, goodness and unwavering piety and devotion of a brand that had been so recently plucked from the burning.

But what about the two women who had prayed so long for the salvation of the wicked husband and son-in-law?

The reader will scarcely be able to credit it, but they were displeased and highly indignant.

They were glad over the conversion for a few hours, but when they saw the subject of their twenty-year prayers, not only leave sin, but sweep past them in the regenerated life, consecrate all to God, which they would not do, and seek holiness at the altar which they again refused to do, and more than that, get the blessing, and still more, live the life before them — they were first disgusted and then became furious.

Not only was Othello’s occupation gone in their case, but the one they had prayed for so long had, in a week’s time, so far outstripped them, had become so much bigger than Othello himself, that the Othello, or, rather, the Old Fellow in them, known in the Bible as the “Old Man,” was irritated, exasperated and generally infuriated — and our two friends, the praying wife and mother-in-law, were plainly, to every eye, both outdone and undone.

The solution and explanation of this last case is so evident to all in the light of full salvation that I need not give it. The lesson to be drawn, however, is that it is well when regenerated people beg God to cast the devil out of sinners, not to fail to ask him to take the “old man” out of themselves.

Chapter 8: Unusual Scenes

The solemnity and order in the worship of God is very beautiful to the eye, and grateful to the hearts of many of God’s children.

I often wish in some of our democratic and almost mobocratic meetings that the reverence we mark and approve in certain churches, could be introduced into our gatherings.

The temple ritual ordained of God was evidently most solemn and impressive. And when we recollect how the angels veil their faces before Him in Heaven, and then mark the flippancy of speech and almost clownishness of conduct in some of our services, we are made to marvel and do a lot of serious and regretful thinking.

Still I have to admit that in services full of confusion, and lacking in the elements of order that I have mentioned, I have beheld some of the most astounding scenes of divine power, and seasons of grace.

I have repeatedly beheld the Spirit come down upon ignorance, uncouthness, awkwardness and heaviness and roll a tide of salvation over the audience.

Not only have I seen the divine glory which once shone in a temple of marble and gold, blaze in its fullest splendor from a rickety clap-board pulpit, and around an altar made of split logs and wooden slabs, and up and down a straw covered aisle lined by puncheon seats; but the same Holy One who shone amid the cherubim, pour the same effulgence on plain, unlettered men and women without rank, wealth, earthly station or personal comeliness.

In addition to all this I beheld a celestial honor paid a meeting, a heavenly outpouring granted a service where not only many things were lacking that would have been desirable in worship, but even blunders abounded.

Evidently God looks on the heart, sees deeper than we do, and under uncomeliness and awkwardness and even ignorance, beholds honesty of heart, and a whole desire to please Him; and so the Spirit falls with power on the humble audience under the brush arbor, and holds aloof from a congregation regarded as refined and cultivated, assembled in a pillared, spired and galleried cathedral costing a million dollars.

Truly, God’s ways are not like the ways of men. He seems hungry for genuine affection, and seeks everywhere for those who want Him supremely and who would worship Him in spirit and in truth.

It is with Him, I doubt not, as it is with us; for it is not the grace and elegance of a child who waits upon us that satisfies and delights us, but the fact that it loves us and is glad to be near us and to minister unto us. We care little for awkwardness and blunders made in the service of our children, when we see the love beaming in their eyes, and the devotion manifest in their lives.

In one of my meetings there seemed to be an utter absence of musical talent. Not a woman on the ground seemed to be able to read music. Several could pick out a few gospel hymns of the ancient order of “Hold the Fort,” etc.

A dozen singers, so called, would gather around the hesitating performer, and clustering in a knot, and some bending over the excited organist to read the words of the hymn, and with children running in and out among the singers, and dogs lying on the platform listening to the caterwauling going on, it all made a scene that would have been laughable in the extreme, but for the unmistakable earnestness as well as goodness of the little group who were doing the best they could.

And how the Lord smiled upon and blessed them; how their faces shone with spiritual light; and how my own soul was warmed, melted and made happy at the scene before me.

In this meeting I beheld over fifty souls regenerated and sanctified, and yet I know of great cathedrals and beautiful temples of worship, where the singing is said to be magnificent, and that at every service, and yet these congregations never witness a single case of salvation from the beginning to the end of the year.

In another meeting, after the conclusion of a deeply convicting sermon on inbred sin and full salvation, I called for seekers, and a man came running up the aisle and fell with such force and momentum on top of the tall altar rail as to go clear over, heels over head, and was sanctified as he struck the floor full length, inside the chancel. He rose instantly, shouting the praises of God.

Long months afterwards a gentleman who witnessed the scene, meeting us in his community, asked me if I remembered what I said when the occurrence took place.

I had to assure him, that other happenings had crowded out the recollection. Then with a smile he said, “You stood with folded arms watching the brother as he revolved over the altar rail and fell flat on his back, while the blessing at the same second filled his soul, and he leaped up with a shout. You said, turning to the laughing, crying audience, ‘That is the first man I ever saw who threw a somersault and landed in the middle of Canaan.”

Truly God has not laid down rules of graceful and dignified bearing for successful entrance into Beulah Land. Lovely positions, beautiful folding of the hands, the impressive bending of the knee, the thoughtful three fingers on the alabaster forehead, the seraphic gaze at a knothole in the roof of the rustic tabernacle, or at the stained upper windows of the costly sanctuary; all of these, charming and picture-like as they may be, I see utterly discounted at many of my revival meetings where people fall on the ground, roll in the straw, and with sighs, tears, and groans, fairly pitch and tumble into Canaan land.

Our brother’s “somersault” into the Kingdom of Perfect Love was doubtless quite an absurd spectacle to a lot of cultured and worldly wise people, but God understood it all, and as an act it certainly laid in the shade, and put to discount, many other styles and efforts in seeking the blessing that no matter how full of grace and dignity, yet had borne no fruit, and obtained no victory.

In still another meeting held in a good sized town of Arkansas in the Method church, a dozen men, all in the experience of holiness but one, came down from the mountains in two wagons to attend the services. The twelfth man, a friend and neighbor, the eleven brought with them to get the blessing.

The brethren brought some provisions and bedding in their vehicles, and renting a small empty house, prepared to enjoy the meetings in full.

On the first night of the services I saw them all ranged in a double row on one side of the church, listening intently and eagerly to the sermon.

One of the first to come to the altar at the conclusion of the discourse was the twelfth, of whom I have spoken. At once the eleven followed and stood grouped around him waiting for him to get the blessing.

In about ten minutes the man who was already ripe and ready for the experience swept with a loud, glad cry into Canaan.

In the next second, the eleven men, so to speak, fell on him. All wanted to embrace him in their simple, honest-hearted joy. As one would turn him loose another would lay hold on him, and the spectacle presented to the amazed congregation was that of a dozen long bearded men with red faces and loud cries engaged in what looked like a wrestling match!

The congregation, perfectly unused to any sights and sounds of salvation, and spiritually dead as a membership, sat astounded and dumbfounded over the exceedingly lively scene going on before them. Many looked panic-stricken and appeared ready to run. Some did run. That tangle of waving arms, floating beards, crimson countenances, and glad cries of praise and salvation as they swung each other around, utterly oblivious of the petrified town audience, was entirely too much for them. They doubtless were glad to escape from the presence of such lunatics with their lives.

At the conclusion of the service, the pastor, who had been much exercised over the scene, walked back to the parsonage in company with his wife and containing himself with great difficulty. Just as they reached their gate, the preacher said:

“I tell you, wife, that altar affair was terrific!”

In an instant the wise woman laid her hand upon the husband’s arm and replied:

“Not a word, husband. Do not dare to criticize those men and that scene. God was in it, and God is in them.”

Several days afterward when the preacher got the blessing himself he related the yard gate occurrence, and with filling eyes, said:

“I thank God for such a wife as the Lord has given me. Neither of us had the blessing of sanctification when the meeting began. But she was more spiritual than I was, saw more deeply and understood better the workings of the Spirit of God, and saved me at a very critical time. I firmly believe that but for her restraint and counsel at the time, I would have been led into criticism, fault-finding and wrong judgment of good men and the work of the Holy Ghost; would have gotten into darkness of mind and hardness of heart, and not only lost this beautiful, precious blessing God has given me, but perhaps finally Heaven itself.”

It would be well indeed for every man if he had such a wife as this man possessed. It was well for him as it proved then and afterwards. And it was well for the church where the protracted services were held. For in spite of the opening scene which so many dreaded in its effect on the town, God sent a gracious revival to the community in which over one hundred souls were regenerated, reclaimed and sanctified.

Chapter 9: Common Sense

The Savior spoke of the wisdom of the children of this world; that is, in pushing their plans, and carrying on their works, they study methods and men, choose right instruments, watch opportunities, and abound in what the Lord calls the wisdom of this world. Some would call it good common sense, tact, skill and energy.

It is remarkable how this quality, or practice, seems to be lacking in many of God’s people. Such is their shortsightedness and failure in this regard, that the church would have gone down long ago, if it had not had omnipotence back of it to counteract its lack of thought and good judgment.

The situation and architecture of many of our church buildings will throw light upon what I mean. As a rule the fact of eligible and commanding situation seems to escape most of the trustees and committees, and cheapness seems to be the great desideratum. So we all recall the house of worship in the middle of the block, dark and poorly ventilated, shut out from public view so completely that it required skill to find the building.

In addition to this could be written a small volume of the unfortunate location of the pulpit, the absence of an altar, the doors opening where they should not, the windows constructed so as not to lower, etc., etc.

I preached in a large stone church once where the only ventilation was through a kind of bull’s eye sixty feet above the floor; and in another where there was no provision whatever for the introduction of pure and the expulsion of a dead atmosphere. The breath of departed stewards, trustees, preachers and presiding elders seemed to be held sacred, and gathered and preserved there in a kind of embalmed state for the delectation of the generations coming on.

Somehow I thought that when people were sanctified they would get more knowledge and wisdom. There would be an illumination of mind accompanying the great, tender love of heart that would help in devising and executing for the salvation of souls.

Yet these are some of the things I have been called upon repeatedly to notice and lament. No system in seating an audience at county and state conventions, and no arrangement or provision whatever for keeping order after service has begun.

In some camps dogs are allowed to roam in and out on the platform and off, at their own sovereign will and pleasure.

Babies are permitted full right of way, in most of our meetings in the summer, and especially at the less notable camps. I have seen a thousand people kept in mental torture for an hour by several yelling babies, as they strove in vain to hear and keep up in a connected way with the discourse of the preacher.

Who believes that the “children of the world” would allow such interruptions in their assemblies, lecture halls, and places of amusement.

The placid expression of some of these mothers has been a study to me, as in the midst of the screams and cries of their offspring they never seemed to have imagined that any one was being disturbed by the uproar.

Once only I saw a mother rise to the situation and come to the help of the public, when worn out herself with what was plainly bad temper and a forced kind of crying on the part of the child, she suddenly arose and retired about ten feet from the tabernacle, and gave that youngster a spanking that neither he, she, nor the audience will ever forget. The castigation inflicted by the maternal hand took place on the side of a neighboring hill which, acting as a kind of sounding board, threw the echoes all over the tent. I will never forget the pleased look of the congregation. Any one could see from the position of their eyes, and the actual movement of their ears that they were not listening to the preacher but keeping up with and drinking in the sounds from the hillside. There was such a pleasant expression on every face that it looked like a kind of ocular amen.

At one of my summer camps I found a large bucket of water sitting on the platform in full view of the audience. Of course the very sight of such an object on a warm day will make people think they are thirsty whether they are or not. And so I sat and watched in dismay the remarkable procession of men, women, and especially children, who came up one by one while the preacher was preaching, and who drank, wiped their mouths, cleared their throats and returned to their seats evidently much refreshed.

I recalled Dr. Levy ‘s famous camp-meeting reminiscence where, by accident (?) he let fall a small quantity of asafetida into the bucket of water, and then there followed soon after the most remarkable spluttering demonstration on the part of a band of boys and country youths who had become thirsty during the sermon, that had ever before been witnessed in a country congregation.

I hardly need add that the offending bucket was given a wide berth after that by all the other chronic drinkers, to the great relief and amusement of the preacher.

Not having any asafetida to drop in the vessel, I deliberately went forward and, David-like, poured the water on the ground before the people. This I solemnly did for three days, until at last it seemed to occur to the board of managers that one of the things not wanted in a religious service of two hours was a bucket of water. It seemed to dawn on them that if the speaker himself could do without drinking for that length of time, the audience might do the same. Perhaps also they discovered that there was such a thing as a mental connection between a preacher and his congregation, and, when established, it was most desirable that it should be kept intact, and not broken into, and that repeatedly by thoughtless parties imagining themselves thirsty.

I wonder if a lawyer could ever convince a jury or win a case, or save the life of a prisoner if he was interrupted as ruthlessly, and systematically, and perpetually as are evangelists on many of our camp grounds.

In our courts of law the speaker is protected by the sheriff and his deputies, and the slightest murmur in the building brings forth the word “silence in court,” and if persisted in pulls down the heavy hand of authority. In large or small assemblies of the world, either in business or recreation, if any one rises up between the speaker, actor and audience at once the cry is raised, “Sit down,” and if not promptly obeyed there comes a small hurricane of hisses.

But what are all the ends in view of these gatherings, as compared with the object of a Gospel meeting, where God’s Word is being preached, and the interests and destinies of immortal souls are being settled forever. And yet what place and hour seems to be more subject to interruption of every kind.

There are numerous other instances of a lack of proper worldly wisdom in running our conventions and camp-meetings, but my chapter limits allow me to mention but one, and that is the unfortunate location of some of our meetings. In describing that feature I would have to use the following expressions, remoteness, out of the way, difficult of access, and very hard to find.

Here are several cases that come at once to my mind out of many others that I could mention. One was where the tent was pitched by the side of a livery stable and back of a large public building. Another meeting was held on a plot of ground a mile from town, with not a single shade-tree in the enclosure to protect from the burning sun, and the one visible connection with the town being a street car which ran about once an hour. I looked in vain all over the town for a single placard or poster on wall or in store window, of the meeting, but not one could I discover.

In the integrity of their heart and innocency of their minds some holiness people get in a corner, some out of the way place and wonder why everybody does not find them at once.

I was called once to lead the camp of a County Holiness Association; was told it was to be in, or near the edge of a city of twenty thousand people. That was all I had as the leader of the camp to go by. There were no notices in the post office and no bills on the street cars, or in the store windows. I was driven to a kind of exploration or hunt.

After several hours of tramping around, I came back into the heart of the city, and hired a youth to help me find the site and encampment. Finally after a great deal of inquiring on his part, and tramping around by both of us, beyond an old field full of jimson weed across a creek and over in the center of a little wooded island, we ran across one small white sleeping tent, and near by, sitting on a log was a man who seemed lost in reverie.

Lifting my voice I cried out, “Is this the Blank County Holiness Association?” He replied calmly, looking over his shoulder, “Yes.”

I rejoined, “Is this all of you?” He answered, “There will be more of us tomorrow.”

And so there was; and in spite of the small looking beginning, and in face of the non-advertising and placarding, God in His kindness and mercy helped the people to find us, and at last with sixteen tents, a large tabernacle and a hungry crowd in attendance, we had a blessed meeting of genuine salvation with a goodly company of souls brightly, powerfully and fully saved.

But truly if we did not have the truth, and God with us and in us and on our side, the holiness movement would have gone down long ago under the mistakes, blunders, lack of method, absence of foresight, in a word want of common sense of its own people.

Chapter 10: Hard Nights

Every preacher and evangelist sooner or later becomes well acquainted with what might be called “Hard Nights.”

At such a time everything seems to move heavily. The morning and the afternoon services may have been free, unctuous and delightful, salvation flowing and saints rejoicing. Everyone seems to expect that there will be a great “break” by night. The anticipated victory is mentioned in prayer in the tents and in brief salutations on the camp meeting streets. Judging from the gracious services of the day, all naturally suppose there will be a grand triumph and general going to pieces of the opposition and crowd at the coming evening gathering.

But as the people assemble they soon become conscious of something depressing and heavy, something unfavorable and resisting in the very air. The atmosphere is close and sticky, prayers are lifeless, wrong hymns are selected and numerous mistakes of all kinds are made. Announcements are not given clearly or are suddenly remembered and inserted at the wrong time here and there. The organist is late, and somebody raises a hymn that nobody knows. Late comers are later than ever. A half dozen babies get to crying, while dogs abound, several of them preferring the pulpit as a place of observation.

When the preacher comes from his knees in the tent to the platform he almost instantly feels the peculiar deadening and also distracting influence. He knows he is going to have an uphill time, in other words, a “hard night.”

And so it proves from beginning to finish, things drag and go wrong. People look sleepy or glum; the penitents are in a kind of sullen despair and will not open their lips; somebody scolds in exhortation; or cuts and slashes and abuses in prayer; and at the melancholy close of the service The people go moodily to their tents with a sense of defeat in their spirits.

One of these nights was witnessed by the writer when he was a young preacher. The presiding elder was conducting a meeting, and on the third night after some success in the day service, that strange heavy season already described came upon the entire audience. Everything went wrong. The people looked dull and stupid, the preacher was sharp and cutting in his announcements and scolded in his sermon. Besides this, he had no liberty of speech and labored in his discourse. After this he blistered the assembly some more.

No one came to the altar at the close of the sermon, for the invitation was more like a command and threat than a Gospel call; and so quite angry the speaker told them he had done all he could for them and they would not be saved, and now they could all go to hell for what he cared.

He next attempted to sit on the end of the altar rail, but missed it, and came down in a sitting posture with a crash upon the floor. Perfectly crimson with mortification and anger, he got up in the midst of the poorly suppressed amusement of the audience and cried out: “The Devil seems to be in everything tonight.”

Meetings with all kinds of untoward happenings are familiar to evangelists, and as they came in their strange order in my evangelistic life, I was once much alarmed over them, and would act with corresponding unwisdom. It was quite a while before I had the satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon of heaviness and deadness, and could then, with a brave heart, confident spirit of trust in Christ, and with a more experienced head, conduct the meeting through the trying hour or hours to victory and a proper conclusion.

It would fill chapters upon chapters to describe these “hard nights.” One in particular out of many recollections I select as having been a severe test in the earlier part of my public work.

I was holding a meeting in a Kansas town. One night, Bible in hand, I came fresh from my knees into the tabernacle and felt almost instantly we were going to have a hard fight and dreadful pull.

The first thing I observed was the sleepy appearance of the audience. Many looked jaded and worn out from previous meetings that had been frequent and long. A self-appointed brother attempted to lead the singing, but sang in what is called “flat,” and would, with each new stanza, begin in a different key. With no natural ear for music and unable to read a single note, he succeeded in producing a wonderful amount of confusion as well as amusement in place of melody. His own ignorance of his mistakes added greatly to the mirth of the young people.

Then the very man in whom the people had least confidence said, “Let us pray,” and sprinkled his supplication with Latin quotations.

It would be tedious to tell how many things went wrong that night; how the altar service dragged; and no one would pray, although we repeatedly made the request, while the Christian “workers” either had their heads near the floor or were hanging on the altar rail looking like so many lifeless sacks of meal swung across the wooden beam, head hanging down on one side and heels on the other.

No one wanted to pray; and quavering hymns that were started died a few seconds after their birth.

Sinners and backsliders sat or stood upright on the back benches presenting a kind of pyramid of animal faces, stolid and insensible. A few were whispering and giggling, but most of the people presented countenances of stone. To crown all, a young country girl of seventeen with a gorgeous looking hat of red and yellow flowers and a bunch of feathers, evidently to show off her finery, walked across the tabernacle from one aisle to another in full view of everybody, and going too near a gasoline torch on the center-pole, had her artificial roses and cornstalk blossoms to catch fire. Instantly a flame leaped up the size of a hand, while the girl, all unconscious of her consuming and perishing toggery, walked serenely through the benches to the goal she had in view.

Most of the Christians, being bowed down at the altar, did not sec the flaming spectacle, but the sinners took it all in with immense enjoyment. Suddenly a lady beheld the catastrophe and rushing to the girl, said in a voice that could be heard all over the building, “Why, Mandy, your hat is on fire.” Whereupon the girl, with a swift movement of her hand, whipped off the straw affair and gave it a tambourine beating that seemed to perfectly convulse the crowd that was massed in the rear.

Meantime I writhed in spirit as well as in body and fairly groaned, as marking all this combination and concatenation of events, I cried out with my face bowed on the altar rail, “Oh, Lord, what will the adversary do next?” And then began pleading for deliverance and victory.

And it came. In less than ten minutes after the last discouraging circumstance, God swept to the relief of His distressed people, the fire fell, souls were saved and sanctified, and the shout of victory rang through and all over the camp.

To the question what produces these hard nights, there are several answers.

One explanation is to be found in the physical as well as mental exhaustion of the people. The strain and drain on mind, soul and body, the loss of sleep, the leakage of freshness and vitality through constant human presence, all these things are certain to tell in a few days on any audience.

Another explanation is to be found in over eating. If we evangelists ate as much before preaching as some of our hearers do before listening to the sermon, we would present to others, as they do to us, the upturned whites of the eyes, and become somnambulists in the pulpit. The process of digestion on a warm Sunday afternoon or night is a dreadful foe to the proper reception of the Gospel.

A third explanation is found in neglect of private prayer, and in too much social conversation, by which the soul is weakened and the heart becomes empty, listless and dull.

A fourth explanation of “hard nights” is found in many instances in the sudden arrival on the scene of battle of a new and larger force of devils.

The Adversary is not omniscient like God, nor is he omnipresent. He does not know all that is going on in different places where certain events are occurring; but I do not doubt that through his devil videttes, picket posts and emissaries he is finally informed as to what is transpiring adverse to his kingdom. So that a meeting may be going on for days before Satan knows it. If it is a Chautauqua, or a popular kind of gospel service or camp meeting, he gives it no attention. So all such gatherings have no knowledge or acquaintance of the “hard night” experience about which I am writing. It is the devil’s interest to let them alone, as they are doing him no harm.

But when the Evil One is informed that a genuine work of grace is taking place, that the gospel in its fullness is being preached, that the eradication of the Old Man, Holiness by faith in the blood of Christ, is being presented and received with great demonstrations from Heaven, then it is that he sends a brigade or division of devils flying earthward with all speed to such a meeting or camp or church, to counteract the effect, hinder the work, discourage, distress and oppress God’s people and in every way to oppose and undo the revival.

So I have no doubt in mind that the majority of instances of “hard nights” can be properly explained by the sudden arrival of a legion or phalanx of devils. It is their dark, baleful presence which gives the heavy feeling in worship, produces restlessness and inattention in the young, while at the same time causing a drag in the hymns, a lifelessness in prayer, a paralysis in testimony, a scolding tone in the sermon and unfortunate happenings during service of every kind.

I have often seen preacher and layman alike utterly mistake the character of the night and the cause of the trouble, and heard them pray against it from the standpoint of this mistaken conception. They said “the Spirit of God had been grieved away,” or that “there was an Achan in the camp,” etc., etc., when the fact was that a fresh corps of devils had arrived on the scene and commenced work.

But, thank God, victory can be had even on these trying occasions. Grace is farther reaching than sin. Heaven is bigger than hell. And Christ is mightier than Satan. There should be no discouragement, and, above all, no despair at such times on the part of God’s people. Neither should there be any scolding or faultfinding, but simply a patient waiting on the Lord in prayer, a steady exercise of faith, a leaning on and looking to Christ; when suddenly in the midst of our weakness and extremity the Spirit of God will descend upon us, a band of angels from the skies will be commissioned to rush down and sweep away the devils, and victory, beautiful, blessed, eye-filling, lip-overflowing, soul-warming and heart-thrilling victory, will come to us with the rush of a cyclone and the fall of a Niagara.

Chapter 11: Interruptions

It has always been the custom of the kingdom of darkness to interrupt the prophets and servants of God in their delivery of His messages. Knowing the power of truth, the effect of the divine Word on the heart, mind and conscience of hearers, the effort of the adversary is to hinder this work in various ways; especially by “breakings in” through human lips, and thereby diverting attention, and preventing the reception by the people of the sermon of instruction or warning that is being delivered.

So we see Micaiah called down as he was preaching the truth; Elisha mocked by the young people; John the Baptist repeatedly interrupted; Paul afflicted by outcries from the soothsaying damsel; while the Savior Himself was constantly besieged with the clamor of devils, with misguided interference, the bawling of a shallow-pated woman, and vociferous caviling questions of the Scribes, Sadducees and Pharisees These latter, with no desire for light and salvation, wished to stem the tide of truth which flowed from the lips of the great Teacher, and that was drawing the people from them to Him.

This kind of ecclesiastical ruffianism was of regular occurrence with John Wesley, while all heaven used full salvation evangelists, could write chapters if not volumes about the experience which I call “Interruptions.”

I believe that these violations of order come from the Pit. That even when the interrupter is confessedly a child of God, he is not in the Spirit of God, or truly led by Him, when with jocularity he diverts attention from great Gospel truths to his successful perpetration of a joke or funny remark. He has indeed secured a laugh from the crowd, but he has also drawn attention from Christ to himself, and from saving truth to a threadbare witticism, if it could be dignified by such a title.

I know that God is able to overrule all kinds of disturbances and interruptions, and will bring His servant out victoriously every time. But still I feel that when the Lord has given a message to His messenger, that then is the time for its delivery; and with faithfulness on the preacher’s part and prayerful attention on the side of the audience, a great and lasting result is certain to be the outcome.

True it is that I have beheld far greater results from the triumph God gave His servant over the hindrance and interruption which befell sermon and meeting, than otherwise would have been. Still this does not alter the fact I have stated, that the interruption itself originates in the pit below, or in carnality in some form on the earth.

The other blessed fact, however, remains, that God will see His messenger through in spite of every device of man and devil; in face of mistakes of friends, folly and vanity of thoughtless people, the wrath of human opposers on earth and the hate and rage of demons in hell.

This truth, strengthened and confirmed by many experiences of divine succor, deliverance and victory, makes the preacher and evangelist wonderfully tranquil and confident when he stands in pulpit or on platform, and confronts any character of crowd and of any size from five hundred to five thousand.

I can not begin to recall the numerous occasions when I have been “called down,” loudly contradicted, insultingly questioned, and furiously assailed in the midst of my sermons. High and low, learned and ignorant, male and female, have alike seen fit to break loose upon me as I held forth on the blackness of sin, or the sweetness, glory and power of Christ’s gift of full salvation.

But up to this hour I have never been carted away to the cemetery, nor spent a single moment in the hospital attending the wounds my assailants thought they had inflicted upon me.

As far as I can see, their weapons proved to be boomerangs returning on themselves; their bullets struck some kind of wall and rebounded on the shooter; and their bombshells exploded in their own cannon.

It has been my lot instead to lay flowers on the graves of many of these nervy belligerents; have visited and prayed with a number of them in the hospital; and beheld a still larger number without calls or engagements, while my own slate of appointments still runs from six to twelve months ahead, as it has done unbrokenly for nineteen years.

Certainly the messenger of God has no need to fear the wrath of man or dread the hate of devils, no matter in what shape or form it may be manifested.

I pass over the drawing of pistols, brandishing of clubs and repeated cursings of infuriated lips with which I have been treated. Also the more offensive forms of pulpit interruption, and mention those of a lighter character, some even smile-provoking. Out of a large number I write briefly of three.

Once while in the midst of a sermon on holiness, a local preacher highly connected by marriage in the church, suddenly arose and with a harsh, rasping voice said:

“Dr. C., is it not true that this doctrine you are preaching to us, destroyed one of the finest churches in Southern Methodism? If this be the case, what have we to expect here?”

Amidst a stillness in which it verily seemed as if a pin dropped could have been heard, I replied quietly:

“If leaving a church with packed pews and gallery; with finances above all previous records; and with salvation rolling at every service constitutes the destruction of a church, then I plead guilty.”

Oh! what a hearty response and loud amen went up from the audience before us. Then turning from the preacher to the congregation I said:

“All of you who believe that I am not preaching false doctrine, or anything hurtful to the true interests of the church, but God’s own blessed, glorious truth, stand on your feet!”

And behold the entire assembly, with hardly a dozen exceptions, sprang to their feet with amens and hallelujahs to God.

The local preacher looked utterly crushed. The next morning, full of pity, I called on him at his request. I treated him as though he had not tried to down me before the big crowd of the night before. He told me with tearful eyes and a broken voice that he wanted to make a public apology before the audience that night. I replied that I did not require it, but he insisted. I left him still humbled; but on going down town that morning he met some of those who had kept their seats the evening before under the vote. Those, with other holiness haters and fighters, knocked the contrition and humility out of him, and that night the “apology” was a kind of harangue and self-defense, and affairs stood pretty much as they did before.

A few nights afterwards this same local preacher constituted one of the “seven” who met on Millionaire avenue to arrange for the ecclesiastical decapitation of their pastor.

In a few months, according to the plans of this inner council, Bishop W. being high priest that year, I was duly beheaded. But inasmuch as Jesus Christ is a High Priest, above all priests and councils, and having all power in earth as well as in Heaven, I was instantly re-headed, and immediately found in other places declaring boldly and with great joy the power of the Son of God, not only to justify freely, but to sanctify wholly and to keep us from falling, world without end. Amen.

Another interruption took place one Sunday morning in a stately Southern church in Tennessee. The beautiful auditorium was packed, and I was discoursing on some of the manifestations of the old man or inbred sin left in the regenerate. I was speaking of impatience and irritability, when the wife of one of the leading stewards arose far back in the audience, and with a high feminine accent shot the angry words over the heads of four-fifths of the assembly to us in the pulpit:

“I protest against such preaching. There is no truth in it. My husband here by my side is a regenerated man, and a gentler, sweeter husband no woman ever had.”

She would have said more, but her anger choked her, and with a face looking like a red peony, and her bonnet shaking like a feather duster, she sat down using her fan like the sails of a windmill.

The woman in her excitement had overlooked the fact that I had carefully stated beforehand, and now restated, that not all the manifestations of carnality were in the same individual, but were varied and affected by disposition and temperament. Some in one person, and some in another.

So it was perfectly evident to the congregation, that while the husband might be free of the symptoms mentioned, they were strongly broken out in the case of the wife.

I saw at a glance over the audience that I had already won the day, and that the woman had mightily helped me to win it. Still I thought it best to fire one parting shot over the broken fortifications, and said in a quiet, good-humored tone:

“It is expected, my sister, that a wife will take up for her husband. They will do this even when the man is guilty. It is certainly very lovely in you to stand up for him as you have done. But according to the law you are an interested witness, and your testimony would count for nothing in a court of justice.”

There was general smiling all over the house; but the woman, evidently descended from Henry of England, never smiled again.

Poor woman! If she had known that in a few brief months the grass would be waving over her grave, I feel sure that her voice would not have been lifted up the last time in church, as it happened, in an attack on God’s servant, and upon the Blood which cleanseth from all sin.

Still another interruption occurred in the midst of a holiness sermon in Washington City, when I was going to the bottom of sin as well as the top of full salvation.

This time the disturber was a woman of sixty or seventy years of age, ignorant, narrow-minded, self-opinionated, and unable to follow the dissecting, revealing argument, she arose in disgust and wrath, and, lifting up her hand and shaking it angrily at me, cried out:

“I’m a Muth-er in Iss-rul, and won’t hyer no sech stuff. I shake the dust offen my feet and leave this meetin’.”

As her tongue kept going, and the aisle was long, I realized that the farewell address would necessarily be lengthy, so I rested against the pulpit, and witnessed the face-inflamed, shrill-voiced, departing valedictorian, confirmed more than ever in the truth of the doctrine of remaining sin or the “old man” in believers.

In respect for her gray hairs, and the sex she represented or rather misrepresented, I kept perfectly still. There was no need to say anything, for the woman was proving and illustrating to the audience what I had been arguing for nearly an hour. I had only to point my finger at this female, who was breaking commandment after commandment as she puffed and steamed for the door, and say, “That’s it!” when I have not the slightest doubt every one in the audience in their hearts or from their lips would have replied, “That’s so!”

The plan of the incensed female, who kept calling herself a “Muth-er in Iss-rul,” was to sweep out of the main door of the building, and so leave us as the prophets would be caught up and away from a doomed city.

But there were several doors at the entrance, and being so angered my interrupter made a mistake, and got into a general lumber room, where we could plainly hear her stumbling over boxes and barrels, groping for the outer door.

There was no such portal, so she had to reappear, and disappear again. But the fine acting was over. The heroics had departed. The vanishing form this time was not that of a prophetess, but a wilted female figure, most decidedly collapsed after falling into a trap which she had set and prepared to crush others.

Looking at the congregation I found every one wearing a broad smile. I could only trust myself to say:

“The devil often very kindly furnishes us free of charge, proofs and illustrations of the Gospel doctrine I preach. He has done so tonight. He has our thanks.”

I then resumed my subject; closed with an invitation to seekers; and had the altar filled in a minute’s time. A number swept through clearly and powerfully. And of all the services, this night’s meeting was considered and pronounced by every one to be the best and most victorious of the entire series.

Truly the promise of the Lord abides, when He said He would give His servants a mouth that no one could gainsay or resist; and would in addition deliver them from the will and the hand of their enemies.

Chapter 12: Unfortunate Responses

A spiritually dead church is a silent one. It receives the messages of God from the pulpit with expressionless faces, fish-like eyes, unwarmed, unmoved hearts and voiceless lips. It is a “congregation of the dead,” according to the Bible; and the difficulty of preaching to such an assembly can well be seen.

A quickened, Spirit-filled church, listening intelligently and sympathetically makes a great difference indeed, to the man in the pulpit. He feels as he presents and unfolds the Gospel a most delightful response from the people. One answer is realized in their spirit; another is beheld in their illumined faces and glistening eyes; a third is heard in subdued whispered unctuous “Amens” that now and then at certain telling points of the discourse are breathed or break from the lips of devout men and women. Sometimes at striking climactic passages or parts of the sermon, a perfect storm of “amens,” “glorys” and “hallelujahs” sweep forth from overflowing hearts that cannot any longer contain themselves.

All this is blessed, and I pray God to multiply such congregations and churches. But just as true is it that there are responses of the verbal and outspoken order which, being ill-timed, out of place, mechanical and perfunctory, do as much harm as the other kind does good. Not a preacher or evangelist but knows the truth of this statement, and have been most sorely tried, and had their services and meetings crippled and hurt by interjectory words that I term in this chapter as unfortunate.

In my native State there was a very able blind preacher named Hays. One night at a camp meeting he preached one of the most fearful sermons on hell I ever heard. It was the custom at that camp for some layman to raise an appropriate altar hymn at the conclusion of the sermon. The last word of Brother Hays’ terrific discourse had scarcely died away when some good brother in a nasal kind of voice started the old Methodist hymn:

“I want to go, I want to go, I want to go there, too.”

Whereupon Brother Hays turned his sightless eyes in the direction of the singer and thundered out:

“What fool is that out there who wants to go to hell!”

The very principle of the objectionable proceedings about which I am writing is brought out and illustrated by this mistake of a thoughtless, but well-meaning, brother.

I have repeatedly marveled at the prayers which I have heard following a sermon that had put an entire audience under conviction. The preacher had been holding up the justice, immutability and holiness of God; His rights as the Creator; His power as a God; His chastisements in time on the persistently disobedient, and His unchangeable judgment at the Last Day upon the lost. What was needed then at the conclusion of such a discourse were prayers following up its solemn truth and pressing conviction deeper still on the people with pleadings for mercy in the name of Christ; when, lo! here followed a number of shallow, wordy brethren with something they called a prayer, when it was nothing but a string of statements made in a bright, careless, easy and often jolly kind of a way about God’s goodness and tenderness and loving kindness, until time and again I have seen the presence of the Spirit withdrawn, the gloom of conviction which God had put on the people utterly dispelled, and a great opportunity for salvation and solid lasting work for the soul lost forever.

Here is seen inappropriateness of response in another degree, and in the form of prayer.

Who wonders, then, that I cry out for the appropriate hymn, and for the right prayer, and for the proper response from the pew in the Gospel battles we are waging against sin, the world and the devil.

The lip response of the pew to the pulpit, when it is as it should be, is an inspiration to the preacher and a benediction to all; but coming in ill-chosen words and at the wrong time, as it not infrequently does, it hurts the message, troubles the audience and adds to the burden of the messenger. The effect is either to produce defeat, or lessen results, or make it doubly hard to obtain victory, which otherwise would have come swiftly and easily. Of course, experienced and Spirit-filled leaders can pull through in spite of everything, but all evangelists and pastors are not generals, and the argument I make is, why should this load and needless affliction be placed even on the strongest in our ranks of workers?

There are good people before whom I actually dread to say that such and such kind of transgressors, if they do not repent and change their course, will go to hell, because of a perfect volley of “Amens” and “Glory to Gods,” which they will send up.

Surely there is a better response for such a fearful statement than “Amen,” which means so mote it be, and sounds like the responders were glad that the lost were doomed to such a world. When Christ said that Jerusalem was undone and left desolate, none of His disciples cried out “Amen,” while He Himself turned about and wept.

Truly it looks like a lot of us have no thinking machine in our heads, and are totally deprived of that lovely faculty or sixth sense by which one knows how to say and do the right thing always at the right time and in the right way.

One of the best and most spiritual preachers in the Mississippi Conference had delivered a most excellent sermon in a Southern town, and a layman was called on to conclude in prayer. The opening of the never-to-be-forgotten petition was:

“O Lord, bless the feeble exhortation, to which we have been called to listen tonight, from Thy weak servant, if he be worthy to be called Thy servant.”

The preacher in speaking smilingly about it afterwards said to me: He called my sermon a “feeble exhortation;” he said I was “weak;” and crowned all by saying I was not “worthy” to be called a servant of God. He knocked me down, next jumped on me, so to speak, and then struck me after I was down.

There was a general laugh in the room over the narration of the occurrence, but at the same time it set some to thinking and asking the question: “Could there have been, after careful premeditation, a more inapt, inappropriate, unjust and unkind a prayer offered up with which to follow a faithful sermon just preached by a true and devoted man of God?”

In one of my camp meetings a circuit preacher was filling the afternoon hour and giving us a good sermon. In the midst of it he said:

“I got the blessing of sanctification, and the bishop straightway sent me to Grasshopper Circuit.”

“Lord help!” cried out a good brother in the audience.

There was quite a smile that went over a number of faces, the preacher himself was taken back some, but resumed:

“And even then, if I had not preached holiness, I would have been lost, gone to hell and been eternally damned.”

“Glory to God!” shouted the same man most fervently with a beaming face and in delighted tones.

After this last response of Brother Inappropriate, the audience seemed utterly unable to wipe off the amused expression or stifle the laugh that now became general.

I had once a singer who was with me several years and was famous for blundering at this point. It was a rare thing for him to go through any service without having responded to the sermon in some most unfortunate way.

On a certain occasion I was preaching on holiness and using the figure of marriage as employed by the prophets and Christ to illustrate this intimate union of the soul with God. To make a certain point clear I related an incident where a man made proposition of marriage to the woman he loved. We added the words:

“And she accepted him.”

Whereupon my singer, with a voice like a trumpet, cried out:

“Glory to God!”

It was fully a minute before the audience ceased laughing and more than five minutes before I could regain the serious fixed attention of the people that I had possessed before. But crying mightily to God from within, and keeping grave in countenance and self-collected in manner, I went on quietly applying the truth of the soul’s acceptance of Christ, the sweet, unbroken union that followed and the happiness and safety which was certain to be the result until tears began to appear where smiles had abounded, and I had the situation once more in hand. But oh, what suffering, what a load, and what labor the unfortunate response entailed upon me.

In the city of Brooklyn, N. Y., I was confronted with an audience one Sunday night of fully a thousand people. Not only the pews were filled, but the gallery was taken up by people evidently anxious to hear.

As I read the text, a woman in the center of the audience cried out: “A-Man.”

This was the way she pronounced the word “amen,” and as she had a brass-like, and tin-pan sounding kind of utterance, and the voice was elevated to a high key, some idea of the effect on the assembly of the response can be imagined.

But worse still, the woman kept striking the verbal brass kettle and hitting the responsive tin pan. With intervals of scarcely thirty seconds and at every thing I said, out would come: “A-Man!” There was not a sentence I spoke where a slight pause or drop of voice is expected, but she would hail the concluding word or signalize the finished remark or statement no matter how ordinary and commonplace it was, with a loud “AMan.”

The mental suffering I endured from the monotonous and inappropriate responses of Sister Tin Pan cannot be put in words; while the audience was distracted in their attention, hundreds of heads kept turning to look at the disturber, who, perfectly serene herself, kept on most complacently and untiringly beating her brass kettle to the end. Doubtless her intentions were good, but by her “Tom-Tom” performance she kept numbers from hearing the Word of God, while scores in the gallery were shaking with laughter at her perpetual call for “A-Man!”

After this experience I had a kindlier and more approving feeling toward that commandment in Corinthians, where Paul said that the women should keep silence in the churches.

At a large camp in New England, a responding brother, who had a metallic, penetrating voice, sat well in front and adopted as his steady, regular and frequent verbal response to the sermon, the word “Amen,” with the letter “a” left out, and the second syllable changed in pronunciation from “men” to “man.” So he sat there and for a full hour kept loudly calling out “Man!”

The individual who thus disturbed preacher and congregation fully one hundred times in a single sermon did so by dropping his chin on his chest when he responded, choking out the first syllable of the word Amen, and wielding a strong nasal voice as well, caused the remaining syllable of the word which he pronounced “Man,” to sound exactly like the bleat of a year-old calf.

The sound was so strikingly similar to the barn-yard voice that I have alluded to, that hundreds were kept smiling, and also laughed openly every time a new bleat, or “Man!” would peal forth on the morning air.

After that service I read with increased attention and interest that passage in the Gospel where we are informed that Christ plaited a whip and drove all the animals out of the temple.

Chapter 13: Happy Speeches and Rejoinders

If any one thinks that because the holiness people are not multi-millionaires, are not found in swell society and do not figure conspicuously in newspaperdom, that they are thereby lacking in intellectual force and mental acquisitions and cerebal quickness, such an individual has made a profound mistake.

I doubt not that we have those in the pews and pulpits of our churches who are disposed at first sight to discount this body of grave, quiet-looking people. But a preacher with a shallow or no religious experience, though he should be a graduate of a college and seminary would not care to stand in the pulpit before them a second time.

I never knew as a rule finer judges of real Gospel preaching. They can tell at once the difference between an oration and a sermon, between the fluency of one and the liberty of the other. They detect in an instant the entire distinctiveness between orthodoxy and spirituality, the throat shout and the soul cry, rhetorical flowers and holy fire, the noise before and the noise after Pentecost, the flutter of spread-eagleism and the hovering of the Holy Dove; in a word, the perfect dissimilarity between genuine full salvation and all its approximations and imitations.

When a speaker tries to preach holiness to them without the experience, the faces turned upon him are kind and polite, but it is equally evident to the practiced eye that they see his exegetical mistakes, recognize his shallow interpretation of Scripture, behold every one of his doctrinal flounderings and realize at once that not only is the man ignorant of sanctification, but has a very light case even of regeneration.

A complimentary speech to the women from the pulpit does not deceive the holiness people. A pathetic deliverance about old-time Methodism and early-day circuit riders, the old flag, the brave boys in gray or blue, and dead fathers and mothers and the loved ones gone before, all alike fail to go down with this body of spiritual worshippers. They will not accept these as legal tender in lieu of a clear-ringing, face-shining, voice-exulting, up-to-date sanctified experience.

At one of my camp meetings a minister preached who claimed, but evidently did not have, the blessing of sanctification. He had a remarkably rich and naturally unctuous voice. He had a fine presence, gesticulated well and looked like he was saying something wise, sound, impressive and convincing. I say it appeared so. The truth was that the sermon, with all of its abundance of language, was a perfect mental puzzle. It was impossible to see what the brother was aiming at or trying to prove. None of the people, however, criticized the discourse. A kind, charitable silence was exercised.

But among the auditors that afternoon was a plain country boy of 18 or 20. He was sanctified, but had no education. His face during the sermon was a study. The polite, respectful look was there, but also the lines of a great mental effort to catch the meaning of the preacher’s rolling sentences.

A little while after the service this lad came to my tent with a pitcher of cool water for me, and after hemming and hawing a few seconds, said just before he walked away:

“Brother Carradine, hit ‘peared to me that brother down there who just preached never made arrer point.”

I have been especially struck with the apt speeches and happy replies and rejoinders of God’s workers in the holiness ranks to people in the church as well as in the world, and to those in the pulpit as well as those in the pew.

Many of these preachers, evangelists and workers have been called by the Spirit from the farm, factory and counter. They had few or no educational advantages, never got in sight of a theological institute and yet have been thrust out by the Holy Ghost to teach men the way of life and become religious leaders.

The promise of Christ to His disciples that they should have a mouth and wisdom which no one could gainsay or resist, is truly fulfilled in their cases. As can reasonably be supposed, they find themselves in responsible places where the situation is most delicate, and where not only a loving, quiet spirit has to be maintained, but a level head, quick judgment, and ready convincing speech must be possessed and exercised to meet sudden oppositions and complicated conditions of all kinds. Whether in the private circle or on the platform conducting the services of a great religious gathering made up of every class of people, and where different questions and open attacks are instantly and not infrequently sprung, I have never failed to be deeply impressed with the aptitude and forcibleness of reply which the Holy Spirit granted to these simple, lowly and ofttimes despised followers of Christ.

Two simple illustrations of this fact occurred in services led by a young Kentucky evangelist who never had the benefit of an education, but nevertheless knew the Bible well and was full of the Holy Ghost.

One day a pastor whom he was assisting in a large city church, kept complaining and fretting over the presence of people inside the altar as counselors and teachers and in whom he had no confidence. He said aloud in the chancel, without personally designating:

“Such people in trying to assist at the altar do no good, but harm. Their inconsistent lives and wild-fire notions are remembered, and grieve both God and the people. I never knew it to fail, that when God begins to do a good work, the devil puts in his hand and brings forward his crowd.”

The young evangelist spoke soothingly to the pastor and tried to quiet his fears, but the preacher was in no mood to be comforted and spoke out still louder:

“I have the Bible back of me in this matter, for in Exodus we read that when Aaron threw down his rod and it became a serpent, the magicians threw down their wands and they also became serpents. The devil imitates God’s work.”

“Yes,” cried out the young evangelist with a voice that rang over the house, “but Aaron’s rod swallowed up the magicians’ rods.”

The effect of this quick and happy reply upon the audience was profound.

This same Kentucky boy was holding a meeting in Arkansas. A circuit preacher in attendance, both privately and publicly did all he could to injure the work going on.

One morning the evangelist preached a powerful unctuous sermon on entire sanctification received instantaneously through consecration and faith in the blood of Christ. As he concluded the God-honored discourse, the circuit preacher arose and vehemently attacked what had been preached and solemnly warned the people against believing in and receiving such teachings. Lifting his voice, he said: “It is a far-fetched doctrine.” Immediately the young evangelist was on his feet and, with his face all lighted up with holy joy, cried:

“That is so; it is far-fetched; it is brought all the way from Heaven!”

I need not tell the reader how that sudden, God-inspired rejoinder silenced the interrupter and set the sanctified to shouting.

Verily, saith the Savior, “I will give you a mouth and wisdom which all your adversaries will not be able to gainsay or resist.”

In addition to cases like these comes the recollection of any number of apt replies and rejoinders, where sweetness of spirit, nimbleness of wit, knowledge of men and, above all, the wisdom that God gives were both evident and prominent.

At a certain place a sanctified brother, in giving his testimony to full salvation, said with overflowing eyes:

“When I, after days and nights of unwearied seeking, got the blessing, I saw God.”

Immediately the voice of an opposer in the audience cried out:

“The Bible says no man can see God and live.”

Like a flash came the answer from the holy-faced man:

“But I didn’t live — I died!”

Under this sweet, instant reply, a wave of emotion too deep and sacred for words, seemed to roll over the entire congregation.

At another place a holiness layman was urging a lady acquaintance to seek sanctification. He reminded her that she had promised him to get it several years before. Her reply was:

“I believe in sanctification, but not in your kind.”

Quick as a flash came his response:

“Show us your kind.”

The woman seemed smitten dumb for a full minute, and then repeated what she had said before.

“I believe in sanctification, but not in your kind.”

Looking steadily and sadly at the disturbed creature before him, the brother said as he walked away:

“The trouble with you is that you never get any kind.”

Usually this class of objectors say in a fretful, worried voice:

“I believe in sanctification, but not in your way of seeking and obtaining the blessing.”

And so often the Spirit gives the response:

“Our way, somehow, brings us into the experience, while your way seems to keep you out.”

The silencing power of this rejoinder is most impressive and convincing.

Still another case comes to mind. A presiding elder in Southern Methodism said to a sanctified preacher on his district: “Brother B_____, I recognize your sweet spirit, your deep spirituality, your sound religious experience and your useful life; but I cannot believe in or indorse your theory of sanctification.”

The preacher replied: “My brother, let me illustrate your position. Say that here is an apple. It is beautiful to look upon, pleasant to the smell, delightful to the taste, and is sound through and through; and yet I utter the remarkable language: ‘I like this apple, but I cannot commend or indorse the tree that bore it.’ Now, my brother, you recognize the sweetness and soundness of my experience and life, and yet cannot believe in nor indorse the theory and conditions of grace by which I obtained this very experience and life!”

What answer containing any sense at all could be given to this reply?

At one of the state camp meetings one of our evangelists was pressed for awhile with a perfect volley of questions. They came from all sides. Some of our well-balanced brother’s answers I recall. He said, referring to the altar, “That he was brought up a Presbyterian but brought down a Methodist.”

Answering the old, time-worn objections against sanctification that God does not do things by halves, he replied:

“That is true, but God does things by doubles!”

In talking about the resistance of many in the church to the blessing of holiness, he stated that:

“The fight does not come from the young converts but from the old perverts.”

To still another he said:

“We do not get sanctified to go to Heaven, but we get sanctified because we are going to Heaven.”

After a number of apt speeches and happy replies, like the above, from one of God’s men, the spiritual atmosphere of the camp became wonderfully pure, the clouds rolled away and all felt like it would be a good while before we would see any more of the devil’s mist, rain and mud.

I cannot conclude this chapter without speaking of a young man in the South, who was sanctified and called of God to preach. He had never been to school, but was full of religion.

He was passing what is called the first examination in the conference for admission on trial. The committee took up a few questions on geography and asked him, “What was the name of the largest river in the world?”

His prompt reply was: “The River of Life.”

There was considerable suppressed smiling on the part of the committee, while the face of the youth was beaming.

Then followed a second question:

“What is the highest mountain?”

And without a second’s loss of time, the candidate for conference honors said in a clear, exultant voice:

“Mount Zion!”

I am not informed as to whether the young brother was passed. I do know, however, that if I had been chairman of the board, I would not only have seen him through, but strongly recommended him for elder’s orders right then and there, without the loss of a moment’s time.

Chapter 14: Right Guidance

I have been often asked how we are to be directed aright, when duties seem to be conflicting.

The reply is, first, that duties cannot conflict. They may appear to do so, but the trouble is with us, and not with God and the Bible.

The light to see the path of right, and the ability to walk in it faithfully to the end are both promised us in the Word of God. In addition to this, the guidance of the Spirit, the shaping of events by divine Providence, with the counsel of the godly, should certainly prevent us from many mistakes that have saddened our lives.

When error creeps in, it will be found that some of the above scriptural directions and regulations have been neglected. The Bible has not been searched, holy advice has been disregarded, God ‘s providence has been unheeded, and His Spirit has not been followed in His movements and leadings.

Personally, I have often found light and obtained relief by begging God to cast gloom and shadow on the way that was not His will, and to throw a peculiar radiance on the course that should be pursued. With the first would come a strange kind of resistance, a sense of being blocked up and hindered, while in answer to the second petition I would realize a sweet drawing power, which, followed and obeyed, would bring blessing and finally blessedness.

In the tenderness and docile spirit of the newly begun spiritual life, persons are very apt to take up with religious nostrums of every kind and think everything they hear declared earnestly and vehemently must be the truth. In the very desire to do right and advance swiftly, the young convert will oftentimes, under wrong teaching, construe the word “‘peculiar” in the Bible to mean odd and eccentric; change the kingdom of heaven, which is righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost, into meats and drinks, neckties and postum coffee; mistake presumption for faith, anger for zeal, self-will for Divine leading, and displace the wholesome, healthful life of Christ into the existence of a latter-day monk and ascetic.

One of the errors some come near falling into through incorrect advice is the endeavor to find out the will of God by a venturesome opening of the Bible. The counsel given was to open the volume quickly, and the first verse the eye fell upon would contain the Divine direction. Another suggestion was to put the finger on the sacred page without first looking, and then to examine the verse thus covered by the digital and it would be found to contain the needed light, information and guidance.

Now, I doubt not that there are numbers of God’s people, who in this manner at times have come across passages which bore remarkably upon their condition and situation at that moment, and so were filled with comfort and received help. But why should not these same individuals tell the whole truth and declare how often they struck upon verses that were inappropriate, meaningless and absurd so far as counsel and deliverance were concerned.

Truly no parent I know of would like a son or daughter to open one of their letters to them in such a haphazard kind of way and be influenced to a certain course or conduct by some single line or word their hand rested upon. The desire would be that the child would read the whole communication in order to have an intelligent appreciation of the will and desires of those at home.

Now, the Bible is a book of counsel made up of a number of epistles. The whole volume is a letter from the skies to the soul. What a mistake, not to say presumption, if, instead of doing what Christ said, “Search the Scriptures “we make a kind of grab-bag, fish pond and lottery business out of it.

In my own case in an effort I made I did not draw the prizes I was looking for, but found my finger resting upon blank spaces on the side, and between the verses. As for the opening suddenly and letting the eye fall on the first verse in the line of sight, I was equally unfortunate. Invariably the copy of the Bible that I read and used at that time, unclosed and yawned wide at the 109th Psalm, and at the startling verse, “As He loved cursing, so let it come unto him.”

The thing having occurred five or six times in succession, I examined the binding of the book carefully, and found that the back of the volume was broken, and so when dropped on the table or opened suddenly with both hands, the pages would separate every time at the 109th Psalm, with the verse of the disturbing nature staring me in the face, “As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him.”

A few years ago I met a man who had become a kind of traveling missionary with horse and buggy, because his finger fell upon the words in the Bible, “Chariot and horse.” If he had read on farther, he would have had cause to be disturbed, for the next sentence declares that “Both the chariot and horse were cast into a deep sleep,” and that because of the rebuke of God.

Dr. Cullis told a lady friend of mine about a woman who was advised to try the finger method, of interpretation, and did so once, and got such a shock she never risked it again. The verse her finger covered said, “And last of all the woman died also.”

Rev. Geo. W. Wilson mentions the case of a man who opened the Bible suddenly in this manner to get light and direction and came upon the passage where the statement was made that “the asses of his father that he had been seeking were found.”

Several winters ago, while in Pennsylvania, a most excellent young man told me that a number of his friends felt so sure that he ought to be a preacher that he finally got to thinking so himself, and concluded to test and settle the matter with the “finger trial.” So be went into the parlor, where a large family Bible rested on the center table. It was a pictorial edition and filled with small illustrations like unto our unabridged dictionaries. Nothing daunted, however, he slipped in his hand, opened the great volume wide, and lo! his finger was resting on an Egyptian mummy!

Serious as the grave, the young man said, “That was enough for me,” while I, unable to restrain my laughter, felt that the whole incident was more than enough for me.

With happier results, a young man in a Northern State told me that the fact of his small stature had often been a temptation and trial to him in regard to entering the ministry. He felt, or was tempted to feel, that his undersize was and would be against him; that he would appear ridiculous in the pulpit and standing among the larger-sized clerical brethren in council or convention.

One day he tried the haphazard way or lottery test, and opened the Word with his finger resting on the words, “Thou canst not by taking thought add one cubit to thy stature.”

Like the oracle of Delphi, this was susceptible of a double construction; but in his case he translated the words favorably to himself and applied for license to preach.

Better than all this chance work is to have such a knowledge of the Scripture as to know where to turn when the different trials, temptations and sorrows of life come upon us. Or, as we read in the Word, ask God to illumine and apply some verse and passage to our hearts and give us strength, wisdom and grace through all.

We have the statement of the Book itself that “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness; that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.”

Chapter 15: Divine Ironical Judgments

Many times in the study of the Scriptures, and in the observation of human affairs about us, I have been struck with the peculiar retributive nature of God’s judgments, and what I would call the irony of the Divine Providence.

As the Sodomites burned in their sins, and burned to sin, so they were burned in their sins and for their sins. As the Israelites craved flesh at any cost, they got it in such quantities that it came out of their nostrils.

The Jews cried out for Barabbas and chose a robber instead of Christ. For nearly two thousand years they have been without Christ and if ever a people have been robbed they have, and if ever a people know how to rob in business, they do. Barabbas has been ruling over them for twenty centuries. “Now Barabbas was a robber.”

There is an irony today that is easily beheld in our church windows. Experimental piety has been laughed at, the witness of the Spirit denied, genuine revivals withstood, prevented, and ridiculed, all manifestations of spiritual joy frowned upon and responses of a voluntary nature from the audience literally frozen out and up. So that the place such churches have been obviously heading for as a congregational procession has at last been reached. They have landed in something like a graveyard. The preacher himself dresses, looks and often talks like an undertaker. I have known a number of them when giving directions from the pulpit to the janitor and ushers, to throw their voices in the very pits of their stomachs and say in deep sepulchral notes, “The janitor will lower the windows, “in the same tone and manner that an undertaker says to his assistants, “You will now lower the body in the grave.”

As for the appearance of many congregations, they have been drilled and schooled to look as impassive and irresponsive as corpses. It is now “A congregation of the dead” as the Bible says.

As for the windows, in pursuance of the death and burial idea, they have become in many places memorial tablets and remind one with their sentences “Sacred to the memory,” of head-stones in the cemetery. The irony of the great judgment has come. Many churches have landed where they headed, in a graveyard.

The irony is beheld at work in the lives of individuals.

In one of our western states there was a preacher who in the effort to drive out holiness from the district in which he was presiding elder, preached himself out of his own religious experience. He became so lifeless and dead that no district circuit or station wanted him, and so he had to take up secular pursuits for a living.

Some years ago I met him on the streets of Philadelphia peddling something in a tin can. We asked him what it was and he told us it was “embalming fluid.”

I had the greatest difficulty in keeping my face straight on the reception of this information. Here was a grim fitness of things indeed. He had abused, scolded and fought in his church until everything was dead in his pastorate, and he more lifeless than all, and now he was engaged in selling “embalming fluid” for the use of corpses.”

When he, in telling me his occupation, began to enlarge upon the merits of the embalming fluid, how natural it would make the dead look, and how long it would preserve the bodies as nice looking corpses, I could not trust myself to look in his face for fear of laughter.

Of course he was in a legitimate business and a most appropriate one; for after killing, the next imperative thing to do would be to preserve the bodies of the slain.

A full year after this I was made acquainted with a third step in this preacher’s life. Asking a cousin of the man how our embalming brother was getting on, she informed me that he had recently changed his business and was now selling a disinfectant oil!

As she told me, it was simply impossible to keep from laughing. Here was not only the irony of circumstance dealing with the man, but a progressive order of events so eminently and so satirically fitting as would make the very Sphinx of Egypt smile.

The man first filled the church with spiritually dead people. Second he got to embalming. Third as the days went by and putrefaction took place, the preserving business had to be laid aside and our active brother ever ready to accommodate himself to new situations and conditions immediately engaged in the benevolent labor of presenting to and urging upon the people a mixture of fumigating and disinfecting nature guaranteed to do a perfect work.

Again I beheld the irony of fate in the project of an unspiritual and unblessed clergyman who had a fountain erected just back of his pulpit. Perhaps he realized in a misty way that there ought to be something of the kind in a moral and spiritual line in the church, and as he failed to grasp the idea that he was the spiritual well that God desired should overflow with streams of living water upon the souls of the people, then there seemed nothing left him to do but to introduce a leaden pipe under the floor, connect it with the city water works, and cause it to flash and play and sparkle in a marble bowl that stood near the sacred desk.

Still again I saw the irony of a retributive judgment of God on a preacher who especially resented and fought the Bible presentation of inbred sin under the figure or symbol of “Flesh.”

This I have observed, that no matter who the man is and how he opposes holiness, it is only a question of time when he is left with nothing but a memory as to religious experience. If a preacher, his unction, liberty, power, all leave him and he never has another genuine Holy Ghost revival. Now as preaching without the Spirit of God in the heart is an uphill work attended with a downhill life, the great body of such ministers go to lecturing instead of preaching the gospel, and many finally return to secular pursuits.

The man who so fought and derided the Bible figure of “Flesh,” was driven to find work, and the only employment he could obtain was in a butcher shop where at last accounts he was cutting flesh, sawing flesh, weighing flesh, handling flesh and literally living in piles and stacks of flesh.

A final instance I remember is that of a pastor who commenced a warfare against holiness in his church and especially against a holiness preacher who had introduced it in his community.

He never rested until he formed such a combination against the man of God that the preacher was tried and ultimately driven from his annual conference.

Then God proceeded to try the persecutor of His servant. And he was ejected from a holier council than an annual conference. He lost fellowship with the Trinity.

But this did not stop him. His remaining friends told him that he was hurting himself with the community, injuring his own interest and acting like a cabbage head so far as sound sense and judgment was concerned.

But he insisted that the others were the cabbage heads and raged on until he was left not only without a religious experience, but without a pastoral charge.

He went into a secular pursuit for living and the reader will be compelled to smile when we reveal the nature of his work.

He went to raising cabbages for a living!

I have wondered if when standing in his six-acre field and looking at the long rows of cabbage heads disappearing in the distance, if he does not think of another cabbage head that was situated above and just between his two shoulders.

It is easy for God to humiliate and bring into an open shame those who oppose Him and resist His work and truth.

The Philistines laughed at God’s ark on the ox cart, but he made them all sick and put the last one into bed. He turned their laughter into groaning.

There are many hands lifted, tongues moving and pens stabbing at God’s servants today, who are being honored of heaven wherever they go. According to the Bible, trouble, shame and humiliation is certainly ahead of them and coming to meet them. He that said touch not mine anointed and do my prophets no harm, knows how to perfectly deliver His servants and bring a confusion, reproach and defeat upon their enemies as completely manifest to all, as anything ever beheld in life or described in the pages of Scripture.

Chapter 16: God’s Workers

More and more am I convinced as I study God’s great body of workers, that in a certain sense hands are to be taken off of them. I do not mean that they are to be free from moral and legal accountability, but I refer to the distinctness and uniqueness of each individual as God has made and endowed him.

There is such a disposition upon the part of men to make the ministry and evangelistic force like a regiment of soldiers, or a uniformed and regaliad order or institute. Not only a clerical dress is adopted, a Rev. prefixed to his name, but an almost identical similarity of sermons and pulpit methods and manners are demanded. Certain theological schools turn out on the public every year a company of graduates who not only look alike and preach alike, but even carry away the accent and tones of the leading professors or president. In an institute in one of the middle states, the dean or president carries his head to one side; whereupon a startling number of the students adopted the cranial inclination and went away to different fields of labor with this strange accomplishment. In still another school the chancellor had a way of shaking his right forefinger vigorously near his right ear while at the same time he was saying something from the pulpit that was worth hearing. Unfortunately for the college and for the people, there were a number of theologues in attendance who were not able to utter anything remarkable in their sermons, but they all went off to treat distant communities and congregations with the spectacle of a quivering forefinger close to the right ear.

There is something about the holiness movement which brings out of obscurity and to the front at that, every kind of character and gift that can add variety, force and attractiveness to a religious assembly. In the early days of Methodism, when the spirit had right of way, what a wealth as well as personal adornment the church possessed in the personages, talents, labors and achievements of that time. Both meetings and laborers were numerous, and their almost endless variety constituted one of their charms.

All this seems to disappear in the periods of religions deadness and formality, and a dreadful sameness broods on everything. In the absence of the Spirit, there is nothing to arouse, quicken, enthuse, transform and glorify. So the mechanical prevails and ritualism drags its dull length along.

When full salvation is preached, believed in and received, what a rattling there is among the bones in the valley of spiritual death, what a rush of hitherto unknown men from the farm, factory and fish-boat to the front, while church and community stand thrilled, and moved, or are fairly swept from their feet by the new moral forces in human forms and methods that have come like a sudden flood upon them.

The sleeping princess has been awakened. Buried treasure has been found in the old field that had been set aside and forgotten. Fishermen become apostles. Country boys cross the seas and establish missions. Factory girls start asylums and rescue homes and lead thousands to God.

Then every variety of gift and talent becomes manifest in this new body of workers brought up by the Holy Spirit from profound obscurity to labor and achieve for the Son of God. More and more have I been impressed with this fact as I have traveled all over the nation, observing and studying every side of the religious question. And so true is it, that for the spirit of holiness to recede and die away in localities and among people professing entire sanctification, the immediate and unmistakable result is the drying up even at such places and among just such people of the very gifts, graces and powers that once made them so attractive and mighty in the work and service of God.

In addition to fervor in prayer, the unction of sermon and the wisdom and ability of counsel, I have also heard in prayers, testimonies, exhortations and sermons of the holiness people, some of the bright and remarkable utterances that come once in a lifetime to a few and never to the great majority of people. God can bless individuals not only with level heads but with ready minds. If there is such a thing as sanctified humor and holy repartee the people enjoying full salvation possess these endowments.

Recently I was made to smile considerably as I heard a brother tell God on his knees that “He knew all our short comings and our long goings.” That unexpected and unique expression, “long goings,” — (oh how I saw them!) -like a two-edged sword cut in different directions. A billow of reminiscent thought, sparkling with humorous light for a moment rolled over the mind, and left me with the conviction that we were all wiser, richer and better for the words.

In a western town at one of my meetings, a preacher was filling what is called the afternoon hour. He was a blessed man, and God used him. He, however, knew more about God’s book than man’s volumes, and was better acquainted with the mysteries of grace than the intricacies of Webster’s dictionary.

He was talking about the benefits of Christ’s death to the race, and among other things, said, with his honest face all lighted up, “It makes us judiciously free from the law.” He liked the expression, “judiciously free,” so well, that he repeated it several times, and appealed to a brother preacher near by, “if it was not so?” The brother inquired of ducked his head and cried out, “Amen!” while another preacher on the opposite side of the tabernacle, with his face wreathed in smiles, shouted “Glory!” There was a little flurry of happy laughter some warm hallelujahs, all of which helped the brother in the pulpit, who had unconsciously, in the use of the wrong word, thrown a quantity of light on the point in hand.

Still more remarkable was a word heard by the writer in one of his meetings. A plainly dressed, but good faced layman, was giving his experience. He said, “Brethren, I consecrated and believed, and then prayed with all my might, and God came down and took the carnal nation out of me.”

There was a volley of amens to this speech, intermixed with a few laughs that would not wound human feelings or grieve the Spirit of God, and I doubt not that all who heard the words, “carnal nation,” were grateful to the man who mispronounced. Light came with the mispronunciation, and we saw in a flash how like a nation is the carnal nature within us, with its disputes and wars, its boundary lines, “touchiness,” great resources and manifold cruel weapons.

Yes, I said, it is a carnal nation, and the worst, meanest, bitterest and strongest of them all. Thank you, my brother. As far as I am concerned, my prayer is that you may go on in your true, honest and mispronouncing way, for you bring, in your ignorance, more light on the great generally unknown subject, than many men of learning and scholarship in our pulpits have been able to do for years or a lifetime.

Better for this world that men came to it who are pronounced in tongue, heart and life as to salvation, though they may abound in the mispronouncing of words, than for it to boast of those who are elegant and correct in speech, and yet are misty and ignorant of certain things that are essential to the happiness and redemption of the human family.

In addition to all this I have been struck with God’s use of what some would call peculiar individuals.

According to nature, God loves variety. And from what I see in human life, with its marvelous changing sea of faces, temperaments, dispositions and gifts, the Lord desires diversity there. So it is unlawful, unwise and a profound mistake for us to construct a procrustean bedstead for the servants of God, sawing them off to a length or rather a shortness, to suit the sawer; or to take another figure, make the ministry look like a row of toy soldiers, and the church like children belonging to an orphan asylum all wearing a checked apron bib and tucker, and with hair combed the same way.

We would be wise to take hands off Christian workers and so long as they preach the truth and God uses them, bear with what we call peculiarities and pray the Lord’s blessing to continue upon their labors.

Some critics and objectors of certain preachers and evangelists if asked the cause of offense would be compelled to say, “He doesn’t do like I do.” This certainly is a grievous charge, and as a misdemeanor is hard to be forgiven; and yet it is about the same speech that fell from the lips of the disciples when in finding fault with some ardent workers, they said to Christ, “They follow not with us.” The response of the Savior was forbid them not; that they were not against Him but for Him.

I wonder if the chronic fault-finder ever realizes that the people may be finding fault with him; that the critic himself is being criticized.

I doubt not that the rigid brother is amazed if not amused at the limber ways of another fellow workman. But what must the supple brother think of the frozen brother. Brother Stiff looks at Brother Active and cries, “jumping-jack.” But Brother Limber or Active gazes in turn at Brother Stiff and exclaims, “Corpse” or “Undertaker!” There are two sides of the question and so not only for gospel and golden rule reasons but for other considerations, we had better let each other alone.

A lady once told me of an evangelist who was invited by a pastor to hold a meeting for him. The town was full of sin, the church was lifeless and the country, in a spirit sense, dry, dead and plucked up by the roots.

On entering the church for the first morning service, the evangelist, who was preceding the pastor, saw three or four solemn-looking members sitting motionless in the center of the auditorium like so many marble statues. It was already past the hour of assembling, and no one could be seen on the streets coming to the service. The view and situation was undoubtedly unpromising and depressing. The man of the world would at once have had his brain in a whirl with thoughts and plans of what was necessary in newspaper advertising, wall placards, printed bills and cards, as well as church bell ringing and house-to-house visiting, in order to secure a congregation to fill the great empty building.

The evangelist of whom I am writing looked at the silent, cheerless scene for a moment, rubbed his chin reflectively, and immediately threw a kind of somersault (a trick he had learned as a boy), landed on the palms of his hands, and walked up the aisle that way, with his feet in the air, where his head usually appeared. He not only went the whole length of the aisle in this manner, but coming to the pulpit, walked up the steps and let the soles of his shoes gaze, so to speak, for a few moments, over the book-board at the four perfectly thunder-struck brothers and sisters in the pew, and then nimbly recovering himself, brought his feet to the floor and his head up, and proceeded to read the lessons from the Bible and lead in prayer.

It is needless to say that the four amazed beholders of the unusual spectacle took the place of church bells and printed notices, and that night the church was literally jammed with a highly expectant audience, while the windows were filled, and the fences and trees nearby were lined and festooned with people who could not obtain entrance in the building, but craved to see what was going on inside.

It is proper to add that the evangelist did not walk on his hands that evening, but preached such a sermon on sin, the judgment and hell that conviction fell on the congregation, and a revival began that very night which resulted in the course of ten days of scores being soundly converted to God.

Of course this instance is not related to approve or endorse the method of walking on the hands to the pulpit. I would rather counsel the use of our physical members in such lines as God created and intended them. But the hint given us by the occurrence is that we had best in many instances take our hands off and withhold our one-sided judgments of good men whom God is evidently leading and blessing to the salvation of immortal souls.

Neither is this instance or incident an endorsement of that systematic row, racket and hullabaloo made in some meetings, where it is evident that the Holy Spirit is not in or back of the demonstration.

The lesson is, that great was the difference between the prophets Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah and Jeremiah. Equally marked was the diversity between the apostles Paul, Peter, James and John. The same striking dissimilarity is to be seen in Christ’s disciples and followers today. May we all get some sense before we die, and let another man’s servants alone. To their own Master they stand or fall. And if they be true, He has said, “They shall be holden up.”

Chapter 17: Puzzled Physicians

In one of my meetings in a northern town, after a jet black sermon on sin, delivered at night, five ladies in the congregation went to bed sick the moment they reached home, and four telephone calls rang up as many family physicians who were brought in a hurry at eleven o’clock to see what was the matter with their female patients, or rather impatients.

How the preachers laughed over these hurry-calls when the fact was made known next morning. But there was no laughter, I understand, among the mentally and spiritually troubled women who used the telephone.

What a pity they did not ring up the Central of Heaven, and secure the services of the Great Physician of souls who could have made them well in the best sense and forever.

I was informed afterwards how the women described their symptoms and ailments to the doctors. And the diagnosis of the medical men, and the prescriptions they wrote; and the kind of medicine that was administered. The patients were told that they had overtaxed themselves; that domestic cares added to frequent and prolonged attendance upon religious services would naturally and invariably result in disturbed valvular action in the cardiac region, abnormal excitement of the cerebrum, not to speak of the cerebellum, and finally resulting in the complete prostration of the nervous system.

In spite of the big words of the wise-looking doctors, I doubt not that the women were glad to hear the case was no worse than it was; for they had feared that under a flash of gospel light they had seen the “old man” in their souls, and some even felt they had beheld the devil! How soothing it was to be informed it was only the cerebrum and the cerebellum! So, taking a dose of antikamnia from the doctor’s hand, they went to sleep and quit coming to the meeting.

A friend not long ago told me of a case where a physician was called in to examine and relieve a party who was under terrible conviction for sin. The man of science studied through his steel-rimmed spectacles the writhing form before him, listened to the pitiful groans, and then straightway applied a mustard plaster to the stomach of the sufferer!

He missed the seat of the pain by some twelve inches, as the misery was in the man’s breast and heart, and not amid the organs of digestion. The difficulty in the matter was that a doctor of earth was trying to handle a case where only the physician of the skies could bring relief, and by a medicine that is made alone in heaven, and so has to be brought all the way from heaven.

In Danville, Virginia, a gentleman obtained the blessing of sanctification and received it after a most joyful and exultant pattern. He fairly over-flowed, and that all the time from day to day. His lips continually sounded forth that holy happy laughter so well known in holiness meetings.

His wife thought he was insane, and sent for the family physician. As this was the first specimen of the holiness people that the doctor had beheld, there having been no revival of that kind in Danville up to that time, the man of medicine was much bewildered in regard the laughing, crying, shouting patient he had been summoned to see.

Never having a case like it before, he requested the alarmed wife for the privilege of calling another physician for consultation.

This was granted, and both of these wiseacres of the Esculapian science studied with grave countenances the smiling, rejoicing individual before them, who refused to go to bed, and who persisted that he was never in better health in his life, and had only been sanctified wholly and received the promise of the Father in his soul.

It resulted in their giving a certificate of the man’s insanity, though not of a dangerous suicidal or homicidal form. The mistaken case was sent to the lunatic asylum, laughing, crying out “glory,” and rejoicing to the last.

As he was not considered dangerous, he was not confined in a cell, but allowed considerable liberty. This freedom, the happy man employed in teaching and showing nurses, attendants, and everyone he could in the large building how to get sanctified.

In two weeks’ time he led a number into the experience, and such a stir as followed can be imagined, as the blessing spread, while the asylum witnessed more genuine salvation in a month’s time than it ever had before in all the many years of its previous existence.

The grand finale can well be conceived. At the end of the month the officials of the institution, both medical and otherwise, packed our happy sanctified brother off to his town and home again, saying, that while he was affected in a way they did not altogether understand, yet he was no more crazy than they were, and that if he stayed another month he would upset the entire asylum, and land the whole business in a condition of mind exactly similar to his own.

In a meeting I held some years ago in Rhode Island a young man cut to the heart by the Word of God fell on the floor in an agony of spiritual distress. I witnessed the fall, and saw a number of Christian workers gather around and stoop over the silent, rigid, prostrate form. Conjecturing the cause I went on with my labors in the midst of an altar crowded with penitents and seekers.

But a friend of the young man, being unconverted and misunderstanding what had taken place, ran for a doctor. In a few minutes I saw him return with the man of the pill boxes by his side, said physician looking as solemn as a judge, and as wise as Solomon. But his air of wisdom soon changed to a deeply mystified expression as he examined the outstretched person before him. Touching the pulse he said “Regular.” Listening to the heartbeat he muttered “All right.” Taking the temperature he whispered to himself “Normal.” And then, shaking his head the puzzled physician remarked in a low voice, “I never saw anything on this order before.”

Then reaching around for his wallet he poured some brandy in a table spoon, and placing it at the lips of the prostrate patient, was about to tilt it down his throat, when suddenly the Holy Ghost fell in sanctifying power on the young man who, leaping with a shout to his feet, knocked over the doctor, spilled the alcohol, and sent the spoon flying to land with a loud clatter on the floor.

The doctor looked amazed at the young man who was running with glad cries up one aisle and down another. Then gathering up his implements of trade, he departed from the church with a most dignified demeanor. But whether mortified or gratified it was hard to tell. He may have walked out disgusted and determined never to practice medicine again in a church, especially when a holiness meeting was going on in its walls. Or for all we know he may have taken the credit for the sudden recovery of the patient to himself, and may be bragging on it to his friends and acquaintances until this day. Doubtless his own skill amazed himself.

All these happenings, however, go to show that there are more things going on in heaven and on earth than are dreamed of in the wisdom or mentioned in the philosophies of this world. Yea, verily, mighty facts and acts that are far beyond all the doctors, whether they be M. D., which stand often for Mur Der; or Ph. D., which means Phiddlesticks; or S. T. D., that is the abbreviation of the words Stupefied, Stampeded and Stalled; or even D. D., that in our days is equivalent to being Dry as Dust, Doubly Dead, and in some cases means Dried-up and undoubtedly Done-for.

Chapter 18: Clear Cases

I do not fail to recognize in the matter of personal religious experience many shades of difference proceeding from temperament, education and other causes. Nevertheless the foundational work is compelled to be the same, and the testimony of the spirit to one’s relation to God is a universal privilege. Many individuals, therefore, with but little outward demonstration are as soundly regenerated and sanctified as those whose noisy overflow commands the attention of gazing hundreds.

While this is true, I must confess, however, to a wonderful partiality for those cases which give no feeble or uncertain note when the fire of heaven falls upon them. Out of a great number that memory recalls I give several instances.

In one of our western states lived an unconverted man, who owned a store and was doing a prosperous business. Among other things which he sold was whiskey by the bottle, jug or barrel. He was thriving so well that he gave his store a new coat of paint and treated it to a brand new sign, which swung and creaked in front.

One day a farmer, who was a friend and acquaintance, came into the store and asked him to let him have a drink of liquor, that he was tired and cold. The merchant in reply gave him a key to one of the barrels and told him to help himself. A half hour or so rolled by, and the merchant had forgotten all about the circumstance, when a gentleman strolled into the store, leaned on the counter and said to him slowly and solemnly,

“I see your sign is lying flat in the road.”

“What!” exclaimed the storekeeper, and rushed out on the gallery expecting to behold his new front ornament down on the ground. To his great relief there it swung in its place near the ceiling.

“No,” he said, turning to his informer, “my sign is not down; what made you say so?”

“Yes, it is,” persisted the gentleman. “It is further down the road.”

The storekeeper followed the pointing finger and beheld, forty yards down the street in the middle of the highway, the prostrate form of the man to whom he had given the key of the whiskey barrel. He was dead drunk.

The sight was like an arrow to the heart of the beholder, and crying out, “My God, is that the sign of my store!” he walked into the building and closed the door behind him.

He never sold another drop of liquor from that hour.

Then followed days of unspeakable anguish of mind and heart through the convicting power of the Holy Ghost. He could not eat, sleep, rest or attend to business.

There grew around the town, and extending deep into the country, dense thickets. Taking his axe he penetrated the jungle and cut out a place in which to pray. He spent an hour in his leafy cavern, and failing to find relief, he went out and, a hundred yards away, hewed a second nook for prayer. Still finding no deliverance, he prepared a third. But as he prayed in it his burden seemed to increase. He then returned to the first, next visited the second and wound up in the third, praying in great and growing agony in them all.

Thus he did for several days, until one morning while in one of his leafy caves calling on God for mercy, the blessing of salvation was poured into his heart and he shouted for joy.

His hallelujahs were heard a quarter of a mile away at a United States military post, and officers and men both thinking that it was an outbreak of the Indians, a corporal and squad of soldiers were sent running toward the town. Guided by the whoops and yells, they dashed into the thicket where our new convert was having the whole war to himself.

Filled with a rapturous love, he flung himself on the corporal and hugged him, and attempted to embrace all the soldiers, when the corporal, at first stupefied and now still mystified, but also deeply disgusted, cried out to his men:

“About face! Double quick!” and went back in a swinging trot to the garrison.

After this our brother joined the church and for months greatly enjoyed his new-found salvation.

One of the idols of the past life, however, which he would not give up, was his pipe. He felt disturbed about it at times, and had occasional gloomy spells, but still was moving along.

Soon after this there came to his western village a holiness evangelist, when he found that under his searching sermons his moodiness was increasing. But still he puffed away at his tobacco and did considerable grumbling.

One morning the preacher, who was watching him load his pipe preparatory to putting a coal of fire on it, said:

“My brother, would you be willing to swap that filthy old pipe for a clean heart and a sweet family altar?”

At once he became very angry in spirit and with difficulty kept from being rude to the minister. He felt that he was being very hardly dealt with, that his rights were ignored, his privileges trampled upon, and he was being tormented before the time. In a word, he fumed. He remained in this state several hours, getting what consolation he could from his pipe; and he never obtained less.

Toward the middle of the day he was a mile from town in his two-horse wagon, filling it with large stones for one of his fences. The pipe lay unsmoked in his pocket, and the rocks seemed to get in his breast. Grimly and with groans he worked until the vehicle was nearly loaded.

He stopped a moment to rest as he stood on the boulders. A sweet inner voice whispered, “Surely you would not keep out the Comforter because of an unclean habit.”

At once there sprang into his mind and heart the determination, “I will give up everything for God!” Running his hands into his pockets he pulled out his pipe and tobacco pouch and threw them as far as he could into the forest. They had scarcely left his hands when the baptism of the Holy Ghost and fire fell upon him.

With cries of joy and tears of rapture rolling down his cheeks, he gathered the reins in his hands, turned the galloping horses homeward, and came flying down the road, filling the air with his shouts and the highway with all the stones he had gathered.

The town, attracted by the outcries and rattle of the wagon, turned out to meet him as he swept into the square. They thought he had lost his mind, but he told them from his wheeled pulpit that it was his carnal mind that was gone. Oh, how he preached! His wagon indeed was empty, but he himself was full. He had given up the last of his old idols, and got in exchange a clean heart and a sweet family altar — in a word, the blessing of full salvation.

The writer saw him two years after the transaction had taken place, and he was still pre-eminently satisfied.

In a certain western town, services were held in the opera house. God gave me a number of clear conversions and most powerful sanctifications. Among the latter was one that was quite remarkable.

For days the man had been patiently and persistently seeking the blessing. Just as I had concluded the morning sermon and while a number were approaching the altar, the holy fire fell upon him. The scene which followed was simply beyond description.

The power on the man was so great that it looked like he was electrified and to the spiritually ignorant would have appeared as if he were in agony. He was literally flung about the house by an invisible, but uncontrollable force. He would sink down for a moment on his knees in a rapture of joy, only the next instant to be lifted suddenly to his feet and swept away to a distant part of the building. I thought several times that he would break a platoon of chairs and throw down the stage scenery before which I was preaching under one of his amazing rushes.

But, nothing of the kind took place. All could see who watched the man, that not a particle of “put on” or the “worked up” was in the case. God was simply pleased to make an individual a spectacle of his power, and show that the live Gospel was still in the world and that the Holy Ghost had not exhausted himself on the day of Pentecost.

But it was fully a half hour before the man calmed down. A crowd of men rushed from the street and with faces as solemn as death, viewed the scene of a hundred holiness people rejoicing and praising God, salvation flowing at the altar and a man whom they all knew, filled with the Holy Ghost and fairly caught away from the world in which he lived.

As I studied the case before me, I could not but think of one in the book of Acts who was saved by the power of Jesus’ name, and went “leaping and praising God through the temple.”

The man in our meeting was not in the temple; but he did not leap and praise God the less because he had found full salvation in an opera house. It was God and not the place that did the work. Perhaps Christ had in his mind these days of ecclesiastical exiledom of full salvation, when he said “Woman, believe me, the hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem worship the Father, but the hour cometh and now is when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth.”

It is blessed indeed to find that God is not confined to times and places. He is everywhere and to the soul perfectly redeemed every house is a temple. The mist of the morning is incense. The birds are a part of the heavenly choir, while every bush and shrub by the roadside burns and sparkles with the glory of God.

On the third, fourth and fifth days of still another meeting, God began to stretch certain individuals out on the floor around the altar, in the old-fashioned way.

I was deeply interested in the case of a Methodist local preacher of fully sixty years of age, who sought the blessing of sanctification with a persistence and patience for five days that I never saw surpassed. Morning and night he was first at the altar and sought the blessing with strong crying and tears. Service after service he failed to obtain the witness of the Spirit that the work was done; but he never allowed himself to be discouraged. Others swept in ahead of him who had begun seeking later, but he did not murmur, fret nor fall into darkness, on account of what to some would have appeared as divine favoritism.

He held on his lonely way. He told the Lord audibly that he must have the blessing. He did not kneel a little while and then get up and go back to his seat, as we have seen many others do. But, he clung to the horns of the altar of mercy and pleaded with God, while great tears rolled down his cheeks and fell upon the rail before him.

Meantime, his soul was greatly blessed in the seeking. He was evidently in the path of the just that shineth more and more unto the perfect day. He was nearing Canaan and stood on the banks of Jordan, in the same beautiful country that so captivated two of the tribes of Israel that they would not cross over at all. Alas! for people who stop short of entire sanctification with any religious experience, no matter how good it is. The word is “Cross over.”

Mr. Wesley said that sanctification is preceded and followed by a blessed growth in grace. All sanctified people find it so. It pays spiritually just to seek sanctification. The soul wakes up; the spirit gets on a stretch for better things; the heart becomes inflamed with love and devotion to God. But, it pays better to “go on to perfection,” to “groan after it,” and never stop until we are made perfect in love in this life. See the Methodist Discipline and above all see the Bible.

Our local preacher spent a couple of blessed days on the beautiful banks of Jordan, but still sighing out his soul for Canaan beyond the flood. One night nearly everyone had left the altar but himself. He still lingered with great pleadings before God, when suddenly the Savior whispered to him, “He that confesseth me before men, him will I confess before my Father which is in heaven.”

He leaped to his feet crying “I believe Christ sanctifies me now,” when suddenly the fire fell! the power of God came upon him, and there followed a scene that the congregation of that night will never forget. Oh! how he shouted, laughed, wept, clapped his hands and embraced his brethren.

Did any one of our readers ever hear a man rejoice who had not thus overflowed in twenty, thirty or forty years; who was doing the first real shouting of his life?

As a rule such people make up for lost time. Besides, the Holy Ghost can make a first-class shouter in a single second. There is needed no evolution of growth into this Methodistic, old-time religion, Pentecostal and heavenly overflow of the heart and exercise of the voice.

So our brother shouted and cried out that he was sanctified, and shouted some more and said he had the witness! That the Spirit told him he had the blessing! Then he shouted again and went over to his weeping wife at the altar and said to her “Say Glory,” and then fell back upon the floor and clapped his hands over his head and shouted again.

Other men were quietly saved that night, but this case drew special attention and interest, because of his being a preacher and his having sought the blessing so long and patiently.

What someone has called “The Problem of Methodism” was solved with him forever, and so it would be with all who would do as he did. If our preachers and laymen who fight the doctrine of instantaneous sanctification by faith, would spend the time and energy in seeking for the blessing which they now lose in withstanding it, there would soon be no “Problem of Methodism” to discuss. While the glorious solution read in shining faces, liberated tongues and God empowered lives, would send a revival wave of salvation over this land that would sweep the church, and the world with it, up to the very borderland of the long promised Millennium.

Chapter 19: Strange Cases

In one of my meetings there came to the altar an individual who gave me a strange history of himself. If ever there seemed to be a child of providence, and one preserved for gospel and remarkable work, it was this man; and yet here he was at the altar a seeker after departed light, unction and power.

His mother, I was informed, was a poor woman. Left in widowhood with this one boy of six or eight years of age, her poverty became extreme.

When two years of age, or hardly that, while she was out in the yard engaged in some manual toil, the child fell in a pot of scalding water. Amazing to say, he was not killed or even scarred. She found him in this condition of peril, his screams having brought her in, and yet he was soon well again from the accident that had ensued.

It was when he was about eight years of age that the mother, more to relieve her desperate financial condition than through love, married a very wicked man. She was pious and devout; and yet broke the commandment about “being yoked unequally with unbelievers,” a command, by the way, that should take every preacher and Christian church member out of the lodges and so-called fraternities all over the land.

The husband’s hate seemed to turn at once upon the boy; and continuous and unspeakably cruel was his treatment of the innocent, unoffending child.

One day, while the mother was absent at a neighbor’s house doing their washing, the lad, who was out in the yard, happened to look up and saw his stepfather leveling a gun upon him. The boy, without being able to account for it, instantly fell upon his knees, stretched his hands heavenward and, with uplifted face, began to pray to God for deliverance. Impressed to look down, he saw that the man, in some way moved and touched, could not shoot a being on his knees in prayer, and was lowering his gun. A third impression bade him run, and he fled with all the speed he could make for twenty or thirty yards, when still another prompting urged him to fall on his knees and pray again. This he did, and as he, with a frightened glance, looked toward the house, he saw that the gun had been aimed at him again. Once more he was impelled to fly, and as he did so saw that the weapon had been lifted.

This time his run placed him out of gunshot, and entering the woods he still ran until he was hidden from sight, and going a mile or so deeper in the dense forest lay down exhausted at the foot of a tree and spent the night in the heart of the woods with nothing but the cry of night birds and the sound of an occasional prowling animal to fall upon his hearing. But this loneliness and the dangers of the forest were far more acceptable to him than the sight of a gun and the scowling face over it that had been directed toward him.

The boy’s history and life did not lack in interest and providential leadings and deliverances after that, but what I have written is sufficient to show the reader how engaged God had been in this human life for some wise purpose.

He finally, after manhood, became converted, sanctified and called to the ministry. He was most remarkably honored in his work by the Divine Being who called him. Without education, yet he had an influence over souls that cannot be given by schools and colleges, excellent and desirable as they are. I was told that God had used him in a most unusual way, and his life had proved one of genuine spiritual power, and a benediction to his community.

As far as I can learn in the matter of explanation, there was in his way a set of unconverted grown-up children at home, a hard-featured, unspiritual wife and a prosperous business. The wife took no stock in holiness, and his sons insisted that he remain at home and help them with the farm and saw-mill. Anyhow, when I saw the man, the glory was departed. A second individual I met at a still later meeting. The trouble in his case was that I could not get him anywhere near the altar. The heart seemed to be turned to stone so far as salvation was concerned, and his spiritual nature dead or paralyzed.

He said that he had been very bitterly dealt with in life, and being filled with self pity and resentment, turned from God, duty and the claims of humanity upon him.

His history was quite wonderful. When a lad of seven he was separated and lost from his parents in London, England.

A man coming with his family to this country encountered somehow just before embarkation, this lost wandering boy, and brought him over to the United States as one of his household.

The man was emigrating west, and, while crossing a river in Kansas, a sudden rise or freshet drowned every one of the party but the boy waif.

As a wagon body swept past the struggling lad there was a halter attached to one of the rods. Grasping, with almost a drowning clutch, the strap of leather, he pulled himself hand over hand until he was able, finally, to climb on top of the upset wagon frame. On this frail craft he floated all day long, washed first near one shore and then towards another; now in an eddy; now in a swift current; until at last, at about sunset, he drifted against the branches of a fallen tree, and, crawling along the limbs, reached the ground and found himself on an island.

Some Indians, for this happened in the early ‘50s, saw the lad and his escape, and next morning came over in a canoe and brought him into their camp, and he became one of their tribe.

He grew up to manhood, and forgot his own name, the name of his parents, and almost everything connected with his earlier life.

Later on he separated from his Indian friends and entered civilization. Taking up different kinds of employment, he soon amassed a competency and indeed a fortune.

When I saw him he had a sweet-faced ladylike wife, and was a man of large property.

If ever I read or heard of an individual who had been providentially dealt with, and that in a merciful, gracious and extraordinary manner, it was this person. And yet I was told that his constant declaration was that he had been hardly dealt with in life both by man and God.

Nothing in the gospel services seemed to move him. He made no response to any proposition and, of course, ignored the altar call and service.

The two cases set me to thinking.

I remembered how many people God had fairly rained mercies upon; that were surrounded with every gospel privilege and advantage; had other beings to make constant and profoundest life sacrifices for them; and yet nothing seemed to touch, move or change them. They went on railing at fate, the hardness of the world, the injustice of being brought into such a life as this, the pitilessness even of God himself; when their life was one long history of Divine mercy and human kindness.

Why could not the first man remember the remarkable display of the Divine interest and power in his life? Why not escape the traps laid for him by the devil in his unconverted children, hard wife and prosperous business? Why could he not break through and over them all, giving glory and obedience to God?

As for the second person, why could he not remember how God had raised up friends for the homeless child, saved him from a raging torrent, made the Indians kind to him, led him to marry a sweet, good woman, and prospered him in material things as He once had blessed Jacob.

This man only saw the fact of his forgotten name, the freshet, and some lonely years on the plains with the savages. When, like the grateful leper, he should have returned and, in view of Heaven’s mercies to a lost and unworthy sinner, given thanks to God in a loud voice.

On the other hand, I have seen men who never had anything done for them. No halter was thrown to them in a critical time; no wagon body lifted them in peril; no Indian cared for them; no one helped them on and up in time of trouble; and yet these precious souls found God and not only found Him without help, but served Him in spite of human resistance and bitter opposition of all kinds.

They adopted the plan of doing good and following the example of their Savior. Nine times out of ten they met with no gratitude for what they did for others. Their own families accepted their sacrifices as a matter of course, and, like the children of King Lear, repaid affection with insult and ill-treatment.

I have known such men abused and accused of everything mean and vile under the sun. I have heard them called devils. Their lives have been dubbed Pharisaical and hypocritical. Slandered by their open enemies; stabbed with innuendoes by secret foes; their own church doors closed against them in face of a life of loyalty; misunderstood and inwardly despised by the nearest of kith and kin; yet they went on doing good, faithful to God, and standing by the Word, the testimony, the doctrine and the faith once delivered to the saints until the very end.

Verily, it seems that the more that is done for certain beings in the home circle, the ecclesiastical realm, the business world and the religious life, the more helpless, ungrateful and generally no account they are. While the less that is done for multitudes of others we know, the better it appears to be for them, their characters, their success in life, their salvation and their final standing in heaven.

Behold, I show unto you a mystery.

Chapter 20: Explanation of Difficult Cases

The Spirit and the Word always agree. So when penitents and seekers declare that they have done all, and yet cannot hear from Heaven, I know there is another history, another side to the matter that does not agree with their statements.

As they protest and affirm with earnestness and even heat of manner that they have done all that the Bible requires, and that they are keeping back nothing, and that they do not know why forgiveness does not come, or why the work and witness of the Spirit is not felt in the blessing of sanctification, we may all know that the truth is not being told.

The inexperienced and spiritually ignorant may be bewildered by such cases, especially if said case is attired in silk and broadcloth, wears diamonds and gold watches, and is prominent in the church or community.

But older heads, and Spirit-taught and led men are not deceived. They know that God understands the man before them, and that because God does know him, certain things asked for by the man, and expected immediately by his admirers and sycophants do not and cannot happen.

In some of these occasions the prayers of the penitent’s friends actually reflect on God and contain insinuations against the divine faithfulness and promises. And the seeker’s own statements would lead some to believe an innocent, overlooked, injured party is being neglected by the Almighty.

The silence of God through all these kind of altar histories is both affecting and also awe-inspiring to the writer. God is being wronged again, and in this new way, but contemplates and takes it all without a word. He hears himself and His faithfulness reflected on, and gives no sign that He has been grieved and outraged, or that He sees a humbug, liar or hypocrite at the altar.

Once in one of my meetings a man suddenly arose from the altar, where he had been a seeker for several days without apparently making any advance, and walking to the stove in a corner of the building, opened a door at the top and casting a plug of tobacco into the flames, slammed the iron lid back in place, and returned to the altar amid the shouts of a number of Holiness people who knew his bondage to the weed.

But I noticed that the man himself did not shout, nor was there any lighting up of his countenance or any facial change for the better whatever. On the contrary, the face was dark and gloomy.

Going up to him I said, “I am glad you have given up this unclean habit, so God can bestow on you the blessing of holiness.”

His reply was, “I have not given it up as you think.” “But I saw you open the stove door and throw the plug in, and supposed by that act that you meant you gave up tobacco then and forever.”

“No,” he rejoined, “I gave it up for today.”

My disgust over this piece of acting, over this false impression made on the people, and the effort to deceive God, was almost too deep for words.

But I did manage to ask him how he could get his consent to mock God in such a way, and added, “Did you know that God killed a man and woman for doing a thing similar to what you have done today? Do you remember they said they had given up all for God, and yet had not done so; and they were stricken down in instant death for their deception?”

Of course the man became very angry and gave up seeking full salvation, as he could not humbug man or God.

Meantime I recalled the look and meaning of his dark, heavy face when he performed the stove scene. God knew he was acting. And though the hypocrite walked with firm tread across the whole breadth of the church, and though he looked determined and honest, and though he pitched the tobacco into the fire as if he was disgusted with it, and slammed the stove door on it with the air of one burning or blowing up a last bridge, and though he strode back to the altar from the tobacco burial as one who had looked his last on the face of a departed one in the coffin, and though the people shouted, wept, clapped their hands and cried out, “Glory!” all over the house, yet the Lord was never deceived a single moment! God, who knows the heart, knew the humbug before him and the poor little farce of a minute’s acting that was trying to pass itself off for a life tragedy.

We may delude man, but we cannot deceive God, for He knows us and that thoroughly and completely.

I have alluded a number of times publicly to an occurrence at a camp meeting in a southern state where a prominent man in the community came to the altar. He was quite a wealthy man, had several large plantations and any amount of blooded stock. Among other possessions he owned a number of race horses.

As he bowed down a penitent and seeker at the mourners’ bench, five or six preachers promptly gathered around him to help him and assist in praying him through.

A couple of hours passed by and there was no change in the look and bearing of the penitent who knelt silent and glum at the altar. The preachers were tired, but the game was too big, the seeker too influential to be left alone, so that their prayers, though now quite wearied, yet still rang out, “Now, Lord!” “Let the fire fall, Lord! He has given up all, Lord; why does not the blessing descend! Open the heavens and come down upon our precious brother.”

But heaven remained silent to the “precious brother” in spite of the insinuations of the preachers. The precious brother continued silent, sulky, gloomy and lockjawed in the midst of a semi-circle of clamoring and vociferating ministers of the Gospel. Heaven and the precious brother were alike silent.

Another hour passed and the preachers were not only worn out but hungry as well. The dinner hour had passed and they had been afraid to leave the prominent seeker at the altar. So that their prayers, so-called, actually reflected on the mercy and knowledge of God. “Give him the blessing now, Lord! He is ready for it! He has given up all, Lord! Why not now, Lord!”

When suddenly the rich sinner at the mourners bench, who had been mentally dropping sin after sin, and giving up different wrong practices lifted his head, and looking up to Heaven cried out, “I give up the colt too, Lord!”

When like a flash of lightning the skies opened over him and God flooded the man’s soul with the pardon, peace and rapture of salvation. Oh, how he shouted around the camp ground; and how cheap the preachers must have felt.

In a word, God understood his own business, and thoroughly knew the man kneeling before him. The position was that of a surrendered sinner, but he was keeping back one thing connected with his sinful past. He owned a colt of the very best blooded stock. He told God that he was done with horse racing and gambling of every form, but he wanted to see that colt run just one race.

On that single reservation he was silently and invisibly battling with God for three hours. Every sin surrendered but one, and so he sulked, and the preachers clamored. Both sides from the different standpoints of deception on the part of the man at the altar, and of ignorance of the withheld thing on the part of the preachers, were trying to make God ignore and set aside his own Word which said, “If I regard iniquity in my heart the Lord will not hear me,” but “He that confesseth and forsaketh shall have mercy.”

Thus it is that the explanation of a human figure stalled and lockjawed at the altar; and the meaning of a silent heaven over such a bowed down, voiceless, joyless form, is, that God knows the man altogether who is before him. Half of the fortune has been kept back. The wedge of gold is under the tent. The colt has not been given up to God.

Chapter 21: The Captive Seal

While on the Pacific Coast several years ago, in one of my walks near the beach, I passed a small reservoir of water about twelve or fifteen feet in diameter and eight in depth. The wall of stone that encircled it rose a couple of feet above the ground, while a palisade of iron stakes crowned the abutment of rock.

In the pool lived the captive seal I write about in this chapter. Repeatedly I stopped and studied this creation of God with its sinuous beauty, dark glossy skin, powerful flippers that were neither feet nor fins, and its marvelous swiftness of movement as it rushed around in circles under the water.

I was especially struck with the fixed gaze that the seal for minutes at a time would bend upon the distant horizon over the limitless expanse of waves. I could all but feel that look of the solitary creature as with body poised above the water and uplifted head it fastened its eyes on the far away view of sunlit billows and that remote line where the sky touched the sea, and beyond which lived and gamboled in the great deep, herds and schools of its own kind, from whom it had been separated for long weary months and perhaps years.

After one of these prolonged looks the seal would suddenly dive deep in the pool and for minutes rush with the speed of a whirlwind round and round the circular sides of its prison house as if it was escaping and getting back to its distant tribe, former life and long unbeheld home.

Oh, how it would cleave the water, and with evident desperation of energy try to cross that wild waste of waves that it beheld through the iron paling. Then it would rise again, fix the eyes once more for minutes on the ocean and sky line that seemed no nearer, and still again repeat the plunge, dive and rush around in the pool.

I confess to being greatly moved at the spectacle, and fancied that I could see back of the pathetic, black eyes the yearning of the creature for its own tribe and household, and mark the disappointment and wonder that its last struggle and swift course under the water had not brought it any nearer to the distant, flashing waves, nor in sight or touch of its companions that by the law of nature it craved to see, live and die with.

In addition to the melancholy impression made upon me by the captive I obtained several lessons.

One was from the look of the seal.

I have seen a gaze kindred in character many times in human life itself and from very different walks and conditions of men.

The prisoner in jail or penitentiary knows it. The exile from his native land, although not writing a page, feels volumes as to what is in that gaze. The banished Marius said to a couple of messengers, “Tell the people of Rome that you saw Marius sitting in the ruins of Carthage.” It requires but little imagination to conceive the expression of face, and the sorrowful eyes looking beyond the Mediterranean sea towards Rome, and all that must have been in the heart of the speaker.

There is no picture of Napoleon which so moves the observer as the one where he is represented standing on the shores of St. Helena looking over the waves towards the France he loved so well but would never see again.

Travelers standing on deck of the departing steamer, and seeing America or their native land disappear as a misty line in the distance, know somewhat of the gaze I am writing about; only in their case there is a certainty or hope of returning.

But far more deeply I have been struck with the faraway look that comes sooner or later into the eyes when the soul itself seems to be gazing.

All of us can easily see the difference between the bright restless glance of youth to whom earth is a kind of heaven, time full of sweet revelations, joys, and rewards; and the look of the man or woman who, first disappointed by the world, wounded and betrayed by friends, and then turning to Christ and His salvation and comfort, begins to wear the contemplative and distant gaze that overleaps the waves of time and fastens itself on the horizon lines of eternity.

I do not mean that there is bitterness in the heart, or hopelessness in this heavenward glance of the person I am speaking of. It is a disappointment in what was expected in and of the world without acidulation of spirit; and a transference now of heart treasure, hope and expectancy to a life and world beyond and above the clouds and stars.

I heard a lady once say that just such an expression in the eyes of a holy woman led her to give herself wholly and forever to God.

I doubt not that to many these looks and attendant facial expressions are not only not understood, but very much misunderstood. With some it may seem to be gloom, moroseness, exclusiveness, secret sorrow or the burden of sin. But other eyes see better and God understands.

Often, since time with its years and cares and bereavements have come upon me I have recalled this thoughtful far-away gaze in the eyes of my mother; of men and women sobered by life experiences; and of men in the pulpit who lived as if they saw Him who was invisible.

Like the seal on the beach, the soul that has been aroused and fully saved and taught of God is as a captive on the shores of time, with its eyes fixed on the cloud and star horizon line that hides the view of the heavenly world with its holy occupations, eternal joys and everlasting life.

Such people are not bitter; they know of something better than time and earth can give. They are in the world, but not of it. They are true to all the duties of the life here, but just as plainly we can see that they “seek a country” and their treasure is in a kingdom above and far out of sight.

The second lesson obtained from the captive by the sea side was the utter vanity and failure of all its exertions and labors to get anywhere.

Round and round it went, upheaving the surface of the pool and churning its waters into a foam, and yet there it was, this foamer and plunger and agitator, in the same place it started from, only minus a lot of physical energy, and plus a number of disappointments.

I see the seal in great civil commotions, wars, mobs, overturnings of governments, etc., etc.; and yet when it is all over, there, panting before us, is the evident failure, and the fact unmistakable, that the community or nation is about where it was before. After the War of the Roses, there in life were the original thorns. After Cromwell’s commonwealth had plunged around awhile here was seen royalty again. There is another splash, dash and run around and a Henry appears; a Charles is gotten rid of and instead we see a George. What a commotion the seal made, and after all only a change of name secured. The state got nowhere.

I see the seal in ecclesiastical controversies and wars of one religious body upon another. What a rushing around the pool, and then stopping where they begun, minus something they ought not to have lost, and plus something they never should have possessed.

I behold the seal again in a number of so-called gospel and revival meetings. The fact is that we hear little of the Gospel, and there really is no revival. There was just a protracted meeting where the seal rushed, plunged, and foamed around for ten days or one month.

Then, when all was over, thoughtful and spiritual men saw that so far as genuine salvation and a real revival was concerned, the meeting had gotten nowhere. The seal had just torn around in dizzy, confusing circles. There was a lot of froth and foam, but God was as far away and the salvation of the Son of God as remote as ever. How often I have been told by true and wise men of God, residents in a city or town where a much boasted and highly praised meeting had been held, that in spite of the scores and hundreds said to have been saved, that there was absolutely nothing to show for it.

In other words, that the seal on the platform, with all his sermonettes, anecdotes, propositions, solos, songs bearing on the natural affections and his generalship, had gotten nowhere.

Still again I see the seal in the lives of men and women in the religious realm who plunge and dash around, and look like they are getting somewhere and doing something and yet at the conclusion of a single meeting, or a year’s labor, or at the end of life itself, in the reviewing and viewing we could plainly see that the seal had gotten nowhere

Mrs. Eddy said there were no such things as sickness or death. Then she plunged around in dizzy circles of illogical and unscriptural statements. What a foam and ferment and stir she made for years and left a following called Christian Science. But where is the Christianity of Christian Science? And where are the saved multitudes and nations to witness this insisted upon superior revelation. And she who said there was no death, died; and she who insisted there was no disease or sickness, perished by a malady, known by the name of pneumonia. Verily, the seal, after all its plunging around, got back to the place it started, in other words, got nowhere.

So with certain male and female evangelists. There is a tremendous splashing around for awhile. A dip into this and a dip into that. Now it is this thing, and now it is that. Comeoutism, socialism, third blessingism, Tongueism and all the other sidetracks of these unhappy times. Here they go, round and round now in this strange movement, now in another, now a new revelation, then a still later one, on and on, whirl and circle, dash and splash, and clash and crash! and lo! here they are after years of frothing and foaming of announcing and denouncing, of fulminating and tirading, just where they started from. They have gotten nowhere.

Indeed in a character sense they are not where they started from. They are minus something they could not afford to lose, and they are plus something they ought never to have had.

Alas for the minus! and alas for the plus! and alas for the final summing up and total that they got nowhere!

Chapter 22: The Moss Parable

Some years ago while on the train speeding to a distant appointment, I read something in one of the magazines of the day, that has many times returned to memory. Whether the author of the sketch had some spiritual design in mind, as Robert Louis Stevenson when he wrote “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” I do not know. But I am certain that as I read and have recalled the contribution since, I have felt deeply impressed with the possibilities of its moral significance and teaching beyond many other communications in the world’s press that I have perused in a long time.

The author said that he was on the deck of a becalmed sailing vessel near the shore of a small coral reefed, palm crowned island in the Pacific.

As he was musing in the starlight on the deck he thought he heard the sound of an oar on the island side of the ship. Looking up and outward he discerned in the misty, foggy, light a small boat, while something that bore a resemblance to a human figure sat in the stern directing its slow and cautious movements. The figure had a wavy, tremulous kind of motion that made one think of a shadow or bit of mist rather than anything of solid substance.

In answer to the “Boat ahoy” of the watch, there was a sudden pause of the boat’s advance, and a muffled kind of voice very hard to distinguish and understand came from the wavering figure.

In answer to what was wanted the voice answering as if proceeding from the depths of layers of something, begged for food, and that it be put on a plank and shoved toward him, that the tide setting in would bring it in his reach, while there were reasons that no one should approach him. That if a boat started toward him he would vanish in the darkness at once.

Filled with pity and somehow unable to deny the strange request, food was deposited on a plank, the light craft was gently shoved in the direction of the boat, and in a few minutes a number of the ship’s crew saw the strange, misty, waving-like figure stoop to get the consignment, and with a muffled cry of thanks, disappear with a few almost noiseless strokes of an oar in the direction of the island.

The next morning impressed by curiosity, the writer of the sketch which I read and several of the crew rowed toward the island, found an opening in the coral reef and landed on an almost waveless beach. As they walked up toward the interior of the land, suddenly a form rose up before them fifty or sixty feet away, looking like a human figure literally covered with a tremulous waving kind of moss. They stopped instantly in a kind of shocked wonder, while the figure stretching out what seemed to be an arm or protuberance waved them frantically away with smothered sounds of voice that were evidently intended to give alarm and convey warning.

As they questioned this uncanny looking form, asking why they were so treated, and why he so resented an intrusion that was meant in kindness, both of the arms as they seemed to be, were lifted, and the hands taking hold of the moss that hung all over the head and hid the face as well as covered the body, lifted and divided it in some manner, so that the vocal sounds issuing from the head might be more clearly heard and understood.

The substance of the strange speech and fearful warning was, that the peculiarly afflicted and doomed being before them had been cast with a dozen other sailors on the island through shipwreck. That on the island was a strange plant that touching the human skin struck in its roots and would then overrun the entire body with its vinelike, mossy tendrils, and after a brief while envelop the being, muffle the head, blot out vision, sap the strength and finally strangle and suffocate the victim.

The figure told them that all his comrades were dead and pointed to what looked like logs scattered around enswathed in moss. He said that he was doomed; and that as the plant was all over the island, they who were speaking to him stood in constant jeopardy and their only hope was to fly at once, and quit the island with its subtle, horrible form of death, and leave him also who was past all cure. That the pangs of starvation they had relieved the night before, but no one could save him from the strangling and suffocation now close at hand. And so he begged them in mercy to themselves to go.

The parable I would make of this fearful occurrence should be evident to the dullest. The world is the island, sin is the plant that lays hold of soul and body and begins its enveloping, enswathing, blinding, weakening, choking and destructive work.

We have only to look around to see the silent dead forms it has slain; only to look again to behold multitudes in the various stages of weakness, blindness, helplessness and doom.

One of the strangest, most heart sickening and horrifying spectacles is a man’s envelopment in sin; the gradual disappearance of the person we knew in the creeping, crawling, multiplying coverings and enswathements of some form of iniquity.

Not only is the character changed, but the personal appearance is altered, and we look at and talk to a covered up, hidden somebody, whom we once knew and loved, but now can not touch, cannot even see him, close as he is, because of the disfiguring enfoldings laid upon and wrapped about him by sin.

One sin curse and envelopment is seen in opiates and alcohol.

I need not tell the reader how quick and deep and dense is the overspread of these iniquity plants on the moral nature.

All soon lose sight of the man or woman they once knew, and feel that they are talking to and warning one who sees not, hears not and is doomed.

Repeatedly I have encountered a person who had acquired the narcotic habit, and as I marked the dull eye, the heavy face, the slothful brain, and the nodding head and cat nap slumbers going on before me, I felt that I had met the moss covered being on the island.

Again the sin touch is beheld in resentment and hate.

Once they were friends and trusted in and loved each other. But somewhere in the Island of Life they touched the Sin Plant; and now great folds and masses of some cold black intervening something has fallen over face and heart, over conduct and life, and they seem utterly hid from each other. Sometimes I have known cases where one of the two had love left and tried to find and communicate with the other. But the eye of the second was hard, the tone repellent, the heart encased, and so the man once known and loved could not be found. If he spoke it sounded as if the voice was far away, was coming from a great distance or through something that muffled and changed the tone and made it sound like the utterances of a stranger.

Yet, third, the carnal mind alone produces this awful growth, what with injudicious praises and flatteries who wonders that the children of a family, grow up to be walking figures of Moss. That selfishness, arrogance and intolerance; impertinence to elders; and disobedience and downright contempt of parents, should make an increasing enswathement of moral hideousness as to completely hide the beauty and life of the soul.

Fourth, I have known cases where pride and its attendants had been wiped out by the blessing of full salvation, and then the man in some way touched the Sin Plant again and became proud, intolerant and pompous as of yore.

Someone told him that he was a great preacher, the greatest preacher that had ever been to the town or camp meeting; and lo! the moss began to run all over him again: he got to posing in the pulpit; tried to look like a bishop; spoke to his brethren as from a great distance and through suffocating thickness of self-importance and spiritual vanity.

“Where is our old friend?” is the cry, as we look at the rocking, waving figure before us. And the answer is there is such an enveloping, repelling something about him that he cannot be found.

Fifth, the Sin Plant can cover the soul with the thickest enswathements of worldliness.

The victim referred to was once single eyed, and simple hearted; but a spray of the poison vine struck him, and the moss began to grow, and now hangs in heavy folds and layers all over the mind, spirit and life. The Bible and Christ have been virtually and actually put away while the standards, maxims, customs, fashions, pleasures, ways and people of this world fill the thought and life, dominate the conduct, and utterly hide the soul we once knew and communed with.

Once while prodding for, or trying to make ourselves heard by this enveloped spirit, some of us saw an opening in the waving moss and caught a glance of the eye. But it was only for a second, and the look we got in that single instant was so hard, cold and even dead, that we were glad the moss waved forward and hid the strange being whom once we knew, but now did not know or could not find.

We heard of the figure after this bending and bowing in waltzes and cotillions; and bending and bowing over a game of cards called Flinch and Bridge, and saying in tones so different from early days.” That they fairly doted on them.” Then we were convinced that the moss had grown so deep and had so obscured spirit vision, and deadened soul hearing, and choked and strangled a former better life; that the unfortunate being was doomed and would soon be seen stretched with the completely dead that lie all along the shore of this Island of Time.

Sixth, I have seen the Sin Plant cover the soul with the moss of suspicion.

David Graham Phillips, writing from the viewpoint of the unconverted man, says that suspicion of an individual once born in the heart never dies, but feeding on something it finds in its own nature keeps growing.

Paul, speaking of the sanctified soul filled with perfect love, affirms that it “thinketh (suspecteth) no evil.”

The question is what sin plant is it which some have struck on the Island that they grow suspicious of the motives, conduct, character and life of their friends and brethren.

So here is the moss again, and not transforming but deforming and hiding people we once knew and loved from the depths of our heart from our sight forever.

Finally, what shall we say of fanaticism and false doctrine, both sin plants; and business itself, which can be made a sin plant. Have we not seen them all cover up a soul, and blind the vision, and deaden the hearing, and envelop the victim so that we not only could not see the hidden being, but could not make ourselves heard and understood by the blinded, stupefied individual we were laboring with and trying to save?

May the God of Mercy save every reader of these lines from the Sin Plant and its quick growing moss that has destroyed countless of millions of souls and would ruin and damn forever as many countless millions more.

Chapter 23: Victory in the Face of Discouragements and Hindrances

Certainly the Lord is in the full salvation movement, or it could never have survived the animosity of hell, the resistance of the world, the ridicule of an onlooking multitude, and the mistakes, blunders and inadequate human resources of its friends and followers.

In the beginning of my evangelistic labors I was so deeply impressed with these contrasting factors and features, as beheld in the comparatively small company of the Holiness people, and the vast number outside the Movement who were ignorant of the doctrine and experience and either indifferent or full of bitter opposition, my heart would be overshadowed with anxiety and apprehension. But as months and years rolled by I soon saw that numbers amounted to nothing with God; that He could win battles without human scholarship, culture, riches, and social, civil and ecclesiastical power being on His side; and that so long as His people would remain true in doctrine and in life He would always cause them to triumph. I then began to draw easier breaths, and have been doing so ever since.

It matters not what may be the opposition, how great the ridicule, how black the falsehood, uttered against us, if we as Holiness people remain clean in heart, sweet in spirit, and steadfast unmovable always abounding in the work of the Lord certainly we will never know defeat, but victory greater or less according to time spent, and conditions confronted, will always be ours.

Four times since I have been an evangelist, I have left a meeting before the allotted period was complete. This I did, following not only the example of Doctor Finney, one of the greatest of evangelists, but thinking the procedure was to be found in the Gospel both in act and word. But with growing knowledge and experience I question now whether I did right. As I see God’s pity and power now in a stronger light, I believe I would stay to the end.

In one town, fully eight or ten years ago, the resistance was so bitter to Holiness, and the hatred to altar work so intense that at the conclusion of the seventh day, I, feeling that the “Blood” was being trampled upon, closed the meeting with a solemn farewell, and God knowing the integrity of my heart and loyalty to His Son, filled me with a great peace, and even joy in my departure.

But in the next three days there came a number of people from other towns and distant neighborhoods hungry for the blessings of reclamation and sanctification, and lo! the meeting had closed.

Perhaps this was not a mistake I made, perhaps it was. But here is one thing absolutely sure, that even in this case God obtained the victory. Quite a number were deeply convicted over the unexpected sudden termination of the gospel services; some saw the “closing of the door” mentioned so solemnly by the Savior, and still others followed me to another meeting and were blessedly sanctified.

The Kingdom of God certainly does not come with observation in the outset of many of our Holiness meetings. We have not the biggest tents, the finest tabernacles, the largest choral bands, nor the company of resident pastors on the platform, nor the newspapers, nor the mayor and board of aldermen. Rarely indeed does a presiding elder lend us the light of his countenance, while a bishop is beheld only here and there and hardly ever more than a day at that. Then when he is gone, a great number go with him, so that it is evident that if the King does not help us, the Kingdom now undergoing humiliation of all kinds as the King Himself once did, must necessarily be in a great strait and sore distress.

But the King is with us, and is constantly proving His presence and overruling power to all who will be true and faithful to Him, and submit entirely to His leadership.

A retrospective glance over the past years ought to fill every sanctified pastor and evangelist’s heart with renewed confidence and zeal as he must see that Christ never left him, but always gave him unmistakable triumph in different ways over the opponents of full salvation whether they were in the church or in the world or from the Pit itself.

From the beginning God has been warring with a minority against an overwhelming majority. Then he has taken the weak things to confound the mighty, and things that are not to bring to naught the things that are.

It has been the same in every age, in every land, and as far as I can see the Lord is now carrying on the battle in the old time way.

The ox-cart with the ark of God is still seen humbly coming up the road, while the chariots of sin flash in their brazen and golden splendor over the land. Saul is on the throne and David in the woods in many places in the world today. And the Lord’s true following is often beheld in these very times looking like the little band of Samaritans and Galileans in the presence of the great and glittering ecclesiasticism in Jerusalem.

But no matter what may be the difficulty, the reproach, the opposition, the apparent weakness of our side and the evident numerical superiority of the other side, yet if God is in us and with us we will not and can not be defeated, but will come out victorious in spirit, ahead in spiritual results, and with the divine smile, favor and honor upon us every time.

It is certainly heart-sickening to begin a meeting with a handful of discouraged looking people; but what evangelist has not started thus and beheld a deep and widespread revival spring up with large convicted crowds in attendance before he got half way through the ten days’ or two weeks’ protracted services. What faithful servant of Christ has not beheld under a firm loving and persistent presentation of the truth, an icy crowd melt, a hard one break, and a violent angry one become calm, reasonable and convinced by the presence and power of the Holy Ghost.

Once in a large city church there was a deliberate attempt made to head me off from preaching full salvation. Even the leader of the choir carefully selected hymns which she thought had not the slightest reference to holiness as a second work. But I kindly thanked the music leader for the two hymns, showing where the second work was taught in each. The indignation in that choir can be imagined. But God filled the altar, and that with the best people. Moreover, the leader referred to went down with the rest. In addition, one day when I gave one of my “Wine Talks,” as I called them, the fury of the congregation arose to its highest pitch, and yet that very day God sanctified twice as many as usual and proved that there was a wine blessing such as the disciples received at Pentecost.

At another place the hindrance was felt in a dissimilar way in the form of a raging chairman of the board of stewards, a slamming side door, and a holiness sister who had a way of stepping over the altar rail in the church, which railing was two feet and a half high.

The chairman would get little knots of people together before and after the sermon and ridicule and inveigh against the doctrine of Holiness. The side door with a terrific clap would sound and resound hundreds of times in every service, distracting attention and preventing people from hearing many words and parts of sentences of the Gospel message. The high stepping sister with her unfeminine acrobatic performances, hurt the meeting more than the chairman or the side door, and I used to groan every time I saw her rise to clear the fence, so to speak.

But I held on, and held in, and prayed mightily, and preached faithfully, and believed steadily, and God gave the victory with over one hundred conversions and sanctifications. The chairman of the board went down at last with a bitter cry at the altar, got recovered, and then sanctified. The side door was forgotten when the Lord opened the doors of Heaven upon us. And as for the agile sister, we turned her over to the tender mercies and instructing providence of the Almighty.

In a third place at one of my opening meetings, I had for my audience one gray headed old man, three women who seemed to be in a brown study, two hens scratching around in the wheat straw, and one dog lying asleep at the far end of the altar.

And yet strangely, sweetly encouraged by the Savior, I held on from day to day and night to night, and saw the tent filled with people, a number of deeply convicted souls at the altar, a score of souls get clearly and powerfully through into pardon and holiness, and a victory so clear in every way as to be evident to every one.

In a fourth place my first meeting consisted of a band of holiness women and four men. And such men, speaking in a physical sense, I never encountered in one group before. One had a leg off. Another possessed but one arm. A third had but one ear. The fourth had a harelip and could with difficulty be understood when he spoke.

Speaking after the manner of men, it seemed that I was but poorly furnished on the male side of my audience. That the masculine enrollment of my troops when all put together would only make about one whole man after all. Doubtless the world would have laughed at my roll call. Perhaps the devils in hell did.

But Holiness people have a way of looking and counting that is all unknown to this sinful earth in ifs wisdom.

First there was a natural pang at the physical inadequacy before me. Then came a deep, sweet, tender feeling of pity. Then a joy that God could take up men that the world and the devil had injured and maimed, and would make them His soldiers. Then an assurance that God in these maimed creatures of His was more than a match for all the stalwarts and mighty ones of earth who knew Him not and possessed Him not.

My four afflicted and dismembered brethren certainly had the blessing of sanctification, and he who said He could take the weak things of this world, and the things that are despised and that are not, and could bring down through them the forces that are considered great and powerful, did so in this case; and a sweeping revival was the outcome, and that in the face of churches by the score who with wealth, culture and numbers had not beheld salvation in their pews and at their altars for a score of years, and some not through the whole course of their brick and mortar existence, not to mention the marble front, and the laying of the cornerstone by the Masonic Fraternity.

Certainly we have nothing to fear from our weakness as to numbers and insufficiency in many things, nor need to dread the wisdom, might, power and combinations of men against us no matter what form the attack should assume. The God of the stripling David, of the single handed Gideon, the solitary Paul, the imprisoned Peter, the ridiculed John Bunyan, and the daily mobbed John Wesley, is still alive; and as He gave these servants of His triumph in a way the world can never forget, so can He grant us success in our posts and places in spite of all the hate of men and rage of devils that can be hurled against us.

So long as we abide in Christ and keep His sayings, we are promised victory under any and all circumstances. And the word is, that filled with the Spirit, one can chase a thousand and two put ten thousand to flight; while the inspired declaration has been given, that as Christ overcame and has sat down with His Father on His throne, even so we through Christ can overcome all things and sit down with Him on His throne.

Chapter 24: Besetments of a Revival Meeting

There are many things that offend the formalist and fastidious in a genuine revival. But those who understand these works of God best are neither surprised nor grieved at what they see. They know that there is an order in what seems disorder to the world, and regularity where human critics allege the fault of irregularity.

But in addition to that naturally to be expected stir, noise and unusual proceedings of people filled with the Holy Ghost, yet there are disturbances, unfortunate occurrences with backsets and withstandings of a character that seem to me never to be beheld in such force and number as at a full salvation or Holiness meeting.

The Ark of God seems inseparably connected in some way with the uncouth, uncomely, creaking, slow moving ox cart. The Philistines still smile at the human side of salvation; but those going up with the ox cart, know that in spite of every hard, unseemly and regrettable feature about our meetings, yet that we have the Ark, and God is with us, who after making the Philistines sick who laughed at us, will finally usher us with shouts and rejoicings into the New Jerusalem.

In a camp meeting in Tennessee a cause of great disturbance one morning originated and proceeded from a setting hen. The tabernacle since the last camp, had been given over to silence, dust and cobwebs, and this sedate matron of the poultry yard concluded to raise her next brood of chickens in the midst of religious surroundings, and so leaving the household premises, wandered up a country lane and proceeded first to lay and then sit upon a dozen or more eggs immediately under the low platform where the preacher stood and held forth to the audience. As the committee of arrangements opened the aisle gates and scattered fresh straw, they did not notice the fowl hidden away under the planks silently and patiently and strictly attending to business.

When the preacher opened his first sermon one drowsy summer afternoon, his increasingly loud voice and animated movements undoubtedly disturbed the feathered biped just below him, but when at last he gave a loud cry, attended with the heavy stroke of both his feet at once just above the hen’s head, she could stand no more and, with outstretched wings and distracted cries, she sped down the middle aisle before the gaze of five hundred astonished people, flew over the tabernacle railing, then across the fence and then down the road toward the farm house with such unquestionable indications of chicken terror and even downright insanity, that the audience seemed convulsed.

Of course, I rescued the occasion as best I could by drawing a moral lesson and showing how secret things could be hidden away for a while, but God always by and by sent a man or circumstance that would bring forth the unexpected and put the hidden thing of iniquity out from under the platform of darkness and silence and send it flying down the road with loud cries and terrified life before the gaze of an observing world. Nevertheless my effort to lasso the laugh was attended with great difficulty, and I could see women with bowed heads and men with shaking shoulders for quite a while.

In a camp meeting in Kentucky a dog was the trying feature of the meeting. It has long been noticeable that the canine species have a fondness for protracted services and seem to enjoy the crowd, stir and singing, whether they endorse the preaching or not. But in this case a dog ensconced himself on the platform and, sitting on his haunches, gave deliberate and fixed attention to the preacher. The people were highly amused at the studied position of the animal, as if he was following the discourse, and when the preacher moved across the platform towards the quadruped, the brute in question would quietly gather himself up and, crossing the platform to an opposite corner, would resume his former attitude and again give his fixed attention to the speaker of the hour.

The occurrence was so laughable that the services in their solemnity and power were seriously affected by our four-legged auditor, and only when at last he was cordially and earnestly invited to leave the stand by a brother with a stick in his hand, was gravity restored to the audience.

In a town in Kansas the meeting was held in a hall, where just below the central window a cow was tied, and being inconsolable for her calf, from whom she had been separated, she kept up a continual mooing, if not a boo-hooing. The man who owned the animal and lot refused to remove the bereaved beast, and I had to preach against that loud and continued distracting noise for ten whole days.

The following year I had another ten days’ meeting in the same hall, and while the cow was gone there were two of the most obstreperous, vociferous and generally unmanageable babies that I ever heard scream and yell in all my wide and long travels. The mothers sat near the front and never seemed to think a moment of the propriety of their withdrawing the two little howlers, but remained with vacant looking faces through it all, and unconscious, if not indifferent, to the mental torture their offspring was giving to the preacher and audience.

One remarkable fact was that the children never commenced screaming until I announced my text and began preaching, when from that moment the howling started and was kept up steadily until the sermon was finished, when in a second the shrieks and screams ended and the two cherubs, as they are often called, became perfectly quiet. This was repeated day after day with such dreadful similarity of start and completion that I became convinced that the devil, who does not want the Word of God preached, was not only in the mooing of the cow, but was decidedly in the squalling of the two children.

And yet I have to record the fact that I never had two more powerful meetings in all the numerous ones held in that state than the two just described, and which might be properly designated as the Cow and Baby Meetings, or the services of the squall and bellow features.

In a town in West Virginia such was the antagonism to Holiness that the little band inviting me to hold a week’s meeting could only secure an empty store, which was next door to a livery stable.

Near the pulpit, so called, and only a few feet away behind the thin wall which hid him, was a horse that had a way of giving the floor a resounding pound with his foot every few minutes. As it filled the building and at times obliterated, so to speak, the word I was uttering, I first regarded it as a sore trial, coming as it did with a silent, discouraged looking audience of twenty in the day and about forty of the same kind at night. But after a while I noticed that the horse was kicking in the right place, and that his big whack with his hoof on the floor was equivalent to a loud Amen. Moreover, his hoof Amen pounding coming almost every time at the right moment became a great comfort to me, situated as I was for several days in a large, long store with a handful of silent people before me.

On the fourth day a very influential Methodist layman heard me, and convinced that I was preaching Bible truth and church doctrine, he went to his pastor, had the big Methodist church opened to me, and on the fifth day I found myself in the elegant, finely furnished, stained windowed first church of our denomination.

But while the man of prominence could obtain the building for me, he could not compel the crowd to come. So there I was in this great city sanctuary with my same little audience of twenty by day and forty by night, and alas for it, my horse was gone! Oh, how I missed him, and said if he was only here to hit the floor and say Amen in his horse way, I would feel so much better.

And yet in spite of the prejudice in the town, the echoing store, the stamping horse, the great ecclesiastical refrigerator into which we moved, then the absence of the steed, and the shortness of the meeting, out of all these obstacles and discouragements came seven souls to shine for God in the light and glory of full salvation, while one of them alone, a lady, has since then brought over seventy people into the blessing of sanctification. Most of these people she led into the experience of Holiness by buying and presenting to them a copy of a book called Sanctification.

In a large town in Nebraska, it was not a hen, or dog, or cow, or horse or yelling babies that worked against the peace and success of the meeting, but two preachers representing two different denominations and both belonging to the white apron brigade.

It was simply amazing and distressing to know what they did against a gathering of God’s people who were magnifying Christ and helping the people to obtain a free and full salvation.

They were both men of great influence, and one at the beginning of the protracted service, whom we will call S_____ for a certain reason, was a recognized spiritual man and had been honored of God in the bringing of a number of souls to Him.

In spite of the strong combination, I saw twenty souls saved and sanctified, and left for other fields, realizing that but for these two men the town would have been visited with a general revival. All, however, was done that could be performed in ten days and I turned to other places, preaching the gospel of an uttermost salvation.

In less than three years one of the preachers, whom I will designate as B_____, standing as it does for Backslider, was out of the ministry making a scanty living by means of a truck farm. He “lost out,” as the people of God call it, soon had no message to deliver from the pulpit, being as dry as a sun bleached bone and empty as a bass drum. His own worldly flock could not stand him. Nobody asking for him among the district superintendents, he was left with no appointment and commenced raising vegetables.

As for the other, the Rev. Mr. S_____, standing for Suicide, the end was far more dreadful. Soon after the close of the meeting he became subject to fits of ungovernable temper. After that graver acts were imputed to him. Finally a most fearful deed was said to have been committed by him. Investigation proved the whisper was true. He was absent in another state holding services in the church of a preacher who had called him to assist in a protracted meeting.

The proper legal papers were made out for his arrest, and the two officers coming into the church listened in silence until he finished his sermon. Then while altar work was progressing they took him aside in the corner of the building and in low tones, so as not to be overheard, told him he was under arrest for the dreadful crime in his town.

He became as white as marble and requested the officers for permission to step a moment into the pastor’s study. They, full of pity, knowing what he had been in other years, and imagining that he wanted to pray, consented, but asked him to stay only a few moments.

The unhappy man entered the study, closed the door and turned the lock, which the officers heard, and at once became uneasy and apprehensive; so, rushing to the portal, they threw their bodies against it to wrench it open, when, before they could burst the lock, the wretched being in the office drew a pistol, placed it hastily against his temple and then, with a cry of despair that curdled the blood of all who heard it, drew the trigger. The ball crashed through his head, and as the officers rushed in, the dead body of the backslidden preacher fell lifeless at their feet. The scream was the cry of a lost soul. Men who heard it far up the street, knew not what it was, but said it filled them with horror, such was its agony and despair.

Alas for the preachers B_____ and S_____ when they began that most unwise, unfortunate and most disastrous of undertakings, the fighting of the Will of God in regard to the sanctification of the people. Christ died that we should have it. God calls us to it. And yet these men fought and opposed the call, command and will of God. They went down in the hopeless struggle. The Rock they struck rolled upon them and ground them to powder. One is today a hopeless backslider on earth, the other a lost soul in hell.

Chapter 25: Irregularities of a Revival Meeting

One irregularity might be called remissness in duty of the camp meeting board in failing to so advertise the location of the camp as to make it easy and even possible to find the place.

This certainly does not show the wisdom of the children of this world, and yet it happens not infrequently with those who profess the wisdom which is from above.

An irregularity of another kind occurred in a camp meeting in Arkansas. In a sermon on God answering by fire on the soul in the second work of grace, I mentioned the custom of branding cattle in the South. I spoke of herding bullocks and heifers in the corner of a lot and then how powerful hands suddenly let fall and press in on the hind quarter of the animal an iron brand heated red hot. How it burned its way through the hair and deep into the skin and became ineradicable. And how when the flaming iron letters fell on the bullock he would bellow and fly down the road scattering everything and everybody before him.

I had hardly gotten the words out of my mouth when the Holy Fire of Heaven fell upon a consecrated man in the audience and the loud, stentorian cry he gave in a perfect agony of joy was so marvelously like a bellow, that a few thought that a mocker was in the congregation. But the large assembly of Holiness people present knew better and a single glance at the face illumined and still bellowing man was sufficient to convince anyone that here was a genuine work of grace before us, and a most powerful one at that.

Some people well posted in laws of mentality might feel able to give us good reasons for the peculiar vocal display of that evening, but the blessing and work of grace was still left which they could not explain. But this the Holiness people know, that the man got the Baptism with the Holy Ghost and fire, that he bellowed and flew down the road of life, and at last accounts was still running, still shouting the praises of God, and scattering things generally before him as he ran.

Such happenings are not strictly regular, according to certain judgments of men and the rituals and observances of a large number of churches, but somehow Heaven smiles where men frown, and we of the Full Salvation movement get a wonderful lot of comfort out of such happenings.

Sometimes the irregularities are of such a nature as to puzzle for a few seconds even a sanctified audience.

Once in a revival service in Washington City as I was concluding a convicting sermon a young man rushed up the aisle from near the door, as I thought, and fell at the altar beating the rail with both of his fists and crying out in a perfect agony of voice and facial expression, “It must be done! It must be done!”

Of course a group of sympathetic Christian people gathered around the apparent penitent, saying in soothing, comforting voices, “Certainly it must be done,” and “You will do it,” and “Now is the accepted time,” etc. Then to our general amazement we found out that the young man was a country visitor in town, had not been to a single service of the meeting, had not heard a solitary word of the sermon just being concluded, but had a few moments before been fleeced of every dollar he had by a three card monte man in a gambling trick, and in utter despair and full of vengeance, he had rushed up the stairs to the hall where he heard voices, and breaking through the door rushed up the aisle, fell at the altar, beat the rail with his fists and cried, “It must be done! and done at once,” etc.

The expression, “It must be done, and done at once” we soon found out, meant that our fancied mourner was mourning not over his sins but over the loss of ten dollars, and that what he wanted “done” was the immediate arrest and imprisonment and punishment of the Street Confidence man, and the recovery of his lost money.

Vengeance on a fellow being, and restoration of property, was the burden on this young man’s heart; and so his cry rang out, and his fists beat a tattoo on the altar rail. But, oh, how natural and true and genuine it all looked for a few moments to the Christian people gathered around.

After that there was a tremendous lot of smiling, while a number felt that they had learned another lesson in regard to revival meetings, and had been given a still deeper insight into the depths of the human heart which God says is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked,

The lesson came in an irregular manner, but it was one that fairly cut and pierced its way into both our intellectual as well as moral natures.

One other irregularity or informality of a different kind I mention in this chapter.

I was conducting a ten days’ revival service in a Methodist church, in a city of two hundred thousand inhabitants. The audience was large, and visitors hungry for holiness were present from other towns and states. In the assembly one morning there were fully fifteen preachers, most of them city pastors. They happened to be present when conviction was deep and the Spirit of God was bringing the congregation where He could fall in power upon them.

Among the laymen visitors and auditors was a man with a clear, intelligent face and most powerfully built body. He was six feet tall and muscular in proportion.

For several days he had been at the altar seeking holiness, and was this morning leaning forward and drinking in every word of the sermon when suddenly the sanctifying power and glory of God swept down upon him and in him.

Such a combined whoop and yell he gave, that audience will never forget! The divinely electrified man leaped out of his pew and came bounding down the aisle toward me. At the same moment I beheld all of the fifteen preachers catching up their hats and overcoats and making a brisk movement for the door. Here was a shout and run, and more shouts and a continued run, in a word a performance and carrying on which had no recognition or mention in their rituals. Here were proceedings utterly unknown in their sedate church services, and hence so dreadfully informal and irregular that they could not remain to be spectators and endorsers of such disorder and confusion. In addition there may have been some strange kind of inward panic and terror aroused by that piercing cry of joy coming from the freed man who in the overflowing gratitude of his heart, was leaping and praising God in His temple.

Certain it is that they left in a hurry and stood not on the order of their going. I had one brief, vanishing view of their coat tails when our newly sanctified friend sprang over the altar rail, and catching me up in his powerful arms, began swinging me around and around, my feet bidding a complete farewell to the floor.

It was evident that the man was hardly conscious of what he was doing, although I had not the slightest question in my mind as to what was transpiring. Of course it was somewhat embarrassing to me, for I realized that my position was neither graceful nor dignified, but fortunately I had laid my reputation and everything in that line on the altar years before, and so accepted the aerial voyage with all patience and humility.

My singer, Professor Rinehart, called out to me to throw my wrestling brother to the ground; but I replied with a smile, “I have nothing to stand on to throw anything or anybody.”

At this moment our good brother dropped me as suddenly as he had picked me up; fell on the floor, and in the most intense spiritual agony, if such an expression can be used, began tearing the carpet into strips and long gashes with the convulsive movements of his heels.

Another departure here took place among some dignified and handsomely dressed laymen and laywomen, but the Holiness people better understanding God’s work and all the phenomena of a real revival, gathered about with filling eyes and praising lips for what God had done in this man. There was no question but the whole outward expression of the inward work was genuine. God’s presence filled the church, and the altar was speedily lined with seekers, and as our sanctified friend became calmer and then calm with a look of ineffable peace and holy love, the fire began to fall on the others at the mourner’s bench, and the work of grace went on far into the afternoon.

My singer, Professor Rinehart, heard three times from the brother who was thus so wonderfully sanctified, and the information came from others and not himself. The first letter informed us that the man had returned to his county just north of where we held our meeting, and was “setting fire” to everything.

Two months later there came a second letter telling my singer that our brother was, as a layman, holding meetings in every direction in the part of the state in which he (the writer) lived. Looking at the map Brother Rinehart discovered that it was a county just north of the other where the brother’s first meetings were held.

Several months rolled by, and it was really smile provoking to learn in a third letter that our enthused brother was holding red-hot meetings in a county exactly north of the second county.

I have never heard from him again. But judging from the course he was taking in his three successive campaigns, it looked to me that our sanctified friend was heading for the North Pole, fully intending to reach it, set it on fire and melt the cold, icy thing out of existence forever.

Chapter 26: Stormy and Rainy Seasons of a Revival Meeting

It is said that Mr. Wesley, who rode not less than hundreds of thousands of miles over England, Scotland and Ireland, had something like twenty-five horse back accidents. In some the danger was so great that he escaped as by a miracle. In other instances there would be a little pain and some bruises, both of which would speedily disappear as he pressed on to his next appointment. At one place he was so badly injured that he had to be removed into a house before whose door he had been cast by the falling animal. In this home he found three backsliders. He at once, after a fervent exhortation, called them to prayer, prayed them back into the Kingdom, and finding himself thoroughly recovered from his accident, but which we can see was a providential happening, he arose and pursued his journey.

As to storms and floods he encountered them beyond number. Not many evangelists can measure up to Wesley ‘s horseback accidents, but can approximate much nearer in the matters of rain, tempest and hurricane. In fact so much of the storm, wind, flood and even cyclone interruption has come to full salvation workers in the field as to cause many of them to think seriously of the passage of Scripture where Satan is alluded to as the prince of the power of the air.

In my own experience, so many have been the faith trying trials of this order, so many rainy days, flood times, and nights of truly dreadful storms that it seems to me a volume could be written concerning them and the happenings from heaven and on earth that took place in connection with them.

Some have been very beneficent in their character and did the meeting good in very unlooked for ways.

For instance, at one camp meeting, both preacher and audience had become genuinely wearied in listening to an experience from a man of sixty. It had no unction, sounded hollow, and was made with an effort to cry himself and cause others to weep. It was always about how he longed to go to heaven and rejoin the loved ones gone before. It was always the same and the people would drop their heads as they remembered his life. One morning this brother had just delivered himself and sat down as one overcome and abstracted from earth, when one of those winds for which the West is famous, suddenly burst from the prairie beyond, and seizing hold of that part of the large tent where the late speaker was sitting, wrenched up several of the side poles, began threshing and striking the ground in alarming nearness to him, when with the most agile and remarkable of leaps, our brother shot into the air and then with successive bounds placed himself in an incredibly short time out of the zone of danger, into safer regions and with such an expression of terror and decided partiality to remaining on earth a while longer, as to be a complete contrast to the looks and language that had been seen and heard only a few seconds before.

Neither the people nor he recognized in his sudden movement the working of the natural law of self preservation; the only recollection left with the deeply smiling crowd was that this brother, who had so longed to leave the world, had a fair chance and evidently preferred to defer his departure to future years.

One gracious thing done by the sudden storm that soon died away was the silencing of our testifying brother. He never spoke again. So that a number felt quite cordial to that special wind and would have been glad to have shaken hands with it and expressed their gratitude for unearthing the brother, but that it seemed in a hurry and had not time to tarry.

Another storm of wind and rain continuing for over thirty hours in the midst of a camp meeting in the West, proved also a great friend to the meeting, though seemingly adverse to it.

I had been preaching night after night on inbred sin, while the people resisted, argued, denied and fought after the old carnality fashion. One night I gave one of the Bible’s blackest pictures of “The Old Man”; and the fighters were fairly flaming and most of the congregation muttering and denying the existence of such a nature in the regenerated heart or life. And so they went home.

That night my friend the storm, stepped in and raged so from thirty to thirty-six hours that the people were weather bound, so to speak, in their houses. A few of the sanctified braved the elements and came out to the services, but my fuming, foaming crowd of men and women were shut up in gloomy, stuffy houses for a day and a half, and what with the dispiriting weather, mad husbands, scolding wives and fussing, crying children, and on top of all that, shut in for thirty-six hours with the The Old Man under such circumstances, we heard from every direction the liveliest accounts of what occurred in those same houses and homes.

They had The Old Man at close range; had him with such a strong pulpit and Bible light upon him, that now they knew him, were convinced of his reality, disgusted with his presence and fairly ached to get back to church, rush to the altar and in prayer and groans beg God to take him out.

And this was what happened. The “break” came as the weather broke, and great was the salvation time and the rejoicing time where there had been so much previous disputing of the Word and resistance of the Holy Ghost.

I wish it to be distinctly understood that both of those storms are my personal friends, especially the last. And if I ever meet him or her or it again, I will take off my hat to it, if it does not itself take off my hat; for while quite friendly and helpful to the meeting, it certainly had some rough ways.

In a third large tent meeting a hurricane swept down upon us while I was in the midst of a sermon that God was blessing. As the unconverted part of the audience heard the roar of the approaching storm, they having lost many relatives in the Deluge and naturally being afraid of wind and water, leaped to their feet and fled pell mell from the swaying tabernacle.

I ceased preaching, as my words could not be distinguished in the tumult, and commenced singing, the Holiness people, who had not left their seats, joining with calm and even shining faces in the hymn.

The gale increased, the great expanse of swaying canvas was torn into ribbons as by invisible swords, the three large center poles rocked as if ready to come down upon us, and still the Holiness people sang on and tranquilly waited for me to give the signal to retire. I finally did so; saw over one hundred sanctified persons walk calmly out, and with one other man was the last to leave the place, when suddenly the whole tottering affair went down with a crash and such was the wreck, and such the freezing rain that fell upon ropes and canvas, and such the weight of ice upon it that it would have required a regiment of men to have hoisted up the ruined tabernacle again.

The result of this storm was the end of the services in that place, the loss of the crowd, the transfer of the meeting to a small hall that could only accommodate a handful of people, and apparently a defeat to the battle undertaken.

So it seemed, and yet the big congregation that fled that night saw before they ran and as they tumbled over each other, the vast difference in spiritual and character facts and features between themselves and the peaceful-faced company that were not panic-stricken and who remained singing while they fled from the rocking tabernacle in terror.

Then there were those, who convicted by the messages heard in previous days and by the spectacle of that night of undismayed, happy-faced people in the midst of a dreadful storm, followed us to the smaller quarters to which we had retired and were reclaimed, converted and sanctified.

All of us know how John Wesley was profoundly impressed and convicted by the calmness of the Moravians in a fearful storm on the Atlantic. He never got over it. So who can tell but God wanted a certain large town to see that He could still turn out the same kind of people, give the same experience of quietness and even joyfulness in the midst of a howling tempest that He did to the Moravians over one hundred years ago.

At still another camp a cyclone fearfully devastated the park in which the tabernacle had been erected, knocked the electric light system to pieces and plunged park and tent in profoundest gloom. The electric wires lay in the mud all night, and lamps were unavailable, and I preached to a silent, listening audience which I only beheld occasionally by flashes of lightning.

I had forgotten all about the circumstance, but in returning to hold the same Holiness Association Campmeeting in the same park after a lapse of twelve years, the people told me about it, and asked me if I remembered how under the circumstances of the cyclone, and the darkness, I had preached to them one night by lightning.

If they remembered the hour so well, who can tell how many in that strangely and solemnly lighted building that night may have been so profoundly moved as to give God their hearts and lives from that hour?

I recalled that some were at the altar after the service, and some got through. Possibly it took the trying experience, the unusual setting of sermon and altar work, to bring to God those who found Him that night.

At still another place a Holiness congregation of two hundred, who had a church seating six hundred, instead of having their revival meeting in their building, rented an immense hall that could easily have accommodated five thousand people. They certainly over-calculated the drawing power of the evangelist, and forgot that the crowds gather when Pentecost comes as a flame of fire to the soul, as a real and not a simulated or stimulated thing.

God sent a storm that lasted nearly a week, a wind that popped into rags a banner that bore the fulsome praise of the evangelist, and a snow-fall of several feet which kept even most of the congregation that sent for me from coming to the services.

Oh, how small their little company looked in that large echoing expanse of an opera house. How the banner seemed like a wet rag clinging to the lofty pole in a kind of despair. And finally all humbled and taught some bitter lessons, the congregation was driven back to its own church, where they heard the messages God wanted for them and not for the world, and where He daily and nightly sent an increasing audience to show that while He had rebuked He had not cast off or forsaken His people.

In still another State the camp meeting was held several miles from town, and the layman leader and general of the enterprise was careful to tell me that there would be no disturbance whatever, that the young men in the country were different from youths in town, and were orderly, well behaving and law-abiding.

I could not but think as he talked on, that inbred sin or carnality was the same wherever we found it, whether on the street or in the fields, in the city or in the country. So when the very second morning we all awoke to find the ropes of the big tent cut and the tabernacle down, I for one did some smiling, and the layman leader I doubt not some thinking, regarding the tenderness of conscience, and amiability of character, as possessed by country boys over city lads. For we speedily found out that four youths in the neighborhood had done the deed. Strange to say, each one had cut a piece of rope ten or twelve feet in length as a halter for his horse, and just long enough to hang the criminal himself.

Immediately after the outrage was committed, a great storm of rain fell, and next morning five of the brethren had not the slightest trouble in tracking the thieves and sacrilegious lawbreakers to their homes. The culprits saw the five brethren approaching, rushed out of their back doors, fled the country and have never returned.

A final storm scene out of very many others will conclude this chapter.

One Sabbath night in a western state, I was preaching to an excellent audience under a large canvas tent, when a violent wind tempest, accompanied with bursts of rain, swept down upon us.

It seemed for a moment as if the big tent would be caught up bodily into the air, so terrific was the sweep of the wind; but fully thirty or forty men sprang to the side poles and with united strength held the great, struggling, fluttering, white body in place.

All of these men were dressed in black, and as each one stood by a pole holding it down, he had his face turned toward me, not wishing to lose a word of the sermon.

There was nothing to do but for the preacher to preach, and for the band of noble, strong, faithful Holiness brethren to hold the tent down. Both were done. The stalwart, devoted hands held the tabernacle fast, and the people say I preached exactly two hours.

Was ever a sermon preached under such circumstances? And who that beheld and heard can ever forget how God blessed us all that stormy evening?

Years have passed, but the memory of that night, with its claps of thunder, the moaning sweep of the wind, the flashes of lightning, the solemn attention of the audience, the sight of that strangely human pillared tabernacle, and the unmistakable presence and power of God, has not and never can or will leave the tablets of my mind and the deep recesses of my heart.

Chapter 27: The Remuneration in Some Meetings

The history of some general or admiral reads very delightfully to one comfortably seated in a library with no sound to disturb the silence but the slowly turning leaves by the finger of the reader who has just breakfasted or supped, and has his leisure hours to peruse the life victories of the character in the volume who has fought his battle, finished his course and gone into the shadowy land of Eternity. But the fearful conflicts, the roar of cannon, the clouds of smoke, the blood, carnage, confusion, heart dread, mental burden and all that assails a central leading responsible figure cannot be reproduced on the printed page.

To many reading the biographies of Wesley, Luther, Finney and Inskip, they see only the success and final issue of life victory, and few stop to think of what opposed, surged against and oppressed these men of God.

So with the revival meetings of today where they are genuine works of God, the reader of the report takes in the fact that from fifty to two hundred souls were saved and sanctified, but not one in a hundred dream of what it cost the leader in prayer, faith, patience, generalship and heart agony, to see that hard conflict turn into the gracious triumph spoken of in some brief notice or printed letter.

Most of the people have an idea of the evangelist as one flying around on Pullman palace cars, met by committees at the station, escorted to beautiful apartments in a leading hotel, a corps of workers at his back ready at his beck and call to do anything, paid handsomely and overflowingly at every meeting and after buying a lovely home, then laying up a large bank account to live on in old age.

Each feature of this description will elicit smiles and laughter from every true holiness evangelist in the land. As for the overflowing pay feature, this will be especially trying on the mirth muscles of the countenance.

Whatever some evangelists may be receiving, and whatever homes they have erected, and bank accounts they have made, here is one who has not been able to build any kind of shelter over his head nor lay up a single dollar in the bank. That there are other holiness evangelists who are in like condition I have not the shadow of a doubt.

I take a few pages from the volume of my evangelistic life to give the reader some little conception of the tests and demands on faith and patience and endurance that come into the lot of men whom God has called from different positions in life to be evangelists.

In a town in one of our middle states the people were so intensely prejudiced against holiness, that they refused to a man to stand by the two preachers who had called me.

When these two brethren came into my room to pay me for my services, I somehow suspected that they had personally put themselves under the financial burden and were footing the expenses. After repeated urging of the two godly men before me as to how they had raised the money with such a kicking congregation behind them, one finally with his eyes filling with tears admitted that he and the other preacher had made conjointly a promissory note to a bank, and would personally meet the obligation. My only reply, with my eyes as wet as theirs was, “Do you think that I would allow two preachers and poorly paid ones at that, to pay me for my services?”

With that I forced the money back into their unwilling hands, and left for St. Louis on borrowed money which I returned from my next meeting.

In a town in Missouri I preached on steadily for ten days with the presence and power of God at every service.

Not a word was said by the pastor and board of stewards about remuneration, not a collection was taken up, and I supposed that the preacher had pursued the method adopted by a number of raising the sum of expenses quietly by private subscription, so I gave the matter no thought.

On the last Sabbath night, the altar was filled, swept clean, doxology sung, and the audience dismissed, and only about nine or ten people were left quietly chatting in the large building when suddenly I saw the preacher running around among the nine or ten like one distracted.

The explanation of his agitation was that he had forgotten to make a single provision for the pay of the evangelist, and now at this eleven o’clock and fifty-nine minutes past hour of the meeting he remembered his forgetfulness, that the evangelist had traveling expenses to pay and a family to support; and so was now seeking to raise from an astounded and empty pocketbook group of nine the money that several hundred would have given if properly approached in time.

Our embarrassed preacher, to whose church I had given ten days and nights of hard, faithful and successful labor, handed me nine dollars with many expressions of regret, and repeatedly assuring me as I left the church to take the daylight hack or stage for the railroad twenty miles away, that I should surely hear from him and that soon.

It is now twelve years since that parting; and I have not yet heard from our apologizing, promising handshaking brother.

Oh, how tremendously we evangelists are overpaid!

In one of our northern states my remuneration for ten days’ service where God saved and sanctified over thirty souls in a very dead church, was my traveling expenses, a little sack of apples given me by the pastor as I got on the train, and the carrying of my satchel or valise several blocks to the depot by a brother who could easily have paid the whole amount that had been promised me.

This was the costliest bag of apples I ever bought, and never before or since have paid so large an amount to have my hand baggage carried several squares to the station.

Meantime rent bills and grocery accounts roll up at home; and my landlord won’t accept a sack of apples for a month’s rent of his house, nor my grocery merchant allow me to pack his valise several blocks for 100. Such men would likely say that the amount given was not sufficient and not legal tender anyhow. But we evangelists are not supposed to have any business relations and obligations or business ideas and must say “Thank you,” and roll away on the train without a single ache of the heart and not one throb of disappointment as we crouch in a dark corner of the car and fight against the soul sickness and spirit faintness until victory comes by another prolonged loving look at the face of the Savior who never fails to comfort us at last in the midst of one of these sorely trying hours.

In one of the wealthiest Southern States I was invited to hold a ten days’ meeting in a town, and in the matter of recompense, in answer to their questions told them what was required to keep me in the field through actual traveling and home living expenses.

The reply to this was that they wanted me to come like the disciples did.

My rejoinder to this was, that if I came as the disciples did, should I wear sandals, and must I bring two changes of raiment; and as they always walked, it would require months to reach the place where I was expected. Not urging the toil worn condition in which I would be at the end of this journey, I concluded my letter by throwing another light on their request about my “coming as the disciples did.” I said, “When the disciples came around, the people sold all that they had and laid the money at their feet.” I concluded with the sentence, “Do you still insist on my coming as the disciples did?”

The reply to this last letter was very different, and I was told to come on, that I would be paid. The disciples this time were utterly ignored.

I came and received exactly my traveling expenses.

It was after this meeting that I went a whole day without food; the little money I had running out before I could begin another meeting.

In a town in Oklahoma I was invited by a preacher to conduct a ten days’ meeting in his church.

On arrival I was surprised to learn that the services would not be held in the church as the board of stewards objected to the doctrine of sanctification. But the pastor said with a reassuring smile, “It is all right’, for I have secured a most excellent place to bold the meeting.” So taking me in his buggy he drove me down to the depot and showed me the most excellent place he had obtained gratuitously from the railroad agent for our revival services.

To say that my breath was nearly taken from me as I looked at the “place” settled upon and secured would be to put the case mildly.

The “place” consisted of a narrow wooden ledge or long gallery, nine feet deep and seventy feet long, running the entire length of a railroad warehouse. This gallery was also fully six feet or more from the ground in elevation.

After I could command language, I said to the preacher, “Did you intend that the people should sit or perch, rather, on that roost to hear the gospel?”

“Yes, of course; on that gallery.”

“And to stand on the ground and preach upward to the string of people in the air above me?”

“Yes, I thought I would fix you up a pulpit stand down there.”

I continued gazing with increasing wonder at the brilliant minded personage before me.

“When I call for mourners and seekers did you intend that they should jump from that gallery to the ground? If so, they would be mourners after a different pattern than we wished for. Or did you intend to have a committee in waiting to help them from this high plank perch to the ground?”

“No,” he replied, “I expect them to walk to the end of the gallery, descend the steps, then come back this way to the altar railing which will be in front of you.”

Dropping my head in mingled amusement and despair, I said:

“How many of them do you think will be willing to make such an absurd promenade as that; and how much conviction will be left in them could we persuade them to engage in such a back and forth journey?”

I finally asked him if there was a building in the heart of the town which might be rented for the meeting.

He replied, “Yes, the opera house could be secured for $50,” but he was unwilling to assume the responsibility for such a sum.

I answered, “Well, I will,” and went up and personally engaged the building.

There seemed to be no head to the meeting even after that. A more helpless pastor and set of people under him I never met before or since.

No collections were taken in public. I preached on through the ten days, beholding genuine and lasting work done at the altar.

At the close of the ten days’ campaign I was handed enough money to pay just half my traveling expenses to the town, and then there was the bill of the opera house against me.

Fortunately a friend had sent me a check not dreaming of my financial difficulties. With this I paid the $50 rent bill of the opera house, and had enough left to bring me to my next appointment.

The gleam of light that rests upon this Oklahoma town meeting is that I am continually hearing of the good results of that hard and, as I thought, almost unappreciative and ungrateful congregation.

There are home workers in the field today as part of the fruit of that meeting. In the far away East across the sea there are two missionaries. Several entire households were swept into the blessing of full salvation. And this is the place where a man was sanctified as described in “Living Illustrations,” and who rode all night home to send his son to be at the last day’s services that he might be sanctified.

It is needless to say that the son arrived on time and got the blessing which he drove thirty miles to obtain.

None of these good people knew how I had been treated financially, for I said nothing. And so they had a wonderfully good time.

Several of them have since written to me, still ignorant of how I not only did the preaching for nothing, but paid for the meeting. They all said in their letters that they never would forget that meeting. And I felt certain as I read their statement, and feel as certain still, that I also will never forget that meeting.

Chapter 28: The Restitutions of a Revival Meeting

There have been few meetings I have conducted but beheld the transfer of money from one pocket to another among the individuals in the audience. The more powerful the meeting the more frequent these restitutions became and the larger the amount of money exchanged.

Yet when the services began there was no outward sign of these generally long standing wrongs; nor have I ever preached an entire discourse on this spiritual essential; but simply gave it a feature in one of my sermons, or dwelt on it some minutes as one of the steps God requires in order that the soul might get right with Him.

The Word is that if our brother hath aught against us, we must get right with him and then come to the altar.

There is no doubt that grasping, overcharging, pilfering and downright stealing are so many manifestations of carnality. During the last Christmas season hundreds of special detectives were stationed in the leading stores of Chicago because of this sinful bent among women.

Any form of wrong done a fellow creature may be wilfully cast into realms of silence and oblivion by the trespasser, but God does not forget, and the Spirit brings it again and again to remembrance and especially in a time of gospel preaching and genuine revival services.

This often accounts for the sudden discontinuance of attendance upon the meeting. The convicted man or woman was brought face to face with the past wrong, and feeling unwilling to confess it to man or God, and altogether disinclined to right the financial obligation, became ostensibly offended at the evangelist’s methods, style of preaching or altar work, and so with an appearance of honest disagreement or virtuous indignation, the convicted thief departed.

In a town in Tennessee where there was a joint school or college with two principals, one with clear, bright face stood by the Holiness revival. The other, with dark, sullen countenance, fought the meeting on the street and in private homes, and wrote a letter to a leading Methodist church paper full of false statements about what was being said and done in services where the Holy Ghost was present in great grace and power.

The cause of the anger and fury of the second principal was discovered in less than a year. It was not the preacher or the meeting after all. Our infuriated college man had wronged his coadjutor out of five thousand dollars. The Word had dug him up, and the Holy Ghost had arrested him and brought him to the bar of his conscience.

Here was an instance where the convicted being did not follow the leadings and commands of God, but went on fighting Holiness, saying that it disturbed and divided the church, until he finally died with the lie of his lips.

There are many who submit to divine arrest, make restitution, get wonderfully blessed and saved, and as wonderfully bless the meeting.

In Alabama a single dollar stolen in girlhood brought a lady into profound darkness as she sought Holiness. She had been forgiven the wrong deed years before, but a voice within whispered to make the wrong thing right. It was days before she could consent to the course laid down by the Spirit to be followed in the matter. But when she did, there was instant glory in her soul, an effulgence of light on her face, while the services took on thereafter a deeper form, and convicted people mightily increased in number.

In a Kansas town I missed a young man from the altar one day who had been a persistent but unsuccessful seeker after sanctification. He had hired a horse and ridden nearly twenty miles to confess and restore the value of some brass ornaments he had taken years before from some steam machinery.

In return for this God took the brass out of his experience and gave him one of solid gold; while the man who had been thus wronged was deeply touched and impressed and came to the revival services as an attentive listener to the doctrine and experience that he had not given a thought to before.

In a town in Ohio when only a brief allusion had been made about restitution in one of my night sermons, a young woman got into deep conviction. Her face was cloudy, her friends wondered, and went into minute explanations of the doctrines and experiences of Christianity, telling her that all she needed to do was to exercise faith and she would be blessed.

The trouble with her, however, was not faith, but ten dollars. Her father owned some real estate, and one of his renters brought in a balance of ten dollars one morning in his absence, and she pocketed the money and then spent it. But God keeps all accounts of the past, and for our sakes brings certain sad facts to remembrance. This recollection divinely brought up was the load on her conscience.

One day, unable to stand the burden any longer, she said to her father, who was sitting in his library: “Father, I stole ten dollars from you,” when like a flash of lightning the Holy Ghost fell upon her and she ran about the room clapping her hands, laughing and crying, and then only waiting a moment to obtain her parent’s forgiveness, flew to the church where the morning service was going on, burst right into the midst of the amazed Christian assembly, still clapping her hands, while with tears and happy holy laughter she cried out, “I stole ten dollars from Papa.”

Of course for a minute or so the audience was astonished, but soon with a few additional words of the transfigured girl they grasped the situation, and saw that her joy sprang not from having stolen the ten dollars, but from the blessing God had given her for the sorrow for and confession of the deed, and the joy sprang from obedience to the commandments of God in regard to restitution and the straightening or crooked paths.

Some may say she had committed no wrong, that it was her money through her property rights, etc. But God’s Spirit did not so present the case to her. The divine dealing was unmistakable; for if she was right there should have been no gloom. And if she had not done right in her confession why did God bless her so?

In a western city of twenty thousand inhabitants there was still a more remarkable case.

The M. E. church and M. E. church South had united in a protracted meeting and called me to lead the services.

The president of the board of stewards in the Southern Methodist church was a regular and deeply interested attendant for several days. When the doctrine of restitution was presented and handled in no uncertain manner he became very gloomy the next day, and disappeared the day following.

The explanation given of his sudden vanishing was that he had pressing business calls up the railroad.

After an interval of four days he reappeared and presented unmistakable indications of having gone through the mills.

It seems that years before he had wronged a woman in the settlement of her estate out of six thousand dollars. She was in the audience and the Spirit of God bade him get right with her and then come to the altar.

Instead of this he played Jonah and ran from duty under the plea of pressing business engagements up the railroad.

On the first day he lost his valise. On the second he lost a portmonaise or wallet of very valuable papers. On the third day he lost his pocketbook with several hundred dollars.

At this juncture he said, “If I go another day in this flight from God and duty I will lose my soul.”

So our fugitive ceased his unhappy and calamitous run from God, went to a bank where he was well known, obtained money for his return home, and on the eighth day reappeared at our morning meeting where altar services were being concluded and not more than fifty or sixty people were present. Our modern day Jonah looked wearied and worn, his voyage had evidently been tempestuous, he was disgusted with Joppa, the whale, the ship and the storm and preferred the Nineveh of duty above his chief joy.

Walking across the entire breadth of the building he stopped in front of his financially wronged victim of other years as she sat with a sad quiet face among some friends, and presenting her with a certified cheque for over six thousand dollars, said, “This is your money. I wronged you out of it. I want you to forgive me.” When in an instant the Spirit of God fell upon the man and flooded and overflowed his soul with a heavenly peace and joy.

So many scenes of the character described in this chapter I have beheld in my meetings, that I sometimes think that if all the tithes and offerings which belong to God, and all the money owed by men to men in the form of unpaid bills and accounts, overcharges, pilferings, stealings of every character, unmet pledges, promissory notes, and downright robberies of every kind from trust companies to highway thefts; that if all this money was suddenly to leave purses, stocks, estates and bank accounts and fly toward the rightful owners, that for days we would not be able to see the sun, moon nor stars because of the rushing currency in mid air.

Meantime Christ still keeps looking steadily upon the race He would redeem and says, “If thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.”

Chapter 29: The Revelations of a Revival Meeting

It is often said that a Holiness meeting divides the church. If it does, then it does no more than Christ did in His stay on earth, nor what every revival sent by Him from heaven to this world has done ever since.

I remember as a lad certain meetings held in my native town that were genuine revivals, and that before the Holiness movement was ever started in the South, and yet these same revivals not only divided the congregation where the services were held, but even rent the community.

To this day I can recall that there were different classes of faces at these deeply moved gatherings. One class was shining and triumphant, another dark and lowering, others troubled, and still others amused and indifferent. Some preachers were preaching, helping and leading with songs, prayers, and shouts at the altar, while other preachers were ridiculing and opposing the meeting all over the town. Conversions were doubted, absurd reports were circulated, tongues raged, excitement was high, and the whole community was stirred.

Boy as I was, I can recall the divisions between families, friends and neighbors. Some kept sweet I remember, while others did not.

The same objection applied to the Holiness meeting could be urged against those of earlier times. The meetings divided the people.

If so, what was the cause? Perhaps the truth as preached called for life decisions that declared for character and destiny. Or perhaps the preaching revealed a division that already existed, and simply showed on which side of the moral gap or chasm the members of households and the town itself was located.

This last thought is certainly a grave one and ought forever to silence tongues that are always clamoring “Holiness divides the church.”

The solemn potential question is, which side is the person on who makes the remark.

“Are you for or against Holiness?” The reply may show that the meeting is not the cause of the faultfinder being on the side he is, but is the light that reveals the whereabouts of the objector. The meeting has not been a division so much as a revelation. Of course it can and does operate in the first way, but what if it be the latter case with many who affect such regret over the deplorable rent in Zion.

When a young preacher in the pastorate I was preaching at the morning hour in a large camp meeting in the South. The Spirit of God so used the message in regard to the life wreck and ruin of a disobedient character in the Bible that a fearful conviction fell upon many people, and the altar was crowded.

The Holiness movement had not yet reached the Southland, nor even been mentioned on that great camp ground; and yet there took place under the tabernacle that morning one of the most remarkable divisions ever beheld. For awhile it looked like a battle and then pandemonium. The altar call to publicly acknowledge disobedience to God, and now henceforth declare for a perfect consecration, for I knew nothing about the experience of sanctification, turned not only men loose upon me, but a legion of devils from the pit. Twenty or more preachers were on their feet, some approving, the majority protesting against the proposition and the marvelous scene at the altar.

I never knew until that morning how enraged, fiendish, and even satanic a face can look in spite of snow-white cravat and the black coat of a clergyman. Some perfectly crimson with an unexplainable fury, cried out for retraction and apology, waving their hands and shaking their heads in the most violent fashion.

One white-haired minister, Dr. Abby, now in Heaven, stood in the altar in the midst of the cries, prayers, wails on one side, and the angry vociferations and clamor on the other, and lifting up his trembling, withered hand for attention, cried out to the amazed audience, sitting as if stricken under the tabernacle, “He is right;” then turning to me, said, “Go on, God is with you!” and then sank to his knees at the altar.

The Holiness movement, as I have said, had not yet reached us, and yet here was a great Methodist camp meeting suddenly divided as by an earthquake.

Who does not see that here was not simply a division arising from a call to a perfect walk with God; but mainly there had taken place under the Word of God a revelation of spiritual condition, and people by the score saw the side of the chasm they were living on.

In either case how can a Christian, an honest man, object to the making, or to the discovery of a division which has been brought about under the preaching of the Gospel of the Son of God.

Certainly it is too risky to put such things off until the hour of death. At the Judgment the separation is made final: some being on the right and others on the left. And in hell the rich man was told that there was a “great gulf” between him and probationary life, and he could not come back to earth, and no one could come even from Paradise or Heaven to him.

Very many of these revelations of character and life division I have seen since becoming an evangelist. In fact every meeting is a fresh disclosure of the truth, and so a confirmation of the matter concerning which I am writing.

In a city in the South where a leading Methodist steward protested against the preaching and the meeting saying that it reflected on their harmony and unity as a church, that the congregation was like a great loving family; the flashing light of the revival broke in through the darkness, and poured through his soft oily speeches and revealed to the amused and astonished public that not only were there numerous divisions in this “happy family,” but the household of the steward himself was at outs and daggers points with four other households in this so-called unified congregation.

The revival there brought a revelation of a split that already existed.

In a western town the revival that came revealed an escaped convict among the men, and among the women one with four living husbands. She was quiet and gentle in her manner and quite refined. Much of the preaching was too harsh for her delicate ears, and she also objected to the noise and confusion at the altar.

I have seen such conviction in some of my services that I verily believe that if one had cried out in a loud voice the names of certain wrongs and evils, that some in the audience would have dropped at their seats or run from the tent or hall. In fact some seeing the light coming of God’s presence and power, leave in the beginning of the ten days’ meeting, or in the early part of the sermon which they feel is going to lay hold on them with a divine arresting hand of judgment and doom.

The genuine revival meeting shows a lot of people that they are on the wrong side of the salvation line which God has drawn down here among the children of men.

Mr. Wesley in his Journal speaks of the effect of one of his convicting sermons preached to a multitude in an open field. Trouble seemed stamped on every face, but especially on the countenance of a middle aged man from the walks of the gentry as he stood by the side of his wife. He seemed to be stricken under the Word. Mr. Wesley looked upon him and said, “Are you a sinner?” The man gazed upward with one uplifted hand, and letting it drop said, “Sinner enough!” and stood like one paralyzed. In this condition his servants placed him in his carriage and he was driven away.

In the strange, clear, solemn illumination that comes in a genuine revival meeting, facts and conditions come up that seem to be hidden in every other kind of light, as well as by the shadow and darkness of this world.

In a town of six thousand inhabitants the Word God sent me to preach took deep hold. But while salvation was taking place at the altar, a minister of another denomination from my own, was much offended at the doctrine and experience of Holiness. He had not the patience nor the courtesy to sit through a single sermon, but noisily stalked out to show his disapproval and condemnation of preacher and meeting. To this hour I recall the long black skirt of his clerical coat as it disappeared through the door and down the head of the stairway.

In less than a year he was out of the ministry on account of a number of deliberate falsehoods he had spoken, and for unprincipled conduct in matters unmentionable.

The recollection of that long black skirt has clung to that incident, and started first in my mind a willingness for short business coats to be seen in the pulpit and on the public rostrum.

In a town of several thousand, while victory was steadily coming down from Heaven upon the meeting, a minister again led the opposition. Neither a Methodist nor believing in the Holiness movement, he attended the services only to obtain matter to find fault with and attack.

It would be tedious as well as melancholy to describe what he said and did against a meeting that God blessed from the beginning to its completion. Suffice it to say that the preaching of Christ’s power to cleanse the heart from all sin, and to keep us from falling, met with his unqualified ridicule, scorn and abuse. He said everybody sinned, and had to sin.

A few weeks after the close of the meeting, the store of a merchant was broken into one night and one hundred dollars in bank bills was taken. Two bloodhounds in town were put on the track and ran swiftly and unerringly to the house of the man I have mentioned. The merchant and his friends were much shocked, but hoping against hope took the dogs back to the store and started them once more thinking the first run had been a mistake. But turned loose again the dogs with the low peculiar note of the sleuth hound ran without a single halt back to the house of the man who had so bitterly fought holiness.

It seems that the man and his wife were asleep when both of the runs were made, and knew nothing of it, though the dogs strained at the leash to get into the house.

So the matter was hushed up; yet some lips muttered, and other faces were full of an angry gloom.

Then, strange to relate, the fighter of Holiness after a lapse of two weeks, and though known to have no money, paid out sixty dollars for a valuable animal, and paid cash in bank bills.

There needed but one proof more, and it came. And so the people in that town now know as others do in different communities why some men rage as well as run under the preaching of Holiness and full salvation.

Ah! the terror stricken faces in the audience that fearless preachers and devoted evangelists have seen looking at them. And yet no pastor or evangelist preached to bring up that look. It gives no joy to see it. And no true preacher or messenger of God would take advantage of this revealment of Heaven, and expose by glance, word or finger such a convicted one. Rather would he cover and protect them from others until they find the Lord with His pardon, healing love and perfect defense and protection from men in their pitilessness and from devils in their rage.

Evangelists deserving the name, know that it is the light shining in a genuine revival which reveals the heart, and holds up the guilty unamended past.

Nor is that all; but many churches, and camp grounds, and some Holiness camp meetings at that, also know this same fact. And so certain soft pulpit pedalers are selected to lead services; the days are filled with programs that are non-conductable of full salvation; the meetings are made so numerous there is no time for the power to fall and the light of eternity to flash; the Holy Ghost is scheduled; the censers taste like brass; the fire beheld does not seem to fall from Heaven but to be kindled on earth; the wine does not really intoxicate as it did at Pentecost; the ecstasy is not so much put in, as put on; there is no real vision of the people, and when there is no vision, the people are fallen and dead.

Chapter 30: Singing at the Holiness Camps

One of the remarkable features of the Holiness movement is its singing. Many of the songs are of quick measure and running over with joy, while the sweep of the palm branch of victory is heard in every line. Some abound in minor notes and solemn chords that follow you with a strange heart-melting power from the camp back to the distant home, office and store and will not be put down nor thrust away.

I have been repeatedly impressed in our smaller camp meetings with the melody of country choirs. It is a singing that must be heard to be understood. Unlike their city cousins, and often using books whose names we never heard before, the band of country singers come up from their training in school houses, and in the old moss-grown church buried in the fragrant depths of a pine forest, with something in their voices, and something in the hymn, that with minor notes and all, fills the eye with tears, the heart with longings for Christ and Heaven, and the mind with fixed purpose to live for God, though the whole world shall fall away and leave us alone.

Among these singers is the brother, who possesses a high peculiar kind of tenor. I do not know if in the musical realm proper it has a recognized part, and is accorded a distinct name; though for gracious and soul-moving effect it deserves a couple of names. As I only hear the plaintive whippoorwill in the hills of my native State, and never in the swamp, so this strange tenor is never heard in cities, but rings out in remote country churches and the piney woods camp ground.

No nightingale note could bring us sweeter pleasure as we listen to this peculiar pathetic part in music, with its steady harmonious rise, and even more melodious step-like descent, and we might say disappearance among the other voices. Like the nightingale, these singers are scarce, and also just as those birds sing sweetest from the depths of the woods, so our unnamable tenor sounds best where the stars look down through the roof of the brush arbor, and the gleaming camp fires illumine the tree trunks and make broad paths of light into the forest beyond.

There is an additional feature about our country camp meetings which binds us with a golden cord of grateful memory to a number of them. I allude to the custom of afternoon singing that prevails with some. At times a group of excellent singers will gather under the Tabernacle and, led by the organ, will pour forth one melody after another from Holiness song books.

Often in my tent, engaged in writing, meditation or prayer, I have had the lovely strains borne to me, softened by distance, and felt in the melting experiences they brought to the heart an abundant compensation for the toils of the day.

It would be hard to describe the spell this distant singing weaves about the soul. The earth looks so little; heaven is so near; the harsh things said and written to and about one are forgotten; the lonely, toilsome, misunderstood life suddenly becomes sweet; the spirit that had been undecided between a smile and tear, between hope and discouragement, swings out with a firmer trust in the Word of God, and the man arises from the olive trees of a lonely testing Gethsemane time and, looking with a steadfast heart down the road of duty, presses firmly on towards Jerusalem, where a cross is seen leaning against the horizon.

From many recollections I take several reminiscences connected with the singing at our country camps.

Once in a testimony meeting which preceded the sermon, there was a slight lull or pause, when a plain-looking farmer, sitting far back, commenced singing an old time Methodist hymn, such as I had heard years before of what is called a backwoods meeting.

The man would sing a single line three times with a kind of terminal chorus of “Oh Glory to the Lamb” as follows:

“My soul has got religion,
My soul has got religion,
My soul has got religion,
Oh Glory to the Lamb.”

The next verse was:

“I’ll tell you how I got it.”

The third was:

“I just gave myself to Jesus.”

It would be simply impossible to describe the effect that this simple plaintive hymn, full of minor strains, had upon the audience. Men and women burst into tears on all sides, while heart-thrilling “Amens” and shouts and cries of “Hallelujah” and “Glory to God” filled the Tabernacle. The soul longed to get away in some secret place and fairly weep itself away in tender humble holy joy at the feet of Christ.

Many other hymns were sung at this camp meeting, but I question whether anyone present on this wonderful afternoon will ever forget the singer and the song of that hour. It opened well with the statement: “My soul has got religion;” and explained most simply and satisfactorily the way the sweet, glad life experience came in the words, “I just gave myself to Jesus.” It certainly required no effort to add the chorus:

“Oh Glory to the Lamb.”

At another camp my tent was several hundred yards outside of the regular inclosure. One night at half past eleven o ‘clock I left the altar quite exhausted from a hard day’s work and sought my little cypress board cabin in the woods for sorely needed rest. A number of penitents and seekers remained, with quite a band of Holiness people singing, praying and working with them.

As I sat in the shadows listening to the distant singing, one hymn in particular arose from the forest in the starlight, crossed the valley and, sifting through the tops of the branches of the pine trees, fell upon my ear with such tender melting, yet inspiring power as to make a beautiful life-long memory. The chorus of the hymn was:

“O Glory! O Glory!
There’s room enough in Paradise
To have a home in glory.”

Among the band of workers and singers were a dozen preachers who had been removed from their pulpits and even driven from their Conference to another Church because they claimed the blessing of holiness. A larger number of laymen had been removed from official positions, and the whole company had suffered ridicule and persecution in their different towns and neighborhoods for testifying that they had been sanctified through faith in the blood of Christ. And yet here they were at the hour of midnight working hard around the altar trying to bring souls into the peace of pardon and into the joy of holiness, while those who had so mistreated and ill-treated them were sound asleep in their beds without a burden on their minds and hearts for the salvation of the world.

Listening at the cabin window to this midnight hymn, the question kept coming up, “Why is it that so many of God’s people spend their time and strength in ridiculing and opposing such followers of Christ? These, their victims, love Jesus, they are working to save souls and to quicken and purify the church. How can a true Christian find it in his heart to strike them?”

As I thought on in the shadows, the volume of the song seemed to increase, and I suddenly recalled the fact that it was an old-time Methodist hymn that was being sung, and under which many thousands of souls had been saved, sanctified and blessed when our church had its former glory. So I marveled all the more.

Again I heard the lines:

“There’s room enough in Paradise
To have a home in glory.”

And this time they were full of plaintiveness and pathetic power, and I said: “Yes, they are crowded out from pew and pulpit, and from Conference and Church now, but thank God, there will be room for them in Heaven.”

Maybe all of the true Holiness people will have to wait until then. But somehow I have an idea that they will not be disappointed when the pearly gates unfold. We can but think that He, for whom there was no room in the Inn, will be especially pitiful to those who were made to feel while on earth that they were in the way, and there was no place nor welcome for them. Hated by the world, turned out of the synagogue, ejected from the pulpit, ostracized from the social circle, unrecognized and unappreciated in the home, how unutterably sweet it will be to have Christ bid all such welcome to Heaven, and be told:

“There’s room enough in Paradise
To have a home in glory.”

A third recollection is connected with a meeting in the South.

A long, hot country camp was drawing to its close. In spite of heat and dust, in the face of poor entertainment and uncomfortable quarters, although the services had been numerous and lengthy, and there was much physical exhaustion, yet the gathering of the people had been owned and honored of God, the Spirit had descended in power, and salvation full and free had flowed about the altar. There had been conversions, sanctifications and reclamations. Many others had been strengthened and blessed. The Lord had so gladdened the souls of a number with spiritual mercies that they cheerfully endured the physical discomforts of the ten days now almost closed.

I had been requested by the committee of public worship to preach Sunday morning and afternoon, when the greatest crowds would be present. I had done so and beheld the salvation of several in the first service, and the power of God descended remarkably at the close of the sermon in the afternoon. And now as the evening came on I sat in front of my tent wearied, almost exhausted in body, but filled with a sweet, quiet joy over another finished work for the Savior and another victory for his cause.

The great body of the people had left or were leaving as the day drew to an end. Hundreds of vehicles had ascended a hill on the western edge of the camp ground and disappeared over its crest. I found myself wondering as I looked at the vanishing caravan what this meeting had been to most of those beings now going forever out of my life! What distant homes would be changed for the better and what souls saved and blessed.

The deep dyes of the sunset faded away and the stars became thick in the sky, and yet I still sat alone in front of my tent, full of prayerful, wistful thought, while the branches of the trees stirred softly overhead.

There was going on a short farewell service at the tabernacle of those that remained and some brother had been appointed to lead. The worship began and a volume of harmonious song floated to me through the night air. They were singing:

“Do you want to get ready to go there?”

In melody, unction and power it had all the distinctive and indescribable properties that belong to what is known as the Holiness hymn.

My heart was all softened and I found myself thinking of many things. I wondered again what that departed multitude would do with the truths they had heard and the experiences they had found. I thought of the scattering of these many individuals to remote homes, obscure lives and difficult fields of suffering and duty. I brooded on the long uphill struggle of the misunderstood and misrepresented Holiness movement. I recalled how to be its advocate and defender was to bring upon one toil, pain, reproach and loneliness, and that in abundance. Then the adversary brought up pictures of a happy home, a joyous family group, a lovely social life and earthly comforts now gone forever. He called attention to the wrongs, trials, unceasing work, inadequate compensation and a certain forsakenness connected with the work and life of an evangelist. Some katydids in the woods near by furnished a melancholy accompaniment to the whispered suggestions and the soul for some moments grew sick and faint.

But the hymn from the distant tabernacle sounded clearer and louder, “Do you want to get ready to go there?” And the stars seemed to look down pityingly, and Christ came out of the darkening forest or from over the silent fields or down through the twilight sky and blessedly filled and comforted my lonely heart. And lo! the wound in the spirit was healed, the faintness passed away, and one of God’s servants was ready again for the march, the battle and the long warfare that is to precede the perfect victory of full salvation around this sin-stricken, grave-riven, heart-breaking and heart-broken world.

THE END

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