Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/159

 140 FAMOUS LIVINa AMERICANS In all the interests and activitieB of these years it was nat- ural that the man with the gift of the golden tongue should be attracted to the possibilities of the political life, and we hear of him about this time being offered the nomination to the senatorship from his native State. He had stumped his State for General Butler and knew that every honor in the gift of his country might be his for the seeking. Victor Hugo, in his autobiography, has said he ever felt two natures struggling within him. So with Dr. Conwell, he felt strongly the call to the political life and all that it might hope to bring, but ever in the background was the persisting idea that he must give this all up to take up another life that could promise but little in the way of earthly reward. In battle- famed Lexington a little Baptist church stood closed and pas- torless. So our lawyer, orator, and politician dedded to preach to these people on Sundays, crowding in a theological course at Newton Theological Seminary between times. In a year the old church had disappeared, a new one had taken its place, and the audience of a dozen people had given place to one that crowded the new building to its doors ; and now the real life work of our mountain boy is about to begin. Forty years have gone by since he first cried out by the fireside in the New England hills. He has been very busy and has ac- complished many things, but like Kipling's Ship That Found Herself, it has been an initial voyage trying out all the parts that are now ready to work together as a perfect whole. A man in Massachusetts wrote to a man in Philadelphia that they had a very remarkable preacher in a small, even though famous, village ; that their preacher earned his living practicing law. The man down in Philadelphia was a deacon of a young church that had just placed the roof on a fine new building. It was not finished inside, neither was it paid for. Now the man in Philadelphia thought the young lawyer who had helped to pull down an old church with his own hands and had helped to build the new one while he lectured, studied theology and practiced law between times, was just the kind of a man they needed in Philadelphia. He was a close-mouthed, stubborn old deacon, a very successful man himself, so he