Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/325

 THE GENESIS OF A MODERN PROPHET 3 1 1

ment of South Australia. On one occasion the gas-works of Adelaide blew out. He quietly bought up all the lamps and kerosene oil on the market, and through his clever foresight cornered the supply of light and made a handsome profit. When he left Adelaide in 1868 to return to Scotland, although barely of age, he had a business reputation of which a midle-aged man might well be proud.

For the next three years he studied at Edinburgh University, both in the collegiate and theological schools, where he had the advantage of instruction by such men as Blackie and Calder- wood, and made the beginnings of an exact and thorough scholarship in the classics, in Hebrew, and in the political sciences. Returning to Australia, he was in 1872 ordained to the ministry as pastor of the Congregational church at Alma, a suburb of Adelaide. The next year he was called to Sydney, New South Wales, as pastor of the Manly Church, and soon after to the larger church of Newtown, a suburb of Sydney. In this last-named church he had in his congregation professors and students of Camden College, the one theological seminary of the Congregationalists in Australia. Here, in the beautiful capital city of the colony a city of half a million inhabitants- he became a political as well as religious leader. He was at the head of the Social Reform party, and took an active part in bringing about an undenominational, compulsory, and free sys- tem of education for New South Wales. In 1878, becoming convinced that it is "wrong for a minister to sell and for a church to buy any man's spiritual power or services," he resigned from membership in the Congregational Union of New South Wales, and gave himself wholly to evangelistic work. "Accordingly, to this day," he wrote sixteen years afterward, "he has ministered at all times and at all places without money and without price, depending entirely upon the free-will offerings of God's people, not only for himself and family, but for the large sums of money which have been necessary to carry on the work in which he has been engaged." For four years after his separation from the ministry of the Congregational church he continued his work as an evangelist in Sydney. In 1882 he removed to Melbourne,