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flesh at such times. But, of course, we could never think of the portrait, so in these letters I have tried to draw a likeness of him. Every line and shadow of it is as true as I can make it to what he really was. I reckon plenty of people back there on his circuits will recognize it, although I have changed names so as not to be too personal. They will remember him, although he was not what is known as an up-to-date preacher. I have often thought about it since I have been up here, what William didn't know or dream of. I never heard him mention evolution. His doubts were not intellectual and his troubles were just spiritual. He never suspected that there were two Isaiahs, never discovered that David did not write his own Psalms, or that Genesis was considered a fable, never noticed anything queer about the way Moses kept on writing about himself after he was dead and his death certificate properly recorded by himself in the Scriptures. He was a man of faith. All of his ideas came out of that one little mustard seed. I doubt if he'd have been surprised if some day he had come upon a burning bush along one of the bridle paths of his circuit. As for me, I do not care what they say here in New York, or even in the Pentateuch, I'd have a sight more confidence in that Scripture of the burning bush if William had recorded it instead of Moses--I never set much store by Moses as a truth teller. He may have been a good hand at chiseling out the Ten Commandments in the tables of stone, and he may have been strong enough to tote them down by himself from Sinai, but Moses was too much of a hero to tell the truth and nothing but the truth about himself. I never knew a hero who could do it. Their courage gets mixed with their imagination. Then again, you can see that I could not write about a man like William in the modern forked-lightning literary style, as if he was a new brand of spiritual soap or the dime-novel hero of a fashionable congregation. The people he served were not like those in New York, who appear to have been created by electricity, with a spiritual button for a soul, that you press into a religious fervor by rendering an organ opera behind the pulpit. Or, maybe the preacher does it with a new-fangled motor notion that demonstrates a scientific relation between some other life and this one. The people William served were backwoods and mountain folk, for the most part, who grew out of the soil,
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