ir condition.

These facts could not fail to impress very deeply such a sensitive
soul, rejoicing in his first love, and possessed of a burning passion
for the salvation of men, whose lips had been touched with holy fire.
When his labors had been so richly blessed in the conversion of many
souls, while preaching in the time spared from his labor on the farm,
his mind was led toward a complete consecration to the work of a
Christian minister, and when he had arrived at the age of twenty-one
years, he dedicated himself wholly to the cause of Christ, as the
first Methodist missionary in the Maritime Provinces. Without any
college training, or the help of any minister or church institution,
he left his father's home on November 10th, 1781, and commenced a
career of undaunted energy, and boundless influence, laying
foundations for others, and becoming essentially the founder of
Methodism in Eastern British America.

During the eight years of his life from 1781 to 1789, he passed from
the position of a raw youth, entering alone amid great difficulties
upon the work of a pioneer evangelist, to that of Superintendent of
the Methodist Church in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward
Island, and Newfoundland. With the zeal of an apostle he entered upon
a career of usefulness, which for courage and incessant travelling and
preaching, place him side by side with John Wesley and Francis Asbury.
Here and there, all over the province he went proclaiming the message
of salvation, preaching every day, and sometimes more frequently, as
we learn of him preaching eighteen times in eight days, and upon
another journey which occupied eighteen days, he preached twenty-four
times.

He travelled on snow-shoes in the winter, and by boat or on horseback
in the summer, and when these failed, he journeyed by log canoe, or
walked over the bad roads. Once he walked forty five miles that he
might spend the Sabbath with the people in Windsor. Sometimes he was
in dangers by the sea, and glad after a hard day's work in the winter
to have a little straw to lie upon, and a thin cover to shelter him
from the cold. Like the early preachers he was often compelled to
suffer opposition, rough fellows disturbing the services by shouting
and seeking to break up the meeting, and some who were possessed of
education demanding his authority for preaching the gospel, but to
them all, he was patient, and some of his revilers were soundly
converted, and learned