Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/357

Rh heartily in many of their amusements," he experienced "a serious decline in spirituality." Within a few months he "often delivered orations and made speeches concerning religion for sport." In the same paragraph, however, the Elder says: "But I never could, even in my most distant wanderings, hear religion ridiculed without great pain." This part of the autobiography the editor should revise, that the contradictory expressions may be adjusted. At the age of nineteen he joined a Baptist church.

The Elder now bent himself manfully to get enough education to preach. Little was required, and, by dint of hard labor and rigid economy—chopping wood, doing chores, going in shirt sleeves to save the coat, teaching school, etc.—he found himself at a Theological Institute at Hamilton, in 1822, and in the pulpit of a Baptist church three years later. For the first eight years thereafter, the Elder farmed on week days and preached on Sundays; at the end of that time, he says, "I looked upon the past eight years of my ministry as comparatively wasted. I felt that I had turned aside for filthy lucre." He had "baptized about two hundred and sixty converts," or an average of thirty-two a year. And, besides, he adds, "the church being small and poor, they failed to give me enough for the current support of my family." He resolved to sell his farm and become an itinerant evangelist. This was in 1833.

"It was thought by some," he says, "that not less than two thousand souls were converted during the first eighteen months" of his evangelizing ministry; but with his fame began also his lifelong troubles. "I was called on to encounter great opposition, alike from professed Christians and the avowed enemies of Christ; ay, even from ministers of the gospel. My motives were impugned. I met with several severe losses, also, in pecuniary matters. It seemed as though all the devils in hell were let loose upon me." It was at this time that he received confidence in a way which we should not like to describe except in his own language:

One of the most striking features of the Elder's story, as narrated by him, consists in its exemplifications of what to him and to many others appeared as special providences. He tells us that Pennyan,