guests and their horses, and yet keep open
house, day and night, for the gratuitous entertainment of preachers? No
traveling preacher ever displayed greater heroism than these truly great
men, and yet they were not the greatest heroes of that heroic age. Such
sacrifices as they made from year to year are not to be lightly
esteemed, yet the supplying of the larder and of the crib was the
smallest part of the sacrifice required for such an offering to the
Lord. Was the cooking for twenty to fifty at a quarterly or
camp-meeting, or the care of the guests whom the open house invited, to
be counted as second to any work done for the church? Let it be borne in
mind that these demands were made before the introduction of cooking
stoves and other appliances for making housekeeping easy. The meals for
those quarterly meetings were cooked by the open fireplace, before and
over a huge log fire, often without the aid even of a crane, and at the
camp-meeting by the side of a big log used as a kitchen. Looking back
through the years, and having been in position to observe every type of
church work, and every class of church workers, from the early bishops
on their long horseback tours; and the early presiding elders, going the
rounds of their large districts; and the early circuit riders, preaching
twenty-five to thirty times every four weeks, and traveling hundreds of
miles on each round; and the early local preachers, with their
gratuitous work, often without even thanks, and the large-hearted men
who not only contributed of their substance toward the payment of
salaries and such benevolences as were then required, but who provided
liberally and cheerfully, also, for the entertainment of these bishops,
and elders, and preachers, I am prepared to say that the very highest
and purest type of heroism ever displayed in early Methodism in Indiana
was shown by the women who set the tables and cooked the food and
prepared the beds for these wayfaring men. And their name was legion.
Every circuit had one or more, though unavoidably and without rivalry
some one easily ranked all contemporaries of any given neighborhood, and
some, from position as well as real merit, acquired almost a national
reputation, so that a strange preacher or a bishop would be directed,
when hundreds of miles distant, to what were known as "Methodist
taverns," by the way. The presiding elder, before leaving home for a
series of quarterly meetings, always mapped out hi