t
nothing could be done there in a spiritual way until he was reclaimed.
He was a large, fair, goat-lipped man with a long straw beard hanging
under his chin, and he was said to be mightily gifted in prayer. But
his besetting sin was strong drink, and he had recently been drunk.
The simplicity with which William went about reclaiming him as a part
of the preparation for the coming revival seemed to me almost too
premeditatedly spiritual.

[Illustration: Brother Tom Pratt, a Prominent Member, Had Backslided.]

The revival proceeded, at first with awful chilliness, at length with
flickering warmth. At last, after a very moving sermon on the prodigal
son, the altar suddenly filled with penitents. I have often thought of
it, the tenderness with which the good God founded our Scriptures for
us, so they would fit the human heart to the uttermost generations of
men. That story of the prodigal is the eternal love message from Him
to us. Preach it anywhere, and the aching, shamed, dissolute rebel in
us trembles and wants to come home. Here in this hill settlement,
where scarcely any man had been ten miles from where he was born, it
seemed that a hundred had been secret vagabonds in the terrible "far
country." When the altar was full to suffocation William called on
Brother Tom Pratt to "lead us in prayer." And he led us through a long
night into the very morning of God. I wish it were the fashion to call
oftener on outbreaking sinners to pray in church. Usually they have a
stronger sense of the immediateness of the Lord than the long-winded
saints do; and many a time since that night have I listened to the
Heaven-turning eloquence of better men in prayer, but never have I
heard a nobler petition for the forgiveness of sin.

The church was a darkened space rimmed with light from tallow candles
standing on wooden brackets around the walls, and the space was filled
with the bowed forms of men and women. Near the pulpit there was more
light falling upon the dejected figures of the penitents clinging to
the altar rail. Within the rail, kneeling facing them, William's face
gleamed like the death mask of prayer.

There was a silence; then a voice arose from somewhere out of the
deeper shadows, timid, beseeching at first, like a sad messenger of the
outer darkness who had known all the torments of hell and trembled now
before the throne of Heaven. But as the bearer of the petition gained
courage from his very woes the v