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You may imagine that I was glad to be a free man when the elder had turned the key on the pulpits I must enter no more, and in some measure this was true. I seemed to draw a long breath when all was over, but can truly say I was not glad; for not one man in the brotherhood held out his hand to me or said a word, intimate as we had been in the church and in our homes through those years. I went out alone and lonesome.

Alone from the conference; but the dear helpmeet was with me heart and hand when I told her of that which had come to pass, good Methodist as she was, and had been down to that day. She had taken me for better or worse, and this was the worse if she had only married the Methodist; but she had married the man, her man, and so after a few tears had fallen how tenderly now I remember the tears she began at once to turn the worse into the better, while this was not because she had faith in my misbeliefs or heresies, but because she had faith

in me. She was well aware how I had striven not to believe in the branded heresies

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or more among the brethren had used another term which held a tang of brimstone had not striven to believe them any more than I had striven to grow to my girth and stature; for indeed the striving for a good while lay in the other scale. She knew also how I would have loved to stay in the old warm nest, because this would be also the safest; but it was not possible. The old shoemaker's warning had come true, about “wanting to reason ower mitch." John Locke says, "He that takes away Reason to make room for Revelation puts out the light of both." I found I must mind the light and follow it, or I could have no peace; and being still a preacher I must make the good confession or I could have no honor or even self-respect, and this the good helpmeet said I must do, bidding me be of good cheer.

One memory is still clear, of the time when I quite made up my mind to leave the old fellowship and find a home, if I could, in some other church, if there was one where I could be free to speak the truth as it should be given me to speak, without fear. The minister in charge had "got up a revival" in our own home church

which was carried on for some time week nights and Sundays. I was not in close sympathy with the movement, but went to the meetings all the same to do all I felt free to do. Preachers were invited from the city to lend a hand, and among the rest a young man came who had won a name among us as a revivalist, and, as I found, was much given to preaching sermons fraught with lurid fire; and in the last sermon I heard from him he closed with this figure: "If you could hold your hand," he said, "in the flame of this lamp but a few moments, can you imagine the agony of such a burning? But this is no more than a faint and poor intimation of the eternal burning in the fires of hell which awaits you if you do not repentthe burning not for a few moments, but forevermore and some sinner now in this church may be there before to-morrow morning." The sermon turned me sick of heart. I wanted to rise and say, That is not true, not one word of it. I brand it in His name whose mercy endureth forever, and in the name of his Christ who came to seek and to save that which was lost. No sermon so lurid had ever been preached before in my hearing; and, when the young man closed with the words I hold in my memory,

the old minister uttered a loud amen, and the brethren seemed to be pleased with the discourse. I left the church almost instantly. It was the sharp turning-point in my way as it seems to me now. I had always believed that more would find their way into heaven than my church was ready to admit even by her evangel of free grace, so I was not considered quite sound when we would talk of these things out of meeting; but from that evening my heart turned toward the larger faith and hope I have held through so many years without dubitation or debate: I could not do otherwise. And yet I have touched this memory for another reason far more welcome. Fine old Thomas Fuller tells of a young man in his time who would make your hair stand up and your heart sink down when he preached one of these sermons full of the wrath of God; but, as he grew older, it was noticed he grew more gentle, and said his damn with a difference. So I hope it may well be true now of the young man whose sermon I hold in my memory, and I believe beyond all question this is true of the discourses in my mother church. I love to go now and then to hear her ministers of mark in her pulpits: I never hear such things said by any chance. The sermons

as a rule are blended of sweetness and light: the doctrine of free grace has taken on larger and more gracious meanings in sermons and prayers. Indeed I think such fireful things are only to be heard now in the dark places of our land. One of these I did hear on a Sunday not many years ago when I was coming home on the steamer from my motherland. I use the word in no harsh or evil sense when I say the preacher gave us hell; for indeed, as it seemed, he gave us nothing else that evening. And, as we walked out of the saloon, a lady said to me, "That was a remarkable sermon, sir." "Yes," I answered, "I have not heard one I can compare to it in many years." The ministernot a Methodist was from South Carolina and so was the lady, as I learned.