all those who were at enmity with one
another to rectify whatever wrong they had committed and to be
reconciled. Nearly always some stiff-necked steward had had a row with
somebody else, apt as not a sinner. He would be expected to go out and
find the man, whoever it was, and patch up the difficulty, and to
report at the next service. I can see now the old spiritual hard-heads
in William's congregations with whom, year in and year out, he had the
greatest trouble. They always managed to "fall out with somebody"
between revivals. But nothing in or out of the Kingdom of Heaven would
make one of them admit he was in the wrong or induce him to go to the
other person and attempt a reconciliation. The most you could get out
of any one of them would be that if his enemy came to him and asked his
pardon, he was willing to "forgive him!" If the said enemy was a good
natured fellow, William usually managed to get him to make this
concession, otherwise the old hard-head remained cold and aggrieved
through out the revival, maybe casting a damper over the whole meeting:
a figure in the Amen corner at which the young unregenerated sinners
would point the finger of scorn and accusation when they were implored
to repent and believe and behave themselves.

No one who has not been through it can understand how heartbreaking all
this is to the preacher and how wearing on his human nerves. There
have been times when I should have been almost willing to see William
lose patience and expend about two pages of fierce Plutonian vocabulary
on some old stumbling-block in the church. But he never did. And it
will serve them right if the ten thousand prayers he made, asking God
to soften their obdurate hearts, are registered against them somewhere
in the debit column of the Book of Life.

Thus, I say, it came to pass that William was wearing out and no longer
able to get through a protracted meeting alone. So at Springdale, he
engaged Brother Dunn to come and help him.

Brother Dunn was what may be called a professional evangelist. We had
never seen him, but he had a reputation for being "wonderfully
successful" with sinners. And if sinners made a ripe harvest
Springdale was as much in need of reapers as any place we had ever
been. You might have inferred that the original forbidden fruit-tree
flourished in the midst of it, the people were so given to frank,
straightforward sinning of the most naively primitive character.

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