and 'evidences,' which, upon review,
amounted to this: that the son of such a father ought to be a good and
pious boy. Being tender-hearted and quick to respond to moral
sympathy, he had been caught and inflamed in a school excitement, but
was just getting over it when summoned to Boston to join the Church!
On the morning of the day he went to Church without seeing anything he
looked at. He heard his name called from the pulpit among many others,
and trembled; rose up with every emotion petrified; counted the spots
on the carpet; looked piteously up at the cornice; heard the fans creak
in the pews near him; felt thankful to a fly that lit on his face, as
if something familiar at last had come to break an awful trance; heard
faintly a reading of the Articles of Faith; wondered whether he should
be struck dead for not feeling more--whether he should go to hell for
touching the bread and wine that he did not dare to take nor to refuse;
spent the morning service uncertain whether dreaming, or out of the
body, or in a trance; and at last walked home crying, and wishing he
knew what, now that he was a Christian, he should do, and how he was to
do it. Ah! well, there is a world of things in children's minds that
grown-up people do not imagine, though they, too, once were young."

Unsatisfactory in many respects as was his religious experience, it
seems to have been powerful enough to change his whole ideal of life.
We hear no more of his becoming a sailor. He appears to have yielded
to the inevitable, and henceforth studies with the ministry in view.

That he became a minister, as did his brothers, by reason of the
unswerving faith and prayer of the parents, is already well known.
"Out of six sons not one escaped from the pulpit. My mother dedicated
me to the work of the foreign missionary; she laid her hands upon me,
wept over me, and set me apart to preach the Gospel among the heathen,
and I have been doing it all my life long, for it so happens one does
not need to go far from his own country to find his audience before
him."

Ushered into the preparation for the ministry by the parental faith,
stumbling and discouraged and ready to give up the work, another hand
was not wanting to open still more clearly the way, draw back the
curtains, and let in the light:

"I beheld Him as a helper, as the soul's mid-wife, as the soul's
physician, and I felt because I was weak I could come to Him; because I
did not know how, a