young and somewhat fastidious bride. Not
without makeshifts, indeed, many of which partook of this infelicity,
was the celestial order of marriage to be obeyed and the world brought
back to its primitive purity and innocence.

And of all persons in any degree distressed about these or other matters
of faith, Joel Rae was made the first confidant and chief comforter. In
the case just cited, for example, Bishop Wright had confessed to him
that, if anything could make him break asunder the cable of the Church
of Christ, it would be the perplexity inevitable to a maintenance of
domestic harmony under the celestial order. The first wife also
distressed this adviser with a moving tale of her expulsion from a
comfortable room into the incommodious wagon-box.

Many of these confidences, as the days went by, he found spirit-grieving
in the extreme, so that he was often weary and longed for refuge in a
wilderness. Yet he never failed to let fall some word that might be
monitory or profitable to those who took him their troubles; nor did he
forget to exult in these burdens that were put upon him, for he had
resolved that his cross should be made as heavy as he could bear.

In addition to his duties as spiritual adviser to the community, it was
his office to preach; also to hold himself at the call of the afflicted,
to anoint their heads with oil and rebuke their fevers. He took an
especial pleasure in this work of healing, being glad to leave his
fields by day or his bed by night for the sickroom. By couches of
suffering he watched and prayed, and when they began to say in Amalon
that his word of rebuke to fevers came with strange power, that his
touch was marvellously healing, and his prayers strangely potent, he
prayed not to be set up thereby, nor to forget that the power came, not
by him but through him, because of his knowing his own unworthiness. He
fasted and prayed to be trusted still more until he should be worthy of
that complete power which the Master had said came only by prayer and
fasting.

The conscientious manner in which he performed his offices was
favourably commented upon by Bishop Wright. This good man believed there
had been a decline of late in the ardour of the priesthood.

"I tell you, Elder, I wish they was all as careful as you be, but
they're falling into shiftless ways. If I'm sick and have to depend on
myself, all right. I'll dose up with lobelia or gamboge, or put a
blister-plaster on the back