ut he
was unhappy on the outside, and finding that my views and habits did not
happen to cross his peculiar notions, he came back. His religious
experience was out of the common order. Bred a Calvinist, of the good
old Scotch-Presbyterian type, he had swung away from that faith, and was
in danger of rushing into Universalism, or infidelity. That once famous
and much-read little book, "John Nelson's Journal," fell into his hands,
and changed his whole life. It led him to Christ, and to the Methodists.
He was a true spiritual child of the unflinching Yorkshire stone-cutter.
Like him he despised half-way measures, and like him he was aggressive
in thought and action. What he liked he loved, what he disliked he
hated. Calvinism he abhorred, and he let no occasion pass for pouring
into it the hot shot of his scorn and wrath. One night I preached from
the text, Should it be according to thy mind?

"The first part of your sermon," he said to me as we passed out of the
church, "distressed me greatly. For a full half hour you preached
straight out Calvinism, and I thought you had ruined every thing; but
you had left a little slip-gap, and crawled out at the last."

His ideal of a minister of the gospel was Dr. Keener, whom he knew at
New Orleans before coming to California. He was the first man I ever
heard mention Dr. Keener's name for the episcopacy. There was much in
common between them. If my eccentric California bachelor friend did not
have as strong and cool a head, he had as brave and true a heart as the
incisive and chivalrous Louisiana preacher, upon whose head the miter
was placed by the suffrage of his brethren at Memphis in 1870.

He became very active as a worker in the Church. I made him
class-leader, and there have been few in that office who brought to its
sacred duties as much spiritual insight, candor, and tenderness. At
times his words flashed like diamonds, showing what the Bible can reveal
to a solitary thinker who makes it his chief study day and night. When
needful, he could apply caustic that burned to the very core of an error
of opinion or of practice. He took a class in the Sunday-school, and his
freshness, acuteness, humor, and deep knowledge of the Scriptures, made
him far more than an ordinary teacher. A fine pocket Bible was offered
as a prize to the scholar who should, in three months, memorize the
greatest number of Scripture verses. The wisdom of such a contest is
questionable to me now, but i