Trials and Triumphs 
 
 An Autobiography 
 
 By REV. W. T. TARDY 
 
Class rB2(^_±3. S" 
 
 Book_jr3_A^ 
 
 COaKIGHT DEPOSm 
 
REV. W. T. TARDY 
 (Before he was stricken) 
 
Trials and Triumphs 
 
 An Autobiography 
 
 BY 
 
 REV. W. T. TARDY 
 
 WITH A FOREWORD BY 
 
 REV. GEORGE W. TRUETT, D.D. 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 J. B. CRANFILL, LL.D. 
 
 MARSHALL, TEXAS 
 
 MRS. W. T. TARDY, Publisher 
 
.^ 
 
 
 
 Copyright, 1919, by Mrs. W. T. Tardy 
 
 ©CI.A5154!)7 
 
 APR 26 1 9 IS 
 
^0 
 
 "The Wonder Woman," 
 
 MY BELOVED WIFE, 
 
 whose unselfish Love has cheered 
 my weary hours and whose tender 
 care has so often chased away my 
 pain, this book is affectionately 
 dedicated by 
 
 The Author. 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 By REV. GEORGE W. TRUETT, D.D. 
 
 It has not been my privilege to read the chapters of this 
 book, for which I am writing this foreword, and yet I count 
 it a privilege, even before reading the book, to give it my 
 most cordial commendation, because of my personal knowl- 
 edge of its nobly brilliant author, the Rev. William Thomas 
 Tardy. 
 
 That prince of preachers and teachers. Dr. John A. 
 Broadus, after an interview that he once had with the 
 world-famed inventor, Mr. Thomas A. Edison, said, "I was 
 doubly anxious to see Mr. Edison, because the man himself 
 is always greater than anything he can say or do." Such 
 saying may preeminently be applied to the author of this 
 Autobiography. Brilliant and challenging and inspirational 
 as its chapters will be to all who read them, their author 
 was himself far greater than anything he ever said or did. 
 
 He has been an outstanding man from the early morn- 
 ing of his manhood. His life has been wide-reaching in 
 its inspiration and helpfulness, even from the days of his 
 youth. His range of reading was wide, and his opinions 
 and convictions were always clearly and fearlessly ex- 
 pressed. Vast numbers eagerly awaited his utterances, 
 whether from his pen or tongue, and were greatly profited 
 by them. Both as a speaker and as a writer, he possessed 
 extraordinary gifts. As a minister of the Gospel of Christ 
 and as a citizen of the State, his brilliant powers were unre- 
 servedly dedicated to the good of his fellows and the glory 
 of his Master. 
 
 His life and labors take on a still more challenging 
 meaning when it is remembered that for years he was 
 sorely afflicted, so much so that he had to dictate all his 
 writings and to make all his addresses from an invalid's 
 chair. The spell and blessing of his patriotic and Christian 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 messages, thus delivered, will long and consciously burn 
 in the hearts of great audiences all over the land. 
 
 Through all his afflictions, his energy and optimism and 
 courage and faith were undaunted, and his activities in 
 behalf of every good cause grew in intensity until the very 
 last hour of his earthly pilgrimage. During his last weeks 
 and days the chapters of this book were dictated, his bril- 
 liant mind glowing at a white heat and his faith in Christ 
 shining out with constantly increasing certitude and tri- 
 umph, until his spirit left the wearied body to be at home 
 with his Lord in the Father's House above. The story of 
 the final, wonderful hours of the earthly life is told by his 
 exceedingly helpful and devoted wife in a final chapter of 
 this volume, which wife the honored husband characterized 
 as *'The Wonder Woman." 
 
 Very earnestly would I here express the hope that this 
 book may have a vast circulation, and that speedily. This 
 hope is voiced not only because the proceeds from the sale 
 of this book will give practical aid to the brave widow 
 and the fatherless children, but also because the book will 
 undoubtedly carry a large blessing to all who may read it. 
 It will cheer the suffering, encourage the struggling, 
 enhearten the weary, challenge and inspire old and young 
 alike to lives of 'maximum deeds and invincible spirit, and 
 it will glorify Him whom the author so passionately loved 
 and served, and it will go on doing these good things after 
 the author, like David of old, has served his own generation 
 by the will of God and fallen on sleep. 
 
 Pastor's Study, 
 First Baptist Church, 
 Dallas, Texas. 
 
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 
 
 Even before I disposed of the Texas Baptist Book House 
 to the Baptist Standard Publishing Co., I had been in cor- 
 respondence with my beloved friend and brother, the author 
 of this autobiography, concerning the publication of this 
 work. He had not at that time completed it, nor indeed, 
 as I learned afterwards, had he begun it ; but it was on his 
 heart for many months, suggested in part, as I believe, by 
 my own autobiography, a copy of which I sent him soon 
 after it was published and many copies of which he dis- 
 tributed among his friends. Finally, when his book was 
 nearing completion, he wrote me again and this time more 
 urgently concerning the early publication of the work. 
 There was in his letter a note of appeal that I could not 
 have resisted if I would, and would not have resisted if I 
 could. Long ago I recognized W. T. Tardy as one of the 
 brilliant men of Texas. He had few equals on the platform, 
 even after his torn and twisted body was so afflicted that 
 he could not stand as he spoke. He was a man of tireless 
 energy, of remarkable brilliancy of mind, of earnest, affec- 
 tionate, and enduring friendship, and of sincere and loving 
 devotion to the Master. Many times I turned my hand 
 to writing a tribute to him while yet he was with us, but 
 like many another Christian task, well planned, I waited 
 too long, and now the tribute I meant to pay him is but 
 feebly expressed in the words here penned. 
 
 Those who have never been afflicted cannot sympathize 
 with those who suffer. I have heard many a man with 
 bright, well, strong eyes commiserate those whose eyes 
 had failed ; but even in the very flood-tide of their generous 
 expressions, these dear friends were unable to enter into 
 the sorrows of the blind, or of the man who, all his life 
 long, has loved and lived in books and yet who is cut off 
 from reading them. It is generous of the strong and well 
 to voice expressions of sympathy for those who suffer 
 
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 
 
 and are sad, but none of us can really enter into an afflic- 
 tion that we ourselves have never known. No juror under- 
 stands the meaning of a sentence of imprisonment. It is 
 easy for him to vote to send a man to prison for twenty- 
 five, or twenty, or fifteen, or ten, or five years, but he 
 cannot possibly measure the long drawn-out torture and 
 suffering of the contemplated incarceration. I saw W. T. 
 Tardy many times during his affliction, and I had seen him 
 many other times during the period of his great and glowing 
 health. I thought that I entered into his sufferings, but 
 I know I never had fully entered into them until his last 
 letter came to me, urging me to hurry with this manuscript 
 and get it to the printers at once, adding, "I am weak, weak, 
 weak!'' Even then I hoped he would be spared until the 
 book could be published, but on the very day that the 
 manuscript was being mailed to the printers, he gently 
 fell asleep and went on to be with Christ. 
 
 I have known many brave sufferers who battled against 
 tremendous and seemingly overwhelming odds, but I never 
 knew a braver one than W. T. Tardy. Even when his body 
 was racked with pain, his wonderfully brilliant mind seemed 
 to soar and cleave the skies. Never shall I forget the tor- 
 rential eloquence that fell from his lips after the beginning 
 of the great war, when he came to our own city and poured 
 out his heart to us concerning the issues that had been thus 
 so tragically precipitated. Despite his great affliction, he 
 smiled his way happily along, cheering others as he went, 
 and giving each and all whom he met words of encourage- 
 ment and hope. He was a patriot to his heart's core and 
 was glad to give his two sons that they might go to the 
 scene of blood and carnage and, if need be, sacrifice their 
 lives on the altar of liberty. In the last chapter of this 
 volume he speaks tenderly of their return, but I know full 
 well that he would have willingly given both to the cause 
 he so dearly loved if their lives had been needed to save the 
 world from the march and martyrdom of German tyranny. 
 
 I am happy in the thought that my promise to print this 
 book brought cheer and gladness to his closing hours. His 
 wife wrote me that when he had my letter telling him that 
 I would attend to all the details of publishing the book, 
 
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 
 
 finance it, and advance every penny of the money, he never 
 worried any more. I was so anxious that he should see 
 the completed volume, but that was not to be. And now, 
 as I close these words, I lay my tribute of love and friend- 
 ship upon his new-made grave, hoping and believing that 
 the work he left behind will help and cheer countless thou- 
 sands of others who have themselves known affliction, pain, 
 and sorrow as did he. 
 
 J. B. Cranfill. 
 
REV. W. T. TARDY 
 (After he was stricken) 
 
TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 BIRTH AND ANCESTRY 
 
 I was born in southeastern Arkansas in June of the early 
 seventies. That Arkansas was my native State is accidental, 
 providential, or both. My father, a middle-aged country doc- 
 tor and farmer, was treking from war-stricken and poverty- 
 ridden Mississippi toward the salubrious climate of southwest- 
 ern Texas. East of the Mississippi River in the Confederate 
 States the fiercely contending battle forces had wrought unprec- 
 edented havoc. Property was entirely swept away. The abso- 
 lute overthrow of the existing social state had dazed and be- 
 numbed the masterful whites. Carpet-bag and scalawag rule 
 and consequent negro domination caused a continuous west- 
 ward exodus of former slaveholders who could not endure the 
 galling and humiliating conditions of the radically changed 
 social order, nor could they readjust their industrial and eco- 
 nomic ideas and activities with sufficient celerity to meet the 
 exigencies of the new and baffling burdensome life thrust upon 
 them. Therefore, the endless stream of westward-bound pil- 
 grims. My parents had no sort of intention of making Arkansas 
 their permanent home. Bandera County, Texas, was the desti- 
 nation; but the distance, the poverty of the pilgrims, and the 
 travel-weariness caused them to strike tent and abide a while on 
 the first hill this side the bottoms of the Delta. Deep stakes 
 were never driven down, neither were the borders of the habita- 
 tion enlarged. Temporariness was written over everything 
 and the rolling plains of Texas billowed invitingly to every eye. 
 There was nothing remarkable about my advent into the world, 
 save that I was born in a rude and quickly constructed shanty 
 that was called "The Soot House," from the fact that the wind 
 blew the smoke against the walls and blackened them. Two 
 
 1 
 
2 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 years later my brother, now an officer of distinction in the 
 United States Navy, was born in a fairly respectable white- 
 washed boxed house. The glaring contrast between our birth- 
 places was often cause for quarrels of no little acerbity and 
 many juvenile pugilistic encounters. 
 
 On my father's side I am of French descent. In a letter 
 from Rev. Reuben Saillens, the great superintendent of Baptist 
 work in France, he tells me that our name is thoroughly French, 
 and that the family probably originated in Normandy. I have 
 a pardonable pride in bearing the same name of the great 
 writer whom the historian, Guizot, calls the Gallic literary 
 genius of his time. My great-grandfather, Alexis Tardy, started 
 the family in America. He reached these shores by a stroke 
 of daring boyish intrepidity. The wanderlust was in his blood 
 and at the age of twelve he secreted himself in a wine cask on 
 a sailing vessel bound for America, and never showed himself 
 to the officers or crew until the ship was three days out, when 
 hunger drove him from his hiding place. Nothing then could 
 be done with the adventurous youth but to allow him to finish 
 the voyage. Philadelphia became his early home. There he 
 married a Welsh girl, and himself became a cunning workman 
 in silver and gold, and later settled in the island of Santo 
 Domingo. He was residing and prospering here with a young 
 family in this black spot of the West Indies when the negroes 
 revolted against their masters and perpetrated the massacre 
 that is now historic. My grandfather's slaves were kindly dis- 
 posed to their master and his family, and they placed them 
 safely upon boats bound for the States. 
 
 That revolution under the Southern Cross forced the migra- 
 tion of my forebears to the coast cities of Charleston, Mobile and 
 New Orleans. To this day I have numbers of distant relatives 
 in those cities. This progenitor of the American branch of our 
 family, Alexis Tardy, was a Roman Catholic. My father's 
 father was brought up as an altar boy and times without num- 
 ber bore the robe of the priest in the service of the mass. This 
 ancestor, my grandfather, was a graduate of Jefferson Medical 
 College at Philadelphia. In some way he settled at Tuscaloosa, 
 Alabama, and there married a wealthy planter's daughter, and 
 himself became landlord and slave owner. The vitalest thing 
 that touched his life here, and thru him the branch of the family 
 
BIRTH AND ANCESTRY 3 
 
 that sprang from him, was that his marriage brought him in 
 contact with personal piety and New Testament religion. He 
 foimd himself indissolubly bound up with Baptists of the most 
 straightest sect. This association and the power of God did 
 their perfect work and since that marriage, the Tardy strain 
 that is removed a few himdred miles from the coast, has been 
 logically and consistently Baptist or, at least, strongly evangel- 
 ical and protestant. 
 
 My father, A. B. Tardy, the first child of his parents, was 
 born in Tuscaloosa. He was instructed in the science of medi- 
 cine by his cultured father, but by some strange lapse in for- 
 tune, or mistake in educational plans, he never attended college. 
 Neither father nor son ever made any money out of his pro- 
 fession. They did the practice on their several plantations and 
 for the neighbors who needed their ministrations, but they did 
 not know how to charge nor how to collect. They gloried in 
 the professional title of doctor and both were marvelously suc- 
 cessful practitioners in the old-fashioned school of medicine. 
 I remember very clearly that my father in the country, 
 in Arkansas, was regarded as a pneumonia specialist. 
 The rural folk said that he and his fly blisters were a dead shot 
 against the dread plague of winter. Many is the time that I 
 have carried from my mother fresh, cool, thick and delicious 
 buttermilk to the emaciated, but convalescent pneumonia pa- 
 tie^nts of my father. The children of the household used to say 
 that my father practiced medicine for the good and glory of it, 
 and made us work like galley slaves on the farm for a living. 
 
 Ours was a mixed family. My mother was my father's third 
 wife. He was a middle-aged man and had grown children when 
 I was bom. Naturally this aggregation of dissimilar spirits 
 and temperaments was not conducive to peace and piety in the 
 home. The disruption of my father's home, the scattering of 
 the children with the inevitable lack of discipline, and the law- 
 lessness consequent upon war and reconstruction, made the 
 place of stepmother an exceedingly hard and unenviable posi- 
 tion. My mother was Miss Mary S. Vaughan, bom near 
 Demopolis, Alabama, on the Warrior River. Since, if strength 
 is vouchsafed me, I purpose to devote a special chapter to her. 
 I shall not here elaborate upon her history or character. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 EARLY ENVIRONMENT AND LOCAL COLOR 
 
 Drew County is in the southeastern corner of Arkansas, the 
 second county from the Mississippi River. ColHns was a small 
 village named for General Benjamin Collins, whose wife was an 
 aunt of my father. Sprawling over a lob-lolly pine plateau, just 
 beyond where the bottom was separated from the hills by Cut 
 Off Creek, a stream whose name was both suggestive and ex- 
 planatory, there was no natural grandeur, beauty, nor attrac- 
 tiveness within miles of our home. The scenery was depressing 
 rather than inspiring. The landscape had not a single noble 
 feature. There were the pin oak ponds from which the country 
 folk got young trees to set out in their yards and white dirt 
 with which they made chimneys for their houses. A 
 frame chimney made of this dirt worked into the constituency 
 of mortar and kneaded into straw was an institution in those 
 days and set the owner in a class far above his neighbors who 
 had only "stick and dirt" chimneys. When the dirt and the 
 straw were worked together into a mass about a foot long, taper- 
 ing at both ends, the result was called a "cat," and the "cat" 
 was thrown to the chimney builder, who wrapped it around the 
 sticks of the wooden frame until there was a mass from the 
 ground to the top. This then had white mud smeared over it 
 inside and out. The chimneys were serviceable and, if well 
 built, almost everlasting and not at all bad looking. 
 
 When I can first remember there was no cooking-stove or 
 sewing-machine in our neighborhood. Our kitchen was a rather 
 huge affair with dirt floor and big fireplace off in the yard a 
 little distance from the house. This is the one building of the 
 place, the appointments, uses, and looks of which are indelibly 
 impressed upon me. What savory odors came from that big 
 fireplace! And what mysteries did the frying pans, ovens, 
 skillets, and pots hold ! How the fire glowed and crackled under 
 the big ovens and how live, bright, and hot were the coals from 
 seasoned bark on the thick and heavy lids. This was all inter- 
 
 4 
 
EARLY ENVIRONMENT 5 
 
 csting to children, especially the bark, for it was the unwritten 
 law in every country home that the "chaps" should keep the 
 kitchen supplied with bark — and not infrequently the trouble- 
 some questions of hungry children during the preparation of a 
 meal were answered by cooks : "If you don't shet up, I'll break 
 dis bark over your hed !" This outdoor kitchen was the social 
 center of the place, especially at evening time. Here middle- 
 aged and elderly women and negroes, who were still on good 
 terms with the whites, gathered and gossiped. All the tales 
 of superstition I know, I learned from the lips of newly emanci- 
 pated negroes before the old kitchen fire after supper time. 
 Hair-raising "cunjur" yarns and eye- widening and heart-stop- 
 ping ghost stories were told again and again until all the little 
 fellows trembled in delicious fright. I have sat by the hour 
 enthralled by the weird tones and barbaric beliefs of the old 
 "Mammies." I was afraid to hear them and loath to forego 
 the thrill of the spell. Many a night I would not have gone 
 alone the few steps back to the house for all the money in the 
 world. 
 
 As the children grew older and progressed in cooking lore 
 they could tell by the smell what food was in a utensil that had 
 been removed from the fire. Quite often when the mother's 
 or cook's back was turned, a trained-nosed and empty-stom- 
 ached boy would slyly uncover the vessel and purloin the articles 
 of food for which his mouth was watering. Thereby for me 
 hangs a tale. One Saturday night my mother had been cooking 
 tea cakes. A close watch had been kept on me and my every 
 approach to the kitchen door had been detected and each time 
 I was driven away empty-handed and clean-toothed. The odor 
 of the hot sweet bread maddened me and when the cooking was 
 done I skulked into the kitchen, but the cakes had been safely 
 hidden and my search was in vain. At length I espied on the 
 corner of the hearth the oven that had been used for baking the 
 cakes. Cake odor came up from it. This was my chance. 
 Nobody was around and my long waiting was to be rewarded 
 as I devoured the last installment of the cakes that were left 
 to cool. The oven lid had a kind of grayish tinge that should 
 have warned even me, young as I was, had I not been so hungry 
 and in such a hurry. I seized the handle of the lid with my 
 bare fingers, holding it with such nervous tightness that I 
 
6 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 could not immediately turn the thing loose. My hand was ter- 
 ribly burned and right there, for the time being, I lost my ap- 
 petite for cakes. I went into the yard, screaming with pain and 
 ran upon my grandfather, who happened to be visiting us that 
 day. Instead of sympathizing with me in my torture, the little 
 gray-haired Frenchman actually slapped me. This is the last 
 vivid recollection I have of the old kitchen, but it is unforget- 
 table, as it was literally burned into me. 
 
 The character of population here was what might be ex- 
 pected from penniless refugees and native squatters in a re- 
 mote corner of a rather new and much maligned State. There 
 were, indeed, some worthy people who were neighborood assets 
 and state builders, but a large proportion of the settlers were of 
 an inferior type. There were many dregs and much scum. The 
 nondescript or nonclassifiable white man was much in evidence. 
 He was hard to rightly appraise. He did not descend from 
 slave owners nor from the independent mountaineer of the 
 South. Probably the negroes were right when they described 
 this class as just "pore white trash." The supreme term of 
 opprobrium of the blacks for the whites was "white buceras." 
 There was, too, a rather consequential infusion of the criminal 
 element. This is not surprising when the state of the country 
 is taken into account, and when a survey is made of this back- 
 ward section of the land. The civil war had ended, leaving vast 
 outlying districts poor, bitter, and discontented. For years dis- 
 cipline in the home and in the government had been sadly re- 
 laxed. The negro problem was acute. The solvent freedmen 
 vaunted their unaccustomed independence. The lower the white 
 man, the more he resented the pretensions of the black man. 
 Fear of the latter hovered as a lowering cloud over every 
 neighborhood and darkened the door of every home. Summary 
 and merciless vengeance was reaped upon the offending negro. 
 What Carlyle calls the cruelty of fear obsessed the helpless 
 whites. The carpet-bagger and political degenerates were 
 in the saddle. Our country was represented in the legislature 
 by the Honorable (?) Curl Trotter, an illiterate black, and our 
 senatorial district had its interest looked after at Little Rock 
 by Honorable ( ?) Henry Brooks, a ginger cake negro of rather 
 harmless proclivities. When I knew these two retired states- 
 men, they were janitors in the Court House at Monticello. 
 
EARLY ENVIRONMENT 7 
 
 The first time I ever stepped into the glistening temple of justice 
 i.t Pine Bluff, a large, ebony-hued, former slave was sitting at 
 the desk as district clerk. Of course, a white deputy was fur- 
 bishing the brains and doing the work. There was thruout 
 our country a kind of bastard Ku Klux organization, holding on 
 ind functioning long after General Forrest had disbanded the 
 ki.ights of the invisible empire. This band successfully sun- 
 pressed the outrages of the lawless blacks, while it engendered 
 and fostered a defiant and lawless spirit among the ignorant 
 and irresponsible whites. 
 
 When the negroes had been subdued, the subduers fought 
 among themselves. Cutting affrays and shooting scrapes were 
 of common occurrence. The grip of justice in the courts was 
 pretty tight and the usual recourse for a poor man after com- 
 mitting a crime was to flee the country. For some days the 
 hunted fugitive would hide out in the cane brakes of the bot- 
 toms or secrete himself in the impenetrable thickets surround- 
 ing the cabin of some friends until the peace officers tired of the 
 search, then on a horse not well-known to the public, he would 
 make his get-away thru Louisiana on to Texas. More than 
 once have I seen my relatives and near neighbors carry a sup- 
 per of venison steak and bread and potatoes and coffee after 
 dark down to the fastnesses of Cut-off Creek. The children 
 gazed upon this procedure with undisguised wonder. Nobody 
 dared to tell us the purposes of these nocturnal expeditions. 
 Natural intuition and the sharpened faculties of childhood's 
 inquisitive mind soon divined the truth. I do not think that 
 I ever had a pony given me by my father, or that I had raised 
 from a colt, that did not mysteriously disappear. The animal 
 was sold or loaned to some poor Cain who was fleeing the scene 
 of his misdeeds. 
 
 Whiskey was an unmitigated evil. Everywhere the bowl 
 went round and the bottle was a boon companion. The liquor 
 jug, plugged with a corn cob stopper, was under the bed of 
 the master of every house. Eggnogs were the established cus- 
 tom. The milder form of toddies was of constant indulgence. 
 I have seen whole households with all the guests, both men and 
 women and children, tipsy to silliness from too freely imbibing 
 the thick and strong eggnog from the capacious bowl. The 
 grocery stores in the little towns sold whiskey in addition to 
 
8 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 that sold by the saloons. The medical fraternity at that time 
 regarded alcohol as a food and a stimulant. It was thought to 
 be good when the winter was too cold and when the summer was 
 too hot — a set off for the chill of the former, and a stimulant 
 for the ennui of the latter. Our community did not know that 
 there was any poor whiskey. The universal opinion was that 
 of the Irishman — it is all good and better. 
 
 The amusements were house-raisings and log-rollings for 
 the mature men and women and parties or dances in the winter 
 for the young people. The house-raisings and log-rollings were 
 of crying necessity, and the social value of the gatherings was 
 not to be despised. But the good of the country fandangoes 
 was always a debatable question with the best arguments and 
 weight of evidence against them. At these entertainments the 
 girls flirted flagrantly and the men grew jealous, drank inordi- 
 nately, fought and shot. Sometimes tragedies unspeakable were 
 enacted at these mid-winter dances. With sufficient reason and 
 on ample grounds the minority of careful parents and good 
 church people fought the dances to the bitter end. The little 
 old town three-quarters of a mile from our house was a place 
 of hilarity and dissipation. Bloody encounters were a weekly 
 occurrence. Yelling, drunken men came on horseback and in 
 wagons by our house every day. Their insane whooping and 
 distorted visages made the blood curdle in my frightened little 
 body. I well remember standing on the roadside and watching 
 a man pass by whose scalp was laid open on one side of his 
 head, the freely flowing blood made the left side of his face a 
 lurid red. He saw me not, but emitted one drunken whoop 
 after another as he soddenly sat his patient horse. The sordid- 
 ness of the whole environment was a heart depressant to a 
 growing child. My impressionable spirit was wounded to the 
 center and my sensitive soul was seared. 
 
 A truly high character never came into my life nor did a 
 great man or woman cross my path from the outside up to my 
 eighth year when we moved from the place of my birth. All 
 of our acquaintances and visitors were ordinary or below. I 
 do not remember experiencing an inspirational hour, nor was I 
 ever helped in the urge of a great expectancy, or the surge of 
 high endeavor. The social atmosphere was murky in the ex- 
 treme and sordid beyond belief. In the terrible times thru 
 
EARLY ENVIRONMENT 9 
 
 which we were going the inner light had failed and there was no 
 vision and the people perished. No stalwart preacher of 
 prophetic voice and awesome mien called the people to repent- 
 ance or charged the well-fortressed bulwarks of hell. We were 
 in the spiritual eddies and moral back-waters of civilization. 
 We had all the disadvantages of the pioneers, dissociated from 
 the heroism of real adventure. The oppressiveness of the de- 
 generacy of those early years weighs heavily upon me to this 
 day. Loftiness of soul, singleness of purpose, and devoutness of 
 spirit were alien to my childhood. Often, my father plowed 
 with two pistols buckled around him, and when he fared forth 
 on his steed he was a riding arsenal. These arms were not 
 carried to meet bearded Huns, nor to slay avowed and brave 
 enemies, but for protection against sinister and cowardly foes 
 in the neighborhood of his domicile. The ambushed enemy 
 might lurk in any fence corner, or under the first dense copse. 
 This made life a suffocating agony rather than a joyous expe- 
 rience. Idealistic impulses were stifled and altruistic aspira- 
 tions were turned into cinders. It is a marvel of grace that any 
 of us lived thru it, and a tribute to the tears and prayers and 
 faith of our mother that the children finally entered upon careers 
 of usefulness and walked in paths of peace. How these 
 miracles were wrought will be told in chapters that follow. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 OBSERVATIONS AND INNER EXPERIENCES OF A 
 
 LITTLE BOY 
 
 Nothing can escape the eager vision of a normal and in- 
 quisitive child. He is all eyes and ears for everything that is 
 new, and for him all things are new. The commonplace is 
 lifted to the dignity of romance. He sees things in the delight- 
 ful freshness of a new acquaintance, and memories are imper- 
 ishable. Mind itself must be destroyed utterly before early 
 impressions can be obliterated. Who can fathom the abysmal 
 wonders of the mind of a child, and who can read the riddle of 
 iiiquiry and the mysterious depth and the mischievous twinkle 
 of the eye of a boy? Except for this appetite and his bodily 
 pains, a child up to eight or nine years transcends himself and 
 his life is an overleaping, outreaching process. When further 
 advanced in years there is an intensely selfish and self-centered 
 ; eriod that gives the gravest concern to parents and teachers as 
 to his final destiny. Just at this time I was entering upon that 
 childhood era that made investigation a perennial adventure. 
 The world of men and women, animals and things, opened new 
 vistas every hour and richly rewarded every exercise of body 
 and effort of mind. I was the eldest living child of my mother. 
 By the time I was eight years old there were five boys in the 
 family. Two years spaced the ages between each one. I 
 clearly remember when my third, fourth and fifth brothers 
 were born. There were always books and papers in the house 
 and my parents were great readers. I do not know when I 
 learned my letters nor at the exact age I learned to read, but I 
 do know that McGufifey's fourth reader was a present to me 
 when I was a very little fellow. 
 
 My father was a voluble man. In private conversation he 
 was one of the most fluent talkers I have ever known. He was 
 the possessor of a wonderful assortment of uncoordinated, gen- 
 eral information. He could sit on the porch in summer, or by 
 
 10 
 
OBSERVATIONS AND EXPERIENCES 11 
 
 the fireside in winter and talk to any willing auditor all day or all 
 night ; meantime, incessantly smoking his pipe, always using a 
 fine brand of "deer tongue" tobacco. But my father was pain- 
 fully timid in public. He never made a speech in his life. I 
 have seen him second a motion at a conference in a Baptist 
 church, and in doing so he always ducked his head and lowered 
 his voice. It took me years to catch the blessing that he offered 
 at the table, with such embarrassment and rapidity did he re- 
 peat it. 
 
 As the oldest child of the younger set, I was forced into out- 
 door activities very early. When I learned to ride horseback 
 is beyond my ken. I was sent upon errands on my pony long 
 before I was able to mount him unaided by any means known 
 even to self-reliant country people. Three near-horseback trag- 
 edies I vividly recall. One time coming from the mill with a 
 sack of ground corn, I essayed to go thru a small gate near the 
 house, rather than ride around and open the big barn-like gate. 
 The two ends of the sack of meal caught against the opposite 
 gate post and the sack and I were left upon the ground with me 
 fortunately on top as the pony squeezed on thru. Another time 
 I came upon my horse Tom in a long lope to the watering pool. 
 The animal stopped suddenly at the edge of the water and I 
 went over his head into the middle of the cool liquid. Some- 
 body near by rescued me, and I was none the worse except for 
 a horrid scare and wet clothes. Later I was racing this horse 
 up the road a mile or two from home when he stimibled and 
 fell, throwing me out on the roadside, where I lay limp with 
 the breath knocked out of me. Had not a passing friend of the 
 family picked me up and shaken me to life again, these lines 
 would never have been written. 
 
 About this time I became a shepherd boy. My father pur- 
 chased various small detachments of sheep and undertook to 
 combine them into a flock, of which I had the care. Here I 
 learned the sheep nature down to the ground. I have no illu- 
 sions about that seemingly mild-mannered brute. My hard 
 novitiate as a shepherd has helped me greatly in the interpreta- 
 tion of many Scriptures that speak of the saints as the sheep 
 of His pasture. I do not think the Lord ever put breath in 
 a more vexatious and obdurate grazing animal than this same 
 meek and mild-mannered sheep. It was my business to drive 
 
12 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 the flock to the fields in the morning and to bring them home and 
 safely house them in the sheep-cote at night. Things went 
 merrily enough so long as the hungry beasts were devouring 
 the luscious grass. But so soon as their maws were filled, some 
 old bellwether would bleat out his commands and the sheep 
 that obeyed his voice would follow at his tail as he made a 
 break thru the woods toward the home of his former master. 
 That first defection was a signal for general herd-anarchy. 
 Universal stampede followed and there was a dispersion that 
 left the pasture bare and left me distracted. I hallooed dolor- 
 ously, abused my horse terrifically, called for help piteously, 
 and usually finished the day worn, thorn-scratched and 
 chagrined over my failure to live up to the arduous task assigned 
 me. When I did bring home the remnant of the flock and 
 attempt to drive them over the stile into the place of secure 
 refuge for the night, some old ram, possessed of more evil 
 spirits than were ever cast out of Mary Magdalene, would whirl 
 around on the topmost step of the stile and go bounding away 
 into outer darkness, followed by all the sheep he could control. 
 This, when I was dead tired and when I was more afraid of 
 the night myself than I was of the menacing threats or sure 
 anger of my father. The sequel always came the day there- 
 after. The rebellious sheep were found dead, slain by ravenous 
 wolves or bands of marauding dogs. Then we had to go out 
 and pull the wool by hand from the stiff and swollen bodies 
 of the dead sheep. I still adhere to the opinion formed then, 
 that that is a job no boy ought to be required to do. The 
 obstreperous animals tried our souls in every conceivable way. 
 They would go into the brier patches and lose their wool on 
 the sharpened ends of fence rails. 
 
 In that day wolves were the highwaymen of the dark. Their 
 doleful and blood-thirsty howls made the night hideous. Packs 
 would come as near to the house as they dared and howl until my 
 father would go out on the porch and shout or fire a shot gun 
 to frighten them away. At such times I shivered in bed with 
 deadly fear and often have I stuffed the cover in my ears to 
 keep from hearing the split-tongued and blood-throated yelping 
 of the wild dogs of the forest. Not much over a hundred yards 
 down the public road below our house I once saw a wolf in 
 broad daylight cross the highway before me. 
 
OBSERVATIONS AND EXPERIENCES 13 
 
 There is, however, a better side to the sheep than the one 
 above dehneated. His flesh, when flat, makes delicious mutton, 
 which is a food fit for kings. Then the clip of his wool keeps 
 the sons of men from freezing. Shearing time was a great occa- 
 sion on the farm. The sheep was caught and laid upon a table 
 and the fleece was cut very near the skin, beginning at the 
 tail of the animal and folded back in great rolls toward the 
 head. I have watched the eyes of the patient animals as they 
 were being robbed of the coats of their backs and I have seen 
 them even not wince when their tender skin was cut again and 
 again. And to this day the mute submissiveness of that indis- 
 pensable beast brings to my mind the passage, "Like a lamb 
 dumb before her shearers. He opened not His mouth." The 
 wool was washed and dried and some of it was carried tp the 
 market and sold. The remainder was used for family necessi- 
 ties. I did not come up in the days when cloth was made 
 in the home. But all stockings, socks and gloves and wrist- 
 bands used by the household were manufactured there by hand. 
 After washing and drying, the wool was carded into rolls; 
 these were spun into thread and the thread was knitted into 
 garments. My mother used to carve innumerable rolls and 
 place them in billowy piles in the corner of the room. 
 
 Then the spining-wheel was brought into requisition. This 
 piece of mechanism was a wonder to the children. A large 
 wheel axled upon a staff that stood upright from a pony-frame 
 that sprawled its chubby legs on the floor, was belted by a cord 
 to the spindle in front. The fluffy end of a soft roll of wool was 
 placed against the shining point of the steel spindle, the big 
 wheel began to turn, and its revolution made the spindle revolve 
 with a dizzy ^une. Soon the thread would cover the spindle like 
 a comb. This was called a broach. It was rolled into a ball and 
 the knitting began. I have beguiled the tedious hours of many 
 a long winter night, watching the flash and listening to the click 
 of the needles in my mother's hand. The fascination of seeing 
 the stocking lengthen under the deft fingers of an expert knitter 
 was absorbing enough to drive the sandman from childhood's 
 eyes. The only relic of my early home that I would care to 
 have is my mother's old spinning wheel, which has long since 
 gone the way of all the earth. 
 
 Notwithstanding the appeal that the sentient and the obvious 
 
14 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 always made to me, I was ever an introspective child. Pain 
 and death always loomed in terror before me. We lived in 
 what is known as a sickly community. The disease called ma- 
 laria made no exceptions in its ravages. It might be said that 
 I was brought up on chills and fevers, pills, quinine and sassa- 
 fras tea. Asafoetida, too, had its place in the pharmacopoeia 
 of the day. It was an epoch of heavy medicine. The theory 
 seemed to be to give the patient quantity enough to kill the 
 disease. I thought I was a pretty strong boy when I was able 
 to lift my father's saddle bags clear of the ground. I have 
 seen him make pills on the back of a great dinner plate and 
 then erect them into a gigantic pyramid that was sickeningly 
 repulsive to the last degree. Frequently the directions were: 
 Take one of these three times a day for thirty days. In these 
 early years I had every disease except mumps and measles, 
 which were reserved to vex my manhood and test my endur- 
 ance after I became the father of a family. Shivering with 
 ague and burning with fevers were the order of the day from 
 early spring till late fall. 
 
 A tragic and premature death came near being my portion 
 from an accidental and too liberal dose of morphine when I 
 was too young to remember my age. But the memory of the 
 experience itself is as vivid as if it had happened yesterday. 
 The medicine had been intended for my mother and by some 
 irresponsible party had been given to me. The mistake was 
 discovered in time for remedial means to be applied. For me 
 that was a night of nights. By harsh treatment I was partially 
 awakened. Then the long vigil and doubtful fight against death 
 began. I was spanked, roughly shaken, flagellated, drenched 
 with coflFee and emetics, rolled and stormed at, and when wake- 
 fulness seemed to be attained, limp and stupid, I was carried 
 in the arms of a half-uncle until far in the gray of the early 
 morning. I shall never cease to be grateful to this relative 
 for his unremitting toil in keeping alive the spark of life within 
 me. The next morning when the damps of death were just de- 
 parting from my brow, and the final weakness of physical ex- 
 haustion sat upon me, I piteously asked this uncle why I had 
 been so maltreated and had not been allowed sleep the night 
 before. His answer was : "Had we not resorted to the heroic 
 measures that were seemingly so cruel to you, you would be 
 
OBSERVATIONS AND EXPERIENCES 15 
 
 on your way to the graveyard now." For a quarter of a cen- 
 tury I have used this illustration about myself to defend the 
 persistency of earnest Christians who were troubling chloro- 
 form sinners. 
 
 I can never forget the first death I had the sorrow of wit- 
 nessing. It was the demise of a grown young man, a third 
 cousin of mine. I do not know how I came to be there since 
 the place was two or three miles from our house, and I was, 
 indeed, very small. How I went or returned is a blank to me. 
 I found myself in the room of dissolution, chained by my first 
 view of the agony of the age-long tragedy. The man was 
 propped up on pillows and a grayish cast overspread his face. 
 The ashen hue was around his lips. He was making inarticulate 
 sounds and to me he seemed to be saying, "Mamma, Mamma." 
 At the bed-railing sat his sweet, heart-broken and distracted 
 mother, wringing her hands and helplessly wailing, "Oh, Bud- 
 die, Buddie, Buddie." Not until the Son of Man shall come 
 in glory and forever abolish death and wipe all tears from the 
 eyes of weeping women, will that picture of unspeakable woe 
 fade from my memory. 
 
 Later the stepfather of that young man was killed by a fall- 
 ing limb. I remember his bent form in the coffin. I have 
 always hated coffins. I dislike the name and abhor the shape. 
 Casket sounds better and it looks better. The pointed foot 
 and head and the distended sides of the old-fashioned coffin 
 filled me with terror. In the little village near us a first cousin 
 of my father was the coffinmaker. I have seen him steam the 
 sides and bend the planks and nail them to the ends. I have 
 heard the rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat of the small hammer as 
 the outside cloth was nailed on and as the inner trimmings were 
 placed. It was all gruesome to me in the extreme, and I used to 
 often wonder if mortality could not be abolished. 
 
 Be it remembered that in these parts religion was not very 
 vital and the doctrine of the resurrection was not so forcefully 
 preached as to offset the lugubrious thoughts that crowded in- 
 fantile minds. I was the victim of all sorts of disquieting 
 obsessions. Gypsy stories undid me. I had seen bands of these 
 nomads passing on the road and had surreptitiously spied upon 
 their camps. More than once did I dream that I was captured 
 by the gypsies and carried far, far away. I was afflicted with 
 
16 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 what is known as nightmares, and in my paroxysm I thought 
 the clouds were coming down upon me and were suffocating 
 me. When discovered, I would be standing up in bed, trying to 
 climb the walls in a futile effort to pierce the asphyxiating 
 clouds and reach the pure air beyond. When awakened I 
 would be in a tub of warm water by which means my father 
 and mother were restoring my physical equilibrium and estab- 
 lishing the balance of circulation. These doleful recitals are 
 the true narratives of the inner feelings of a small boy who 
 cannot forget. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF HARD KNOCKS— MOVING 
 
 Since it was predestined that my father would never get to 
 Texas, but would spend his life and find his grave in Arkansas, 
 he was seized with a mania for short moving. From the time 
 I was eight years old until the time of his death, he was always 
 on the jump. He had every personal excuse for his migrations, 
 and he defended sacrificial surrender of his holdings with great 
 fluency. He urged the matter of health for his family, cheaper 
 lands, broader range for his stock and a thousand other 
 specious arguments, justified his determination, answered the 
 protests of his family, and overawed all opposition. Strangely 
 enough each new move of the family carried us further from 
 the centers of population, culture and power. The impression 
 made upon the children was that they were to be hidden in the 
 obscurity of the backwoods. 
 
 At this time we moved eight miles farther south down to- 
 ward the Louisiana line. The place-name of our objective was 
 Troy. There was plenty of dignity in the name and the his- 
 torical association sufficiently high-sounding to satisfy the anti- 
 quarian and to please the modern. But four years of residence 
 there did not reveal even a postoffice. There was an old two- 
 story church and Masonic hall with an old field on one side of 
 it and a graveyard on the other. The building was a general 
 neighborhood utility structure. School, justice courts, singing 
 classes and preaching were all conducted there. We lived on a 
 little hill beyond this building and the justice of the peace, the 
 quaintest character imaginable, resided across the road in front 
 of us. The nervous proclivities of my father were shown in 
 that he demolished the farmhouse the very first year and moved 
 it Jown the road to another part of the estate. Here I came 
 right up against the exactions of real life. Making a living was 
 the important thing. My father was now an elderly man with 
 
 17 
 
18 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 five small boys, and we had to wring a subsistence from the 
 ground on a newly settled place in a remote community. 
 
 Hard, imrelenting, and for the most part unremunerating 
 toil was the portion of us all. Misfortune followed us at every 
 turn. Some sneaking enemy stole the best horse from our stable 
 and tied him out in the woods until starvation caused his death. 
 My father rigged up a loaded shotgun and set it with both ham- 
 mers cocked at the stable door, but that was after the horse was 
 gone. To this day I marvel that some of us were not killed 
 from the discharge of the gun set for the thief as we went out 
 to feed in the early hours. 
 
 I can never forget the unrelieved agony of continuous labor. 
 Doubtless some work is good for children, but everlasting work 
 is a measureless curse. We cleared land, cut sprouts, grubbed, 
 hoed and plowed, and harvested early and late. This rigorous 
 regime of unremitting toil was a weariness to the flesh. It 
 stunted the body, dwarfed the mind, and embittered the soul. 
 One year we made a crop with a blind pony and a yoke of oxen. 
 During the rush part of the work season we had no meat. Every 
 other day I walked two miles for some buttermilk and clabber, 
 with which beverage we slaked our table thirst and washed 
 down our frugal fare. That was the year that cotton seed 
 products came into vogue as a cooking oil. The refining 
 process had not been fully developed, and the odor from boiling 
 cotton seed oil at the kitchen was not unlike the smell of rotting 
 seed at the old-fashioned gin. By shutting your eyes and hold- 
 ing your breath you could eat the potatoes and other vegetables 
 cooked in this oil with a fair relish if you were very hungry. 
 
 Many is the time that my hands have cramped to the hoe 
 handle, and I had to rake them off on a stump in the field or 
 against the protruding corners of a rail fence. Most of the 
 land was rough and new ground. We plowed with a home- 
 made plow stock, equipped with bull tongue and colter. When 
 the colter cut a great root, both ends of the liberated under- 
 ground runner did business against the unprotected legs of the 
 barefoot plow-boy. There is to this day not a speck of skin 
 on either one of my shins that was born there. When I now 
 pass a country boy plowing in a field, my hand involuntarily 
 goes to my side because the rough old plow-handle used to 
 bruise and almost fracture my ribs. 
 
UNIVERSITY OF HARD KNOCKS 19 
 
 Coming from the field dead tired after the sun had set, we 
 ate what supper was awaiting us, then went to the back porch 
 to wash our feet in the old-fashioned wooden foot-tub. The 
 process of bathing was simple if mother was not watching. 
 One foot was put in the cold water and gently rubbed with the 
 other foot. Then the action was reversed. This over, we 
 dragged our tired bodies to bed, where the night of rest was 
 far too short for nature to restore the ravages of the preceding 
 day's toil. The sogginess of a little body prodded to exhaustion 
 and the effects of the toxic poison of overwork, prevented me 
 from ever knowing the joys of normal slimiber. I never even 
 knew the exact time when I went to bed. I was unconscious 
 when I hit the couch and always the next thing was father's 
 voice calling me to go and feed the horses. This call came at 
 an uncomfortably early hour. It was the business of my 
 brother next to me to arise at the same time and cut the day's 
 supply of stove wood. The wood was chopped from dry and 
 gnarled old fence rails. Since the axe was uniformly dull the 
 year around, the wood-cutting operation was no small task for 
 a sleepy, hungry lad hardly big enough to raise the axe above 
 his head. During the four years we lived at Troy I experienced 
 every imaginable country vicissitude. 
 
 One winter and spring we had no variety of meat, but lived 
 upon bread and pickled beef. The beef was cut into strips and 
 put into barrels of boiled brine, where it kept well and would 
 have been palatable enough had the diet not been so dreadfully 
 monotonous. To this day the term pickled beef causes my 
 stomach to revolt. This was also the era of cornbread. The 
 move and the purchase of a new place had left the family for- 
 tunes flat. It was cornbread for breakfast, for dinner and for 
 supper. Often have I said that we only had biscuits on Sunday 
 morning for breakfast, or when the preacher came, and even 
 then the children were allowed but one apiece. Sometimes we 
 had venison steak or squirrels. At these meals it was a great 
 privilege to be allowed "to sop the frying pan." Here the 
 crumbly bread absorbed the rich residue of the gravy left in the 
 cooking vessel. Often a baked sweet potato was used instead 
 of bread, and not infrequently there was a quarrel rising to 
 blows between the two boys who were "sopping the skillet" 
 because one quicker or hungrier than the other would shove 
 
20 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 his potato over the middle of the gravy line and thus impinge 
 upon the rights of his brother. 
 
 Up to this time my brother and I had never had a store- 
 bought suit of clothes. Our winter outside wear was usually 
 made by our mother out of gray jeans. This was a warm, serv- 
 iceable cloth. The suit consisted of pants and jacket, both 
 fitted as tightly as they well might. Next to the skin we wore a 
 one-piece garment made of woolen linsey. That article of ap- 
 parel to me was one long drawn-out torture. The prickly ends 
 of the threads irritated my skin and aroused in me such an 
 abhorrence for flannel or woolen underwear that from the day 
 that I began to purchase my own clothes I have worn nothing 
 but cotton. 
 
 The shoes and boots sold us by the furnishing stores added 
 greatly to our discomfort. The shoes were heavy, rough bro- 
 gans, and the boots usually so drew on the foot that they had 
 to be pulled off at night with a bootjack, and we never had 
 any too many even of these. One pair to the person for the 
 year was the rule. And perchance, if fortune favored, and the 
 winters were long, there might be two pairs. Much has been 
 written about the happiness and glory of the barefoot boy, but 
 the poets and rhapsodists knew nothing of the terrors of cold 
 and bleeding feet. For years I walked on the heel of one foot 
 and on the toe of the other foot. Stone bruises, nailless toes, 
 and lacerated foot bottoms were the concomitants of country 
 conditions as they then were. 
 
 Sometimes the larger boys of the family earned a little extra 
 money by hiring out to the neighbors when up with the work at 
 home. In the summer we would hoe corn or chop cotton at 
 the wage of fifty cents a day, and in the fall pick cotton at the 
 prevailing rate per hundred pounds. When picking cotton out, 
 frequently I have left home so early that my breakfast was a 
 cold baked sweet potato, eaten on the way to the cotton patch. 
 In this way my brother and I earned our first manufactured coat 
 and shirts. The two coats cost seven dollars, and the shirts, 
 with detachable turned down collar, cost seventy-five cents 
 each. The first Sunday we went to church in these new togs 
 we circulated thru the crowd to see if any of the neighbors 
 were so well dressed as we. We met behind the church before 
 entering the house and with great satisfaction reported to each 
 
UNIVERSITY OF HARD KNOCKS 21 
 
 other that we were by far the best-dressed boys on the ground. 
 
 School facilities were pitifully meagre and the standards 
 were close down to the ground. The term was in the heat of 
 mid-summer and lasted from two to three months according 
 to the funds. The instruction was in keeping with the equip- 
 ment and that was the last Hmit of crudity. Teachers were 
 not employed so much because of their ability to teach as of 
 their pecuniary need. One time a good woman whose husband 
 was not a very successful farmer was given the school and 
 when another woman teacher was thought to be not quite sat- 
 isfactory her husband was employed. Lest I be unjust, let me 
 say that while living at Troy, we did have two teachers from a 
 distance, a man and a woman, whose impress is still upon me. 
 I register my gratitude to God for the devotion and piety of 
 the good woman, a devout Episcopalian, who led us in the way 
 of reverence and prayer. 
 
 In this neighborhood I entered the riotous age and tumul- 
 tuous period of youth. Thoughts were tumbling over each 
 other in my head and my heart was burning for I know not 
 what. I was making excursions thru books and papers out 
 into the great world of learning and adventure. One day I 
 would want to be a foreign missionary and the next a western 
 cowboy or a mountain highwayman, so complex are the moods 
 and so contradictory the convictions of adolescence. 
 
 Then, too, I thought myself fearfully abused and woefully 
 unappreciated. My parents and the neighbors seemed to wan- 
 tonly underrate my abilities. It was hard to find anyone to 
 whom I could talk and harder still would it have been for me 
 to have adequately expressed myself. Occasionally I was the 
 victim of the most depressing moroseness. Rebellious thoughts 
 were bursting my little heart and in it all I was pathetically 
 alone, for my companions were too stupid to fathom my mental 
 distresses and my loved ones were too distraught with family 
 cares to comfort or understand. A desire to know, to be, and 
 to do was stirring within me and the religious impulse was 
 struggling for expression and satisfaction. I did not know 
 how to attain the first and there was no living soul to guide me 
 in the development of the latter. There was at least one good 
 preacher who came our way in these years. He was Rev. R. C. 
 Stuart, who tho stricken in years, farmed for a living and 
 
22 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 preached as opportunity offered for the edification of the saints 
 and the salvation of sinners. He was a mild, dear man whose 
 very presence was a benediction and whose tones could soothe 
 my turbulent spirit. 
 
 That was a day and an environment which thought not 
 seriously upon the worth of a child. He was too often cuffed, 
 neglected, and toughened. Debasing associates and brutalizing 
 companions left their ineffaceable marks upon all the boys of 
 our neighborhood. The tragedy of it is unspeakable. Then 
 there was no adequate offset to this tide of evil. The opposing 
 forces of righteousness were not intelligently aggressive, 
 neither were they zealous nor compactly organized. The grow- 
 ing boys were sucked down in the whirlpool or they floated in 
 the eddies or climbed up the slippery banks as best they could. 
 
 At this time I was beset by every imaginable temptation and 
 completely encircled by every form of sin. Despite it all the 
 voice within me was never dumb and I was continuously grasp- 
 ing for that that evaded me. It now seems that it would have 
 been the easiest thing in the world for a devout spirit to have 
 led me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake, but 
 no pilot of the soul touched my life. A visiting preacher's hand, 
 laid upon my head, would set aquivering every nerve in my 
 being, and many is the time that I tremblingly expected the 
 ministerial guest to speak to me intimate words of soul instruc- 
 tion, but it was never done. I suffered on and groped my way. 
 Oh, the pathos of the ignorance of grown people concerning 
 the needs of a little child! And too often the consequences 
 are tragic beyond repair. Kinsmen and hired men have times 
 without number told me when I was a little miserable tow- 
 headed boy that I was then having the happy time of my life. 
 While I did not dare tell them so, I knew their words and 
 theories were false and the long years have confirmed me in 
 this opinion. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 AMBITIONS AND EDUCATIONAL LIMITATIONS 
 
 Just as I passed my twelfth year we moved again. This 
 time, however, we migrated back toward the center of the 
 county within six miles of Monticello. Tho much nearer the 
 county site than we had ever been before, the neighborhood was 
 really the most backward community in which we had ever 
 lived. The settlement was strung along Sand Creek between two 
 public roads. Whatever of highway traffic there was did not 
 touch us, and when we started to town or to church or to school 
 we had to go about two miles before we struck the big road. 
 Our location was such that by an effort we could reach the 
 capital of the county in an hour or two, yet the cross-section 
 position of the farm effectually isolated us. In this new place 
 we first lived in a three-room log house, but there was a double 
 hall and each room had a chimney, and as I recall living condi- 
 tions were comfortable and exceedingly pleasant. About three 
 years later we built a splendid, large boxed house on a rather 
 favorable site, and this new residence with other farm improve- 
 ments gave us a commanding position in the neighborhood. 
 The land was good and the wood and water and range were 
 abundant. The pride of our possession was a strip of bottom, 
 lying on both sides of the creek that ran thru the field. We 
 had in cultivation about twelve acres of this rich alluvial silt 
 and whatever happened to the rest of the farm, there was 
 always a satisfactory yield from the bottom field. 
 
 I was now developing into a strong and vigorous boy- 
 farmer. But I had ideas. Never for a moment since I could 
 think had I contemplated tilling the soil as my life work. The 
 periodicals that came to our table from the time I was born 
 and the talk of my father and mother around the fireside had 
 fired me with an ambition to transcend my birth conditions. 
 Some of the papers that came to our home were Vickery's 
 Fireside Visitor of Augusta, Maine, Home and Farm, Courier 
 Journal, The Arkansas Gazette, and The Arkansas Baptist. 
 
 23 
 
24 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 Later we got both Memphis and New Orleans papers. At 
 Troy we were so far from a post office that mail was very 
 irregular and its reception quite uncertain. For ten days or 
 two weeks one fall my brother and I stood on the roadside, 
 asking passers-by who had been elected president. Our papers 
 had not come and there were no telephones, and even national 
 election news had to be carried to us by word of mouth. 
 
 While the country districts of our county were lamentably 
 lacking in all the graces of culture, the town of Monticello had 
 always been an educational center. There were noted teachers, 
 intelligent doctors, acceptable preachers, and cultured women 
 who created the spirit and molded the thought of the place. 
 For years Monticello had the honor of being the home of the 
 congressman at large, Col. W. F. Slemmons, who in his palmy 
 days was said to be the handsomest man in the House of Rep- 
 resentatives. The State Superintendent of Public Instruction 
 did an enduring work, and laid the foundation work for his 
 fame and fortune, in his own private school at Monticello 
 before he was called to Little Rock to give the mature wisdom 
 of many years to the work of developing the school system of 
 the State. The names of all these outstanding ones were 
 familiar to us from our earliest remembrances because of the 
 insistent determination of our mother that some day her chil- 
 dren would be placed under the tuition of these noted men. 
 
 Our last move brought us nearer the seats of the mighty and 
 that was sufficient compensation to the ardent boys for the 
 labor involved in improving another place. By some means the 
 country trustees in our district refused to allow the teacher to 
 carry the pupils beyond what would now be called the sixth 
 grade. I wanted to study Latin and Algebra. Fortunately we 
 were blessed in having two teachers, one after the other, both 
 of whom were highly educated elderly men. Our parents obvi- 
 ated the difficulty imposed by the school authorities by boarding 
 the teachers in return for extra tutoring in the higher branches 
 given to my brother and me. This work was done at home 
 before and after school hours. 
 
 The upward struggle was difficult because the downward 
 tug was hard. Money was scarce and the products of the farm 
 were cheap. I think a little over eight cents per pound is the 
 highest price we ever got for cotton. At times I was well nigh 
 
EDUCATIONAL LIMITATIONS 25 
 
 desperate as I thought I saw my youth sHpping away from me 
 with nothing to show for it It seemed that the past had all 
 been wasted and at times it looked as though every door of 
 hope was shut in my face. My father was an irascible man 
 fast growing old. He had brought up one family and the bur- 
 den of a second brood in the evening of life was too much 
 for him. Had my mother not been young and flamingly ambi- 
 tious for her boys, sad indeed would have been our plight. 
 
 There were three educational agencies that made rather 
 large contributions to my mental development just at this period. 
 These were the Bible readings conducted by my mother in the 
 home, the political discussions in campaign years, and the em- 
 bryonic debating society in the dimly lighted school house. A 
 fourth factor, the annual revival meetings, might be credited 
 with awakening spiritual impulses and arousing soul action. 
 Permanent perennial Sunday Schools were unknown. Only a 
 few months in the spring and summer could any neighborhood 
 in which we ever lived maintain a Bible school at the church 
 or school-house. Except for the social joys and the uplift of 
 the congregation our home did not suffer serious deprivation 
 because of the lack of the public teaching of the Bible. The 
 Word of God was read and the helps were studied every Sun- 
 day in my mother's room. The children as they grew old 
 enough read verses by turn. It took much firmness on the 
 part of my mother to force or cajole or persuade unruly boys 
 to gather around her chair and read chapter after chapter of 
 the Word of God, when field and wood and sunshine and play 
 were calling. To this day the value of that Bible reading 
 practice is manifest in every child that persisted in the exer- 
 cise. Whatever mastery of pure English and whatever joys 
 we find in the glorious writings of the Elizabethans are un- 
 doubtedly attributable to the Sunday Bible reading drill in our 
 country home. 
 
 The political campaign was in that day a crusade of lofty 
 ideals and great dignity. Even candidates for county offices 
 were nearly always men of superior ability and culture far 
 above the ordinary. The clash of mind on the stump and the 
 display of forensic eloquence were intellectual marvels to the 
 hungry-minded boys of the country side. The moral elevation 
 of the speeches and the nobleness of the diction were infinitely 
 
26 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 above anything I have heard in the last decade. Men who 
 could not speak did not attempt to speak. The candidates were 
 largely gentlemen of the old southern school and there was a 
 hint of knightliness of the past and in the voice of the orators 
 was the haunting note of the fast vanishing race of men whose 
 genius for statesmanship made their supremacy upon the forum 
 unassailable. 
 
 The high day of my political foregathering was when I heard 
 in the courthouse the Congressional candidates. That is my 
 red-letter experience. Our county had a candidate and there 
 were three others. I remember them all and could now repeat 
 large portions of the speeches. I walked out of that court- 
 house determined to go to Congress. I got the map and laid 
 out my district. I fell upon the law as my chosen profession, 
 made some tentative plans with jurists to read law in their 
 offices, secured an appointment from the county judge to the 
 State University. I read feverishly every book about great 
 men that I could lay my hands on. The newspapers were de- 
 voured in a night by the light of a pine-knot fire. Every man 
 prominent in public life of county, state, or nation was known 
 to me thru the printed columns. The high tariff and low tariff 
 advocates were familiars of mine. Frank Hurd of Ohio, 
 Springer and Morrison of Illinois, Bynum and Voorhees of 
 Indiana, Carlisle of Kentucky, Garland of Arkansas, Lamar 
 of Mississippi, were the great democratic luminaries in whose 
 light I walked and whose doctrines I accepted. On the other 
 side was Blaine, the plumed knight of Maine, Hawley of Con- 
 necticut, Sherman and Hoar, Conkling, Logan, and Blair of 
 New Hampshire, who was eternally addressing the Senate on 
 his education bill. Any day I would gladly have gone on my 
 hands and knees any possible distance to see and hear a great 
 man. One cold spring night I sat up till after eleven o'clock 
 around the fire, listening to the informing and sparkling talk of 
 a Pennsylvania tramp, whom I persuaded my father to take in 
 for the night. This run-down bum discoursed volubly upon 
 men, from Lincoln to Governor Curtin. So voracious was my 
 appetite for public news that every chance visitor was called 
 upon to pay a heavy tax for the hospitality extended him. 
 
 The debating society was a crude, ill-conducted and poorly 
 attended affair, but it furnished a few of us the opportunity we 
 
EDUCATIONAL LIMITATIONS 27 
 
 sought. The first question ever discussed was the relative 
 merits of Washington and Columbus in defending and discov- 
 ering America. I had the affirmative side and after listening 
 to the stammering arguments, the judge very promptly ren- 
 dered the decision in favor of my opponent. That was a 
 crushing blow and the sting of the defeat is felt by me to this 
 hour. The debating society's life was short, but it served its 
 purpose and gave at least one of its participants a start upon 
 his life's career. 
 
 The protracted meetings of that time were probably more 
 orderly as to the conduct of the crowds than they were a few 
 years previously or have been since. The preaching was not 
 of the highest order, but it was not bad. The sing-song in- 
 toning minister was before my time. The preaching I heard 
 was superlatively Biblical and earnest to the point of boiling 
 blood. The seeking note was prominent in all the sermons and 
 the prophet did not cease to warn his hearers day and night. 
 The horizon of most of our ministers was not very broad, but 
 their very narrowness made them mighty. Their concentrated 
 convictions forged a terrible bolt which they launched against 
 sin with deadly effect. I have seen whole audiences mightily 
 swayed and entire platoons of strong men crowd the front 
 benches and piteously cry for mercy. Sometimes the rough 
 building would seem to rock as it was filled with the glory of 
 God under the power of the preached word as proclaimed by a 
 rugged and uncompromising son of the soil. The singing was 
 old-fashioned, earnest, devotional, and weird. The music of 
 the old hymns would break the heart of stone and start tears 
 from every eye. 
 
 The history of my own spiritual exercise and the story of 
 my torn soul will be recorded in the chapter devoted to my con- 
 version and call to the ministry. / 
 
 Since there was no possible hope of advancement in the 
 country school, I was now determined to leave the roof-tree for 
 larger training. It was absolutely out of the question to expect 
 my parents to pay board and tuition for me in town. The finan- 
 cial condition of the family made the idea unthinkable and of 
 course I had no money and there was no way for me to imme- 
 diately earn a sum large enough to pay my expenses at school 
 for a year. My father consented to release me from the farm 
 
28 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 labor and to allow me to go if the way should open. One of 
 the teachers who had boarded with us, a scholarly old gentle- 
 man, owned a house in town. He reserved one room for his 
 own occupancy when he was not teaching in the country. This 
 dear man, Prof. J. B. Hunter, offered to share his room with 
 me and to instruct me without charge provided I would furnish 
 the ampler portion of the staple foods we should need. It may 
 be readily understood that I eagerly accepted this proposition. 
 The cooking was done on the fireplace in the one room the 
 teacher and lone pupil occupied. I brought from the farm 
 bacon, salted pork shoulder, corn meal, butter, potatoes, and 
 such other things as could be spared from the not too large 
 store of provisions in my father's house. Mr. Hunter bought 
 the tea and the sugar and whatever fancy groceries we used. 
 The arrangement was not ideal, but it was the best thing in 
 sight and I profited from the relation. 
 
 I studied here for probably a half year and then I was able 
 to secure and teach a country school. It was what was known 
 as a "pay school." The tuition fee was a dollar a month per 
 pupil. The community in which I taught was so remote that my 
 loneliness was oppressive. My patronage was small and I 
 did not make enough salary to pay my board. However, I 
 learned in this distant section lessons of hardihood and self- 
 reliance that have stood me in good stead throughout the years. 
 As teacher I carried into the schoolroom ideas of discipline 
 that I had gathered from those who had been over me. The 
 rod was the supreme instrument of instruction. The commu- 
 nity's conception of an efficient teacher was that he be able to 
 thrash and subdue the big boys. I carried out this idea with 
 terrible precision. My sternness was not so much because of 
 innate hardness of heart and cruelty of disposition as because 
 of fear. I was so small and so young that I was literally afraid 
 of my pupils, and I thrashed them furiously to bluff them into 
 submission lest they might discover their physical ability to 
 overcome me. 
 
 This drastic course brought me many pains and involved 
 me in constant embroilments. Only the rarest diplomacy kept 
 me from being brutally beaten by irate parents. I recall one 
 exceedingly narrow escape. The enraged man was a sawmill 
 hand, ignorant and truculent. His boy had come in for the 
 
EDUCATIONAL LIMITATIONS 29 
 
 usual chastisement. The father came to my room at night 
 accompanied by a friend and urgently demanded that I take a 
 walk down into a pine thicket where we could talk over the 
 matter of the boy's punishment. I readily went to the desig- 
 nated place. Ordinarily it would have been a foolish thing to 
 do. A maturer man would not have dared accept that invita- 
 tion. But it seems that my very crassness saved me. The 
 bullying parent, who intended to maul me unmercifully, was 
 evidently convinced that I was not afraid of him, and then my 
 explanation of the affair of the child's punishment may have 
 had some weight. At any rate I returned to the house alive 
 and untouched, but I shudder in bodily fear now as I think of 
 what might have happened to me out there in the dark. Surely, 
 it was a horrible system that brought such suffering and hard- 
 ships on both teachers and pupils. 
 
 The next year was a happier time for me. My purposes 
 crystallized and my opportunities broadened near home. In- 
 stead of accepting the appointment to the State University, I 
 went to Hineman University School at Monticello. This was 
 a small training school for boys and girls, named for, founded, 
 and conducted by Mr. J. H. Hineman, a graduate of Bingham 
 School, and for these past thirty years prominent in educational 
 circles in Arkansas. The school had the highest and most ex- 
 acting standards. The work was one continuous drill and the 
 preparation was the last word in thoroughness. The honor 
 pupils took high rank in many colleges — and not a few have 
 unrivalled preeminence in the learned professions and higher 
 walks of life. Though a zealous Methodist, Mr. Hineman 
 inspired and launched upon careers of preeminent usefulness 
 many Baptist preachers. His fair method of instruction and 
 his open and keen analysis of every subject no doubt had much 
 to do with his school being a sort of nondenominational incu- 
 bator for Baptist Colleges and Seminaries. 
 
 For a little more than a year here I had what might be 
 termed a gloriously hard time. I got both my tuition and board 
 on credit. It took all the wages I earned at my next summer's 
 school to pay these two bills. But, despite the practice of econ- 
 omy, there were other expenses that had to be provided for. 
 Books and clothes were prime necessities. I labored on Satur- 
 days and afternoons. I worked on the streets of the city 
 
30 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 throwing gravel in the mudholes, and sometimes at a near-by 
 brickyard. For a ten-hour day I received the wage of one 
 dollar. That was considered good pay and I thought myself 
 fortunate. For a while I was janitor of the public school build- 
 ing. For this service I got five dollars a month. The contrast 
 of the time is seen when I here write it down that I have not 
 been able at all times since my affliction to keep a colored valet 
 at ten dollars a week and board. 
 
 During this term at my boarding place I was fortunate in 
 the literature I found on the library table. I made acquaint- 
 ance with such heavy magazines as The Forum and The Arena. 
 These periodicals carried my citizenship from Arkansas to 
 Boston. Since then the intellectual supremacy of "The Hub" 
 has been to me a fascination and a delight unalloyed. 
 
 The outstanding event of this school year was the lyceum 
 lecture course inaugurated and successfully conducted by the 
 principal. There were five numbers. The men were all spe- 
 cialists in their lines and their impress is upon that town until 
 this day. There was Col. Copeland, a star performer in his 
 famous humorous skit, "Snobs and Snobbery." Then came 
 CoL Sanford, the world traveler, who made our eyes bulge as 
 he told us he had crossed the ocean nineteen times. Dr. Hedley 
 brought us his "Love and Laughter." Dewitt Miller told us 
 of California and the Golden West. But greatest of all was 
 that prince of the platform, who yet lives in mellow old age, 
 George R. Wendling of Philadelphia. God never made a man 
 of handsomer stage presence nor gave to speaking mortal a 
 sweeter voice. His every feature was noble, every thought 
 was sublime and grace was in all his movements. In a southern 
 town he naturally expected to be asked for his lecture on 
 "Stonewall Jackson." So sure was he of this that upon arriving 
 upon a belated train, he took from his satchel the address on 
 the great southern soldier. But he was privately beseeched to 
 give his marvelous sermon on "Immortality." There were 
 local reasons for this. A strong sentiment of unbelief was 
 dominant in the little town. One leading citizen and office- 
 holder was an avowed agnostic. The doctrines of infidelity 
 were boldly proclaimed and the danger to the educated young 
 was imminent. Perilous to the souls were the times. I can 
 Qever forget Mr. Wendling's opening sentence : "If a man die, 
 
EDUCATIONAL LIMITATIONS 31 
 
 i.hall he live again ?" The rafters quivered with the fervor of 
 his oratory. The walls reverberated with the grandeur of his 
 periods. The gale thundered his anathemas against unbelief 
 and the zephyrs softly wafted to broken and doubting hearts 
 the deathless consolations of the blessed hope. After that lec- 
 ture infidelity in Monticello was dead. Since that night the 
 place has been a new town. Ministers and missionaries and 
 serving Christian teachers have been the heavenly products of 
 the hill-girt Capital of Drew County. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 NATURAL QUALIFICATIONS LACKING AND EN- 
 DOWMENTS WANTING 
 
 I am amazed at my own temerity in attempting to carve out 
 a public career for myself. Never was there a sorrier specimen 
 of boyhood out of which to make a leader. I was a tow-headed, 
 tallow-faced, indifferent looking, undersized youngster. There 
 was not a strikingly strong characteristic to my entire person- 
 ality. I was painfully timid. In company my embarrassment 
 was agony unconcealed. I suffered tortures in the presence of 
 my betters. I constantly contrasted my own limitations with 
 the more favored persons of my acquaintance. I had a hesi- 
 tancy in speech that almost made me a stammerer, and when 
 called upon even to talk in the family circle a dizziness would 
 seize me and my words were flighty and contradictory. When 
 I essayed public address, I was afflicted with nausea. My 
 knees knocked and my whole frame trembled and the audience 
 was a sea-rolling maze before me. The fairies put not a single 
 oratorical gift into my cradle; neither by inheritance was I 
 more favored. As far back as my lineage can be traced, there 
 is no record of an effective public speaker. 
 
 It was left for me to break the long years of forensic 
 silence. The task was almost an insuperable one. I resorted to 
 every conceivable stratagem to cure my defects. I read aloud 
 by the hour; I taught my tongue the twist of words; and I 
 practiced my voice in the roll of sentences. I traveled unfre- 
 quented paths thru the woods that, unheard and unobserved, I 
 might declaim in the presence of the forest. Between the 
 plowhandles I sonorously thundered the masterpieces of the 
 ancient worthies. Every stump and fallen log in the lonely 
 field served as my pulpit or platform.. The barn was a favorite 
 trying-out place for the witchery of advocacy, with the horse 
 and cow as my dumb and unresponsive auditors. I marvel 
 at the persistency of my efforts. To this day I suffer many of 
 
 32 
 
NATURAL QUALIFICATIONS LACKING 33 
 
 the same handicaps that made my youthful ebulHtions one con- 
 tinuous torture. Never in my life have I gone into the pulpit 
 unafraid. I have had to force myself to affect indifference as 
 I trod the rostrum. Constant appearances did not allay the 
 fear nor did ceaseless repetition cure the malady. Stage fright 
 was my portion in the beginning and has been my bugbear to 
 the end. 
 
 Singularly enough I have succeeded in deceiving the public 
 and even my most intimate friends have thought me gifted in 
 the art of public discourse, especially that of extemporaneous 
 address. The multitude jumps at conclusions and all too often 
 goes upon the basis of contrast. I suppose most men are thus 
 misjudged. I have suffered cruelly from the hastily formed 
 opinions of many puritanical deacons and of numberless out- 
 wardly pious Christians because I have laughed and quipped 
 and joked. These I did to keep from crying. I smiled to hide 
 my tears and laughed aloud to drown the uprising wails and 
 I had the misfortune of being judged by the outward appear- 
 ance rather than by the billowing sorrows that surged over 
 my soul. 
 
 I was of a mercurial, French temperament and my Latin 
 blood caused me to hate the routine and monotony of work-a- 
 day existence. The continuous task was intolerable to me. I 
 had to lash myself to the oar, if I were to propel the galley. I 
 forced myself to bend to the hardest labor and subjected my 
 entire being to the most terrible discipline of life's common 
 exactions that I might serve my generation with credit and 
 meet the most repulsive duties with the fortitude of a man. 
 Therefore I was always driving or being driven. Uncongenial 
 duties met me at every turn. I think I can modestly say, tho 
 I winced I never shirked. I had no talent for continuous, 
 sustained toil; yet I goaded myself until I could perform the 
 labor of a quarry slave. If possible, I was rnore wanting in 
 ability to write than to speak. My penmanship was a scrawl of 
 undecipherable hieroglyphics. It is no exaggeration to say 
 that it was with great difficulty that I read my own writing when 
 it became cold. I had not the patience to transfer my thoughts 
 to paper and for years I was ashamed to send such execrable 
 manuscripts as I produced to the printer. One blessing prob- 
 ably will emerge — my family and friends will surely not be 
 
34 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 bothered with any barrels of my sermons. Not a dozen dim 
 and musty outlines will I leave to clutter the library or to 
 pester posterity. Not until typewriters became common and 
 I could command the service of an amanuensis did I arrest the 
 attention of the Christian public thru the denominational press. 
 
 In all the spectacular elements that capture the minds of men 
 and enthrall their hearts, I was sadly lacking. In fact, a critic 
 when writing up a contest in which I was a participant said that 
 there was not a line of the leader seaming my face. This thrust 
 drove me to mental labor so intense that furrows were ploughed 
 in my face and the hoar-frost sprinkled my hair. The perora- 
 tion of Broadus in his matchless tribute to Gessner Harrison, 
 "Fear God and Work," became my motto. Thus persistent toil 
 in a measure offset temperamental and congenital delinquencies. 
 
 My desultory and unsystematized habits of reading, and 
 fugitive schemes of study did not fit me for the severe grind of 
 organized high school and college discipline. I was not a well- 
 rounded student. My shortcomings in mathematics were 
 always painfully apparent. Discursive learning was my forte 
 rather than the prescribed course. I was said to be good in 
 Latin and I took the honors in English, History, and Rhetoric ; 
 and in general reading I had no peer ; but from the standpoint 
 of the schoolmen I was a baffling proposition. My brilliance in 
 some studies gave the teachers good hope of developing me on 
 all lines. But in this they were doomed to bitter disappoint- 
 ment. I do not for a moment defend my course, nor do I hold 
 myself up as a criterion for any other student. I deplore the 
 lopsidedness of my education. There are many excuses that 
 I might offer, but these are now beside the mark. I was in 
 desperate haste to get out of school and into life; and I was 
 always short of funds, and I thought that high rank in some 
 branches would be a set-off to my low attainments in other 
 lines. Undoubtedly this was a mistake and in consequence I 
 have been handicapped thru the years. It humbles me to the 
 dust to have to here set down shortcomings that I have never 
 before confessed. I make the revelation lest other youths may 
 be tempted to presume and follow in my own footsteps to their 
 own undoing. I was unable to earn a degree and of course 
 never received a diploma. My education might be termed as 
 scrappy, disjointed and angular. The midnight toil of a quar- 
 
NATURAL QUALIFICATIONS LACKING 35 
 
 ter of a century has in some measure atoned for the early 
 errors, but the price I paid was a terrible one. I have tried 
 to see that my children did not follow in my footsteps and I 
 have founded a college to do the work for others that was never 
 done for me. 
 
 X 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 AN ADDED CHAPTER ON PIGS, 'POSSUMS AND 
 
 POTATOES 
 
 Hitherto I have said little about the pastimes and pranks of 
 my boyhood. In the preceding chapters the chronicle has been 
 straightforward and the serious note has been dominant. The 
 melancholy most poignantly affects the introspective child. 
 Grim care grins over his shoulder and cuts the hard line of its 
 history into his very being. Lest I should be charged with a 
 pessimism to which I am a stranger both by nature and by 
 grace, I purport here to record the lighter side of my boyhood's 
 uneven pilgrimage. Certainly the usual variety of work and 
 play, fun and frolic vouchsafed to the child of my day was not 
 denied me. Hunting was the chief diversion of that time. Old- 
 fashioned double-barrelled muzzle-loading shotguns and long, 
 one-balled rifles were the weapons used. The powder was first 
 put in the barrel of the shotgun and this was held down by paper 
 wadding which was tightly pounded with a ramrod. On top 
 of the wadding the shots were poured, then other paper was 
 rammed down to hold the shots in place. Caps were placed on 
 the tube and the gun was ready for action. There was a trunk 
 full of old Confederate money on our place, all of which was 
 used as gun wadding by my half-brothers and uncles. Many 
 is the time I have wished some of that money had been saved 
 as historic reminders of the lost cause. The loading of the 
 rifle was very like unto the process of charging the shotgun, 
 except that the lone ball was wrapped in a piece of tough cloth 
 called a "patching" and then rammed down on the wadded 
 powder. 
 
 Squirrel hunting was the liveliest sport and also the best 
 meat-producing excursion of the nimrods of my time. Very 
 little boys were permitted to accompany the gun bearers to 
 "turn the game." When a squirrel was treed he naturally 
 
 36 
 
PIGS, TOSSUMS AND POTATOES 37 
 
 placed a limb or the body of the tree between himself and the 
 hunter. It was the business of the boy to go around and shake 
 a bush that he might frighten the squirrel and drive him in 
 range of the man with the gun. At the crack of the gun the 
 body of the little animal would hit the ground with a sickening 
 thud, where sometimes a battle royal would take place between 
 the dog and the boy for possession of the dead squirrel. 
 
 Coons were so prolific that often the green corn crop was 
 endangered. I have seen their tracks by the tens of thousands 
 on the moist ground along the banks of a creek. The coon was 
 a wary varmint and when chased by dogs usually climbed the 
 biggest tree he could find. It was the sport of stalwarts to cut 
 the tree down and set the dogs to the task of killing the coon 
 in fair fight. Coon skins covered the barns, chicken houses and 
 the cabin doors of the backswoodsman. I have seen horses so 
 laden with these dried pelts that you could scarcely distinguish 
 the animal as it wended its way marketward with its cargo of 
 coon skins. 
 
 The trouble about the table fare of the farmer of that day 
 was that it was either a feast or a famine. In the spring we 
 had milk and butter, but in the winter we had none. As was 
 often said, we had things in their season. We almost starved 
 between beef and bacon. Hogs were of two varieties, wild 
 razorbacks on the range and tame hogs at home. Nearly every 
 farmer had hogs at home and also a "claim" among the wild 
 hogs in the woods. These latter were always mast fed — that is, 
 they lived upon whatever they could find until the acorns fell 
 and then they were fattenend upon these. The flesh of mast 
 fed hogs was not solid nor firm, and therefore did not keep 
 very well. Often before cold weather, when in need of meat 
 the farmer would with corn entice a fat razorback to some open 
 spot, where the hog would be shot and then tethered by a short 
 rope to the tail of horse or mule and dragged home for dressing 
 and consumption. In addition to swine and cattle, my father 
 usually had a small flock of roaming and depredating goats. 
 In the lean days of summer we quite often had fresh kid, the 
 flesh of which was esteemed a great delicacy by meat-hungry 
 children. I remember that on two occasions we had bear meat. 
 The flesh was very like bacon, though the grease was of a more 
 oily consistency. White soft-shelled turtle made a dish fit for 
 
38 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 a king, and smoked rabbit was esteemed a delicacy good enough 
 for a connoisseur. The rabbit was dressed and hung high up 
 in the chimney above the old-fashioned fireplace, where it was 
 thoroughly cooked and blackened. When wanted, the meat 
 was stripped off and eaten. The negroes taught us this method 
 of rabbit cooking. 
 
 But the most wonderful sport for juveniles was 'possum 
 catching. In the fall of the year, the old 'possum is fat and 
 lazy. Any sort of a dog can run upon one in the weeds or 
 chase him into a small sapling where he is easily captured. 
 When caught, the 'possum affects death by "sulking." He can 
 then be borne home with impunity. The usual boy scheme 
 with a live 'possum was to stick his tail into the aperture of a 
 green pole riven by the blade of an axe. That securely held 
 the game as the ends of the pole were borne on the shoulders of 
 two boys, one behind the other. The last and most successful 
 'possum hunt I remember, we caught four; one so large and 
 so vicious that he would never "sulk" ; he growled and snapped 
 at us all the way to the house. Though a scavenger of the 
 forest and the barn yard, when properly prepared opossum is 
 the most toothsome dish ever set before a ravenous wayfarer. 
 There is just one time to eat him, in the fall of the year after 
 frost, when persimmons are ripe and potatoes are sweet. 
 
 This furry varmint is killed by placing a piece of wood 
 across the back of his neck, securely held down by the foot of 
 the slayer, while with the hands the executioner pulls the victim 
 over by the tail. This results in a broken neck and a quick and 
 painless death. The hair is removed by rolling the body in a 
 bed of steaming embers — that is, red hot coals and ashes upon 
 which water has been poured. The result is a roll of clean, 
 white flesh. Then the animal is eviscerated, laid open and 
 placed inside out upon the housetop for the frost of a chilly 
 night to fall in and freeze him. That takes away the 'possum 
 odor and draws from the flesh the jungle funk. The next 
 morning the carcass is taken down, placed in a large oven, 
 lined with sliced sweet potatoes that will exude candy at the 
 touch of fire, a slow-burning wood fire is kept going under the 
 oven and on the lid for hours or until the escaping savory odor 
 tells the experienced housewife that the dish is done. Words 
 fail me now. Language is too poor to describe the ravishing 
 
PIGS, TOSSUMS AND POTATOES 39 
 
 aroma and the toothsomeness of this incomparable culinary 
 triumph. As Governor Taylor said of the old lady in the 
 mountains of east Tennessee, "The best vegstubble that ever 
 melted on these old gums of mine is kerpossum." 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 CONVERSION AND CALL TO THE MINISTRY 
 
 I cannot remember when I did not fear God. I was ever 
 awed by the mightiness of Jehovah and the terrors of the law 
 consumed me. Tho fearfully depraved, I was always relig- 
 iously inclined. From memory's dawn two principles con- 
 tended within me for the mastery of my soul. The little 
 prayers taught me by my mother were repeated with nightly 
 regularity, the one beginning, *'Now I lay me down to sleep, 
 I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to keep," was said until I gradu- 
 ated into what is known as the Lord's prayer. Very early I 
 made additions to these petitions. I did this because I felt the 
 need of it. My spiritual history is not pleasant in retrospect, 
 neither I fear will it make easy or acceptable reading. Never 
 at any time was my soul's course smooth and even. Compan- 
 ions, environment, unwise direction, all doubtless had their 
 share in the anxieties and abnormalities that possessed me. 
 Inward doubt and depression not infrequently obtained the 
 mastery over me. I was never sure. The most splendid rhap- 
 sodies were often succeeded by the darkest forebodings. My 
 consciousness of sin was uncannily keen. I never had any sort 
 of doubt about the fall of Adam and the fearful consequences 
 of the curse pronounced upon our first parents and thru them 
 upon all posterity. To me that doctrine was ever clear and its 
 application to myself was incontrovertibly personal. That I 
 was an outcast, utterly and justly lost, seemed a fact beyond 
 debate. 
 
 To me every favor of the Most High was unmerited grace. 
 I walked around my fellows smiling, but thoroughly despising 
 myself. And I was afraid ; afraid of God, afraid of death, and 
 afraid of judgment. I thought myself the greatest of all sin- 
 ners, and this too at a very tender age. I was obsessed with 
 the idea of special judgments and bemoaned the afflictions that 
 came upon my family, fearing that they were providential dis- 
 
 40 
 
CALL TO THE MINISTRY 41 
 
 pensations sent in punishment of my sins. I well remember 
 going hom^e from school one day and finding my baby brother, 
 of whom I was passionately fond, in the paroxysms of a con- 
 gestive spasm. I was struck with the conviction that I was 
 responsible for his condition and this distress drove me to the 
 back of the house to pray. So it was with all the woes of the 
 neighborhood. The deaths in the homes of our neighbors and 
 the funerals at the neighboring cemetery all bore upon me with 
 a weight crushingly heavy and pierced me thru with unreliev- 
 able sorrows. Vicariously I suffered for all my little world. 
 And there was heaped upon me the heartaches of my entire 
 realm. The accusing finger of Deity seemed always pointed at 
 me. I hated and shuddered at death and yet every death was 
 my death. 
 
 The consolations of the tenderer and dearer parts of the 
 Bible had not been explained to me and their comforting as- 
 surances were not stressed so as to relieve the dread blackness 
 of my accumulated despair. The very terrors that clutched 
 my heart drew me to the place of mourning. I would have 
 given worlds to stay from the dead and from the cemetery, 
 but my own heart agony drew me to both and I was probably 
 the loneliest and most miserable soul that fearfully approached 
 the death chamber and the graveyard. At every impending 
 calamity I sought alone a place of prayer. This trysting place 
 with God was usually the chimney corner at the farther end of 
 the house. My prayer was characterized by intercessory 
 pleading and piteous confession of personal unworthiness. I 
 wonder now if this supermorbidity was an over-development 
 of egoism or the result of too great emphasis upon the funda- 
 mental doctrines of sin, or was it what it seemed to be, my 
 predestined mission to be the vicarious sufferer for all I knew 
 and of whom I heard. The souls as well as the bodies of my 
 brothers seemed to be my special care. The moment one of 
 them was taken sick, I had no peace and no rest until recovery 
 was evident. 
 
 When I was about fourteen my brother next to me was 
 stricken with pneumonia of a most virulent type. The agony 
 of those weeks is burned into me. I trembled on the threshold 
 of his room, not daring to go in and look upon his suffering 
 form ; yet I could not tear myself far enough away to be beyond 
 
42 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 the sound of his cries of pain. I did without sufficient food, 
 and sleep fled from my eyes. To show my distracted condition, 
 let me recite a wild tale of my church attendance one day at the 
 crisis of my brother's illness. There was a Methodist quar- 
 terly meeting going on a mile and a half from our house. In the 
 hope of help and to escape from the heart depressing atmos- 
 phere of the suffering home, I mounted my pony and hurried 
 to church. But so anxious and distraught was I, that I left 
 the service in its beginning and' went home at a lively pace. 
 So distressing was the condition of my brother that I could 
 not remain at the house, and I again mounted my horse, went 
 back to the church, heard the conclusion of the sermon, and 
 lingered to the close of the service. So quickened was my 
 every faculty and so overwrought my nerves, that to this day I 
 remember portions of the sermons of the two men, for there 
 were two who preached, one following the other. 
 
 Fortunately my brother recovered, and I had again a breath- 
 ing spell from the stressful days thru which I had passed. 
 But even these unusual soul experiences and heart tearing 
 crises did not bring me immediately into the light. I could not 
 see my way clear to make a public avowal of my faith in Jesus 
 Christ as Savior and Lord. For me the way yet to the Cross 
 was long and tortuous. I have an idea that I had been con- 
 fused and misled by the experiences of older persons, and here 
 is a psychological mistake of the first magnitude that was an 
 error common to our fathers and the Christian workers of my 
 day. All, children and grown people, were expected to be put 
 in a common religious mold. It was thought that they must 
 have the same convictions, the same experiences of grace, and 
 the form of expression was to be identical. 
 
 Then, too, I had planned my own conversion. I had an 
 idea that it should be a cataclysmic affair after the type of Paul. 
 I awaited the voice from heaven and the blinding flash of a 
 startling presence out of the sky. These never came. They 
 could not come, for God could never allow a sinner to dictate 
 the manner of his conversion. My emergence from darkness 
 to light was a process slow and painful. Full of qualms and 
 beset by doubts, I groped and tremulously felt my way; and 
 when on one eventful night I did go forward in the old country 
 church to make a public profession of faith in my risen Lord, 
 
CALL TO THE MINISTRY 43 
 
 it was not a moment of dazzling brightness with parting crowds 
 and shouting hosannas, but a time of deep contrition, subdued 
 self, and hopeful trust, accompanied by an inexpressible peace 
 that suffused my quiet soul. I only knew that I had passed 
 from death unto life because I loved the brethren. Thru sub- 
 sequent life I have had to fight for my faith. A few weeks 
 later a small company of people witnessed my baptism in the 
 unpretentious waters of an eddying pool in a creek near the 
 public road. That ordinance pictured forth my theology, my 
 belief in the Lord's death and resurrection, my death to sin 
 and resurrection to newness of life in Christ Jesus, and my 
 hope that this body of my mortality shall rise again. 
 
 The impression that I should preach was contemporaneous 
 with the conviction that I should be a Christian. The two con- 
 ceptions were allied and ran concurrently in my mind. But 
 after my baptism I sought to delay entrance upon the ministry. 
 I wanted to satisfy my early ambition to be a lawyer, achieve 
 a reputation, accumulate a competency and go to Congress. I 
 resorted to every mild device to postpone the hour of the great 
 decision. I knew something of the hardships and unrewarded 
 toils of preachers, and I felt more than the world can ever 
 know my own utter unworthiness. This vacillating course 
 gave every doubt a chance to do its perfect work. I fell upon 
 trying times and, like Jonah, I tried to evade responsibility by 
 fleeing the face of my Lord. I even went so far as to offer 
 in compromise the evening of my life to the task of preaching 
 if God would permit me to engage in secular employ in the 
 strength of my manhood. It is needless ta say that this trifling 
 with the greatest of all issues increased my difficulties and cov- 
 ered me with confusion. My call was unequivocal and direct 
 and the answer had to be a joyous acquiescence in the will of 
 God or a flat refusal to obey His plainest command. 
 
 The days of my controversy with Jehovah were for me full 
 of pain and peril. Satan ably assisted me in every argument 
 that I submitted for putting off the inevitable. My sins, my 
 temperament, my age-long inheritance of Christian powers un- 
 trained, all conspired to make me shrink from the high and holy 
 calling of a messenger of God. The way to earthly prefer- 
 ment seemed to be open, but the path to the pulpit looked long 
 and rugged. Not to living mortal did I tell my trials or reveal 
 
44 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 the secrets of my heart, but all men seemed to know what was 
 going on within me. I was astounded when fellow churchmen 
 and pastor announced their belief that I would one day preach 
 the gospel. It seemed that my fearful and beating heart had 
 pounded out the news to listening ears. I had cringed and 
 shrunk so long that I was beginning to feel myself a coward. 
 I must have had the limp and furtive expression of a slacker. 
 Why this indisposition on the part of a called man to obey his 
 Master? — for thus has it ever been from Moses to the last 
 preacher ordained. Only under the Divine compulsion will 
 even a redeemed soul preach the unsearchable riches of grace. 
 It was, "Woe is me if I preach not the gospel." The impulsion 
 was unremittent, insistent, and clear. As a God-conquered 
 man I could do no other, and the cry of glad surrender went up 
 from my heart : "Lord, here am I, send me." 
 
 I cannot therefore say that I was surprised when, on one 
 hot Sunday afternoon our little country church held a called 
 conference under the shade of some small trees by the side of 
 a schoolhouse in which rustic singers were making music at 
 the tops of their voices, and licensed me to preach. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 COLLEGE, FIRST SERMONS, ORDINATION 
 
 When it was settled that I was to become a preacher, there 
 was but one sort of educational institution suited to my needs 
 — a Baptist college of unimpeachable denominational integrity 
 and of unchallenged Christian character and teachings. Oua- 
 chita College at Arkadelphia fulfilled these conditions and met 
 all reasonable requirements. After correspondence with Presi- 
 dent John W. Conger, I made the best and hastiest preparation 
 I could to leave that fall for Arkadelphia. I had very little 
 money, and some of that was borrowed, and my going-off outfit 
 was pitifully meager. I had a trunk that cost four dollars, 
 some books, a few pictures of loved ones and a scanty wardrobe. 
 
 The trip from Monticello was an eventful one, made upon 
 three lines of railroads. My brother, now commander in the 
 navy, accompanied me. He was going to attend a Northern 
 Methodist university in Little Rock, where he could work his 
 way. We were driven the six miles to Monticello with cheap 
 trunks in the farm wagon drawn by a stubborn mule and a 
 balky colt. The home leaving was a trying ordeal. There was 
 mother, a father rapidly aging and three little brothers to be 
 left behind. Ever and anon the question whether we were 
 doing right in leaving home at all would arise to disturb us in 
 our quest of an education and in our dreams of triumph. The 
 journey itself was an epoch in the lives of two green country 
 boys. We traveled all day and spent the night in a hotel in 
 Little Rock. 
 
 There were some ludicrous sidelights to the trip. We ar- 
 rived at Little Rock just as the electric lights came on in the 
 evening. Never before had we seen spluttering arc lights 
 illuminating a city, and in order to get the full benefit of this 
 wonderful modern invention we walked up the middle of the 
 street directly under the lights to our hotel. At our first meal 
 in the hotel we were bewildered by the amazing number of 
 
 45 
 
46 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 small dishes set before us, and at the table we held a whispered 
 colloquy about the probable price of the meal if we should eat 
 out of all the dishes. Next morning we were relieved to learn 
 that there was no extra charge for the vast variety of foods 
 served us. 
 
 My brother found his institution and settled to study and 
 to work, and I left on an early morning train for the college 
 city on the banks of the Ouachita river. On arriving at the 
 station in Arkadelphia, I was highly elated over my reception. 
 The college president did not meet me, neither was the mayor 
 at the train, but numbers of people of whom I had never heard 
 seemed to know me and to be looking for me. These turned 
 out to be cab men and boarding house proprietors. A nice 
 young married student captured me and bore me away to his 
 house. 
 
 Unforgettable is my first morning in the college chapel. 
 The student body was large enough and serious enough to be 
 impressive, and as the faculty filed out upon the stage I was 
 awed beyond powers of description at that human array of 
 dignity and wisdom. The exercises were in keeping with the 
 setting. Scripture reading by the president was almost dramatic 
 in its thrilling impressiveness. The prayer was uplifting and 
 the singing was tinglingly inspiring. The campus was a noble 
 sight on the bluff of the river and the buildings were by far 
 the most massive structures of the kind I had ever seen. The 
 atmosphere of the school was unaffectedly Christian and the 
 spirit of the institution was wholesomely democratic. There 
 was learning without pedantry and piety without cant. To be 
 sure, the standards were not then so high as they are now. 
 The curriculum went from A, B, C to A.B. But the college 
 nobly fulfilled its mission in the day in which its times were 
 set. My reception was cordial and my presence was welcomed. 
 Study was encouraged and demanded and discipline was main- 
 tained and right conduct enforced. 
 
 The college was thoroughly organized and the student soci- 
 eties were factors of tremendous educational and social value. 
 They had beautifully furnished rooms in which to meet, were 
 well officered, glowing with enthusiasm and had back of them 
 noble histories and achievements of which they were justly 
 proud. I soon joined the Hermesian Literary Society and 
 
FIRST SERMONS AND ORDINATION 47 
 
 later the J. P. Eagle Society of Religious Inquiry. The latter 
 was for ministerial students only, while the former did not 
 have a record of enrolling the best scholars nor the most sub- 
 stantial class of men; it prided itself upon producing more 
 poets, orators and medalists than its great rival, the Philoma- 
 thian Society. 
 
 I was soon to see my first great gathering of Baptists. The 
 Baptist State Convention held its annual session in Arkadel- 
 phia that year. Occasionally from our home county and church 
 in the country some man would be a messenger to the state 
 convention. He would bring back glowing accounts of the 
 greatness of that body. And too I had read brief reports of 
 these high convocations of former years in the state Baptist 
 organ, and now I was to be in the midst of it all and really look 
 upon the men of whom I had so often heard and around whose 
 names imagination had cast a halo. In passing let me say that 
 I saw and heard the giants and the princes of the church and 
 behold I lived! 
 
 One morning at the chapel there was subdued but unwonted 
 excitement. The audience of students was bright- faced and 
 expectant. The faculty was dressed with unusual care. Extra 
 chairs were placed upon the stage. The convention digni- 
 taries were our guests that day. Books were thrown aside and 
 the eminent visitors were given the right of way. That picture 
 is ineffaceably engraved upon memory's wall as I dictate these 
 lines. There were personages upon the platform and they 
 beamed upon us wisely and benignantly. There was Dr. J. 
 William Jones, representing the Home Mission Board. (I had 
 sold his book, the "Life of Jefferson Davis," packing it upon 
 my back as I tramped afoot over the country side, and I had 
 read his other book, "Christ in Lee's Army.") He was round, 
 fat and sassy and more than forty. Though it was November, 
 he wore low-quartered shoes over white socks. In a voice 
 singularly feminine and fine he told his four splendid 
 preacher boys whose little mother could manage them as if 
 they were still children. 
 
 Then there was Dr. W. P. Harvey, of the Western Re- 
 corder, the most "pizen" Baptist of all. He trod the stage 
 militant and belligerent. An Irishman, reared a Roman Cath- 
 olic, he shamelessly revelled in his New Testament faith and 
 
48 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 Baptist liberty. He boomed out the word "Baptist" like a 
 viking, defiant and unafraid. In the center of the stage sat a 
 young man keen of eye and large of head. In a quarter of a 
 century his name was to run through the corridors and class- 
 rooms of the universities of the globe. A library of eighteen 
 books was to be the labor of his hand and the output of his 
 genius. He distributed a little pamphlet at the convention on 
 preaching and scholarship. This was his professorial inaugural 
 address. He was A. T. Robertson, the son-in-law and assistant 
 of the great Broadus in the seminary at Louisville, and now 
 the noblest Greek of them all. At the church that scholarly 
 knight of the republic of letters, W. R. L. Smith, pastor First 
 Church, Nashville, represented the new Sunday school board 
 that was petitioning for favor and seeking to serve. For the 
 purest English extant, just read Dr. Smith's address on "Jeter, 
 Fuller, Yates." Our literature is infinitely poorer because of 
 the shrinking modesty of this marvelously gifted man. The 
 tall and saintly Dr. T. P. Bell spoke for the Foreign Board and 
 presented the claims for world-wide missions. This pious sec- 
 retary and editor, after a life of noble service, a little while 
 ago put off his harness and entered into the joys of his Lord. 
 Governor James P. Eagle was president of the convention, and 
 a mighty host of invincible warriors and scarred veterans of a 
 thousand battles for the Cross led in the deliberations of the 
 body. Their grizzled visages loom before me now, and their 
 quenchless zeal and uncompromising convictions of truth are 
 an inspiration to me unto this day. Most of these have long 
 since joined the choir invisible, but their works do follow them. 
 The seraphic and zeal-torn B. G. Maynard was the state secre- 
 tary of Arkansas. Eternity alone will reveal the worth of this 
 foundation layer's sojourn in Arkansas. A few years ago he 
 went on high from his Missouri home. 
 
 These are the impressions of my first convention and its 
 loftiness and glory shall not depart from me until all are 
 merged in the convocation of the saints in the supernal splen- 
 dors of the general assembly of the First Born. 
 
 There were few opportunities for the young theological 
 aspirants to practice preaching in or around Arkadelphia. For 
 some reason the churches and communities were rather inhos- 
 pitable to youthful ecclesiastical invasion. The position of a 
 
FIRST SERMONS AND ORDINATION 49 
 
 ministerial student at college is rather trying. It is expected of 
 him that along with favorable progress in his studies whatever 
 be his stage of learning, that he be pious, a leader in the re- 
 ligious activities of college and local church, and with all be- 
 comingly submissive. He is somehow expected to do enough 
 preaching to learn the art. There is no provision made for 
 him to have any systematic training in pulpit or pastorate. But 
 he is expected upon his own initiative to find appointments and 
 fill them, to gather congregations and preach to them. He is 
 expected to learn denominational procedure while remaining 
 inconspicuously in the background. I offer no solution of the 
 problem and I make no complaint, but I am simply stating the 
 difficulties. The theological seminary student has a better 
 chance and a more established standing than the mere college 
 ministerial student. After all, however, it is probably a good 
 thing for the neophyte to be temporarily suppressed and kept 
 in his place. One of my schoolmates had a monthly appoint- 
 ment at a new pine schoolhouse some three or four miles out 
 from town. I persuaded him to allow me to accompany him 
 on one hot Sunday afternoon. We walked the entire distance 
 there and back in the heat and dust. My friend graciously per- 
 mitted me to address the audience for a few minutes. This 
 concession was indeed a favor for it was precious time taken 
 from the hour of the regular preacher. As we returned, the 
 only comment made by my brother upon my effort was, "Tardy, 
 why do you make such an ugly face when you arise to speak ?" 
 When the Christmas vacation came, I was out of money and 
 of everything else that I needed to keep me in college. I went 
 back to my home and did not return to the late winter and 
 spring session. On the farm I tried to fit again into my old 
 place as laborer and helper, but I was restive and anxious to 
 preach. There could not possibly be any remunerative minis- 
 terial work awaiting me, for no man so young as I had ever 
 been paid for preaching in all that section of country. Finally 
 the pastor of the Baptist church in Monticello extended me an 
 invitation to preach my first sermon in his pulpit. For some 
 reason the pastor, the famous blind preacher, Dr. White, was 
 to be absent on the day I was to appear. This was one source 
 of embarrassment removed, for which I was devoutly thankful. 
 I tried to prepare my sermon and my heart for the ordeal. I 
 
50 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 was anxious, too, that the service should receive as little ad- 
 vertisement as possible. The fewer the hearers I had, the 
 better I should like it. I never can forget that morning. I had 
 made a few notes on the text, "Be ye not conformed to this 
 world." These I carried into the pulpit. I was chagrined to 
 see my old school principal file into the building, followed by 
 cultured associates and not a few of my former iellow pupils. 
 They came from the most innocent motives and out of the 
 tenderest regard for me, but their presence made the cold 
 chills race over me. I had to conduct the entire service, in 
 addition to the task of trying to deliver my maiden sermon. In 
 prayer my voice sounded hollow, and afar off. I found that 
 talking to God on behalf of the people in public worship, was a 
 holy and awesome thing. It was a heart-searching and soul- 
 straining experience and it left me emptied, humbled, and dumb 
 with amazement at my own audacity. 
 
 I hurried thru the hynms and struck furiously for the 
 sermon. In the attempt to preach the sound of my own voice 
 again frightened me. My notes got mixed before my dancing 
 eyes, the audience swam before me, and floor and ceiling seemed 
 to meet. The only redeeming feature was the brevity of my 
 address. Probably in twelve minutes I had finished. It seemed 
 that I had been trembling behind that pulpit for an age. I 
 could have wished that the floor had opened and swallowed me. 
 I should have rushed in the darkest cave had there been one 
 near-by, to hide my shame and confusion. I was convinced 
 that the effort was a dismal failure. I remember hoping that 
 my friends and the people would all go out without speaking to 
 me, for I was sure they could truthfully say nothing good of 
 that service. To my surprise and overwhelming humiliation 
 Professor Hineman, whose critical opinion I dreaded above that 
 of all men, took me by the hand and said : "William, that was a 
 very edifying discourse." That is the only comment that lingers 
 with me, but it was enough and it has heartened me to try again 
 after many failures. I preached only four more times in my 
 native county, once at the church where I was converted and 
 once at Collins near where I was born, and one time each at 
 two other country churches. 
 
 In a few months my father made his last and longest intra- 
 state move. This time he went twelve or fifteen miles west of 
 
FIRST SERMONS AND ORDINATION 51 
 
 Pine Bluff, beyond the fringe of civilization and into the very 
 heart of the wild. He had for many years owned some woods 
 land in that locality and after selling his Drew County farm he 
 purchased a partially improved place near his other holdings on 
 the lines of Jefferson and Grant Counties. This was a disas- 
 trous financial transaction for my father, but in many ways the 
 Lord made the move redound in blessings to the children. Not 
 being able to go back to college, I again dropped into my old 
 place at the farm and was subject to my parents. In those 
 remote and weirdly rural surroundings I made the best of my 
 father's bad bargain and bent every energy of my being to 
 assist in mending the family fortunes. I preached to the 
 strangely ignorant folk and both my mother and I taught school 
 in those far off jungles. 
 
 There came at length one summer a providential opening 
 of preeminent significance to me. I learned that the new 
 pastor, Rev. W. K. Penrod, of the First Baptist Church, Pine 
 Bluff, was to preach one Sunday afternoon at White Sulphur 
 Springs, a resort seven miles from the city and more than that 
 distance from where we lived. I determined not to lose the 
 opportunity of hearing this town preacher whose fame had 
 reached the country side. Therefore I made it a point to 
 attend the service at the Springs. The sermon was on the 
 faith of Abraham. All of the events of that afternoon are 
 yet fresh in my memory. I met Dr. Penrod and he invited me 
 to visit him in Pine Bluff and to preach in his church. Later 
 that noble pastor led his splendid congregation in sending me 
 back to college. The finest tailored suit of clothes that I ever 
 owned was given to me by friends that I here made. I placed 
 my membership in that outstanding church, and the results 
 amply justified the relationship. 
 
 A year or two later that sovereign congregation called for 
 my ordination and on a rainy Sunday morning before a filled 
 house, the pastor preached my ordination sermon from the text, 
 "Let no man despise thy youth." The presbytery was com- 
 posed of the elders of the church and the deacons, and Dr. W. A. 
 Clark, editor of the Arkansas Baptist, who presented the Bible 
 at the conclusion of the public oral examination. Mr. John T. 
 Marsh, a great churchman and a leading business man of the 
 city, arose and made the following motion : "Brother Moder- 
 
52 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 ator, I move you, sir, that the church instruct the presbytery to 
 proceed with the ordination of our young brother by the laying 
 on of our hands." I bent the knee and bowed my head, while 
 the hands of those good men were caressingly laid upon me. 
 That was the supreme moment of my youth. It marked the 
 official sanction of my dreams and the ecclesiastical recognition 
 of the inner urge. So far as a church could do it, I was now 
 set apart to the full work of the gospel ministry. Ever after- 
 wards I had an open road. The zeal, confidence, and approba- 
 tion of that prominent church gave a momentum to my upward 
 climb and an impetus to my preaching crusade that the oppo- 
 sitions of a quarter of a century have not been able to check. 
 I cannot close this chapter without a further word regarding 
 the life and character of my beloved friend and pastor. Rev. 
 W. K. Penrod. He was a Kentuckian who early moved to 
 central Texas. In Ellis County he heard the call to preach and 
 got his training under the great masters at the Seminary at 
 Louisville. After a notably successful pastorate at Pine Bluff, 
 he wrought heroically at the First Church, Paducah, Kentucky. 
 Then for years he was the solidly upbuilding leader of the 
 Tabernacle Church at Ennis, Texas. Later he happily min- 
 istered to the First Church at Cleburne for a long pastoral 
 tenure. And now in the mellowed glory of life's soft evening, 
 he is preaching to the saints at Gonzales and leading many to 
 righteousness, while he patiently waits until the Master comes, 
 the hem of whose garment he shall touch and be forever young. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 PASTORATES IN THREE STATES 
 
 After my ordination a great door and effectual opened unto 
 me. Invitations poured upon me and the bars were down 
 everywhere. Even before this I had been preaching once a 
 month at Alexander, a little town more than fifty miles from 
 Arkadelphia on the Iron Mountain towards Little Rock. For 
 each monthly visit I received a stipend of five dollars. Often 
 have I said that not since have I ever had so much money to 
 spend for the smaller things of life. My visits to Alexander 
 were a joy and my associations there with the small company of 
 people a delight. As I remember, the church had sixteen mem- 
 bers who worshiped in a rather pretty little building in which, 
 I should think, I preached to from thirty to fifty people. Here 
 I had one convert for baptism, but I was called to another field 
 before I could administer the ordinance. 
 
 In the summer of my second year at college, by virtue of 
 the recommendations of Dr. Penrod and other influential 
 friends, I was invited to assume the pastorate of the Baptist 
 church at Camden, Arkansas, while still continuing my studies. 
 This was the most surprisingly acceptable honor that ever 
 came to me. Camden was an old town long since fully grown, 
 of no inconsiderable wealth and culture. The membership of 
 the Baptist church was the superbest organization of redeemed 
 wayfarers I have ever known. There were only about sixty- 
 five communicants, but they were the salt of the earth and the 
 elect of the Lord. Worldly prosperity was just beginning to 
 smile upon some of the leaders. The Civil War aftermath had 
 not yet been lived through and as in most ancient towns of 
 the haughtier sort. Baptists were a financially feeble folk, often 
 secretly despised and not infrequently openly contemned. But 
 the piety and character of this congregation commanded the 
 admiration and respect of all the right-thinking people of the 
 community. Scions of illustrious families were on the church 
 
 53 
 
54 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 rolls. The Lides of South Carolina, the Watts of Alabama, and 
 the Lees of Virginia and Mississippi, and the Rowlands were 
 some of the foremost families who bore the burdens and gave 
 standing to the little church. 
 
 The building, a huge two-story brick, though in a strategic 
 location, was a veritable handicap and an estoppel of growth. 
 The lower floor was owned by the church and the upper story 
 by the Masonic lodge. This double proprietorship and dual 
 occupancy militated most seriously against the church. How- 
 ever, there was no friction between the two bodies, but on the 
 contrary each showed to the other the profoundest considera- 
 tion. For twenty years this condition has been changed. The 
 church owns the entire property and worships in a beautiful 
 modern edifice fully adapted to all the needs of Kingdom 
 building. 
 
 In this pastorate I received what was then regarded a mu- 
 nificent salary. The figures were six hundred dollars a year. 
 And I had nothing to do but preach on Sundays. I came from 
 college on Saturday and returned on Monday. My permanent 
 residence in Camden was in the lovely and spacious home of 
 Mr. and Mrs. M. P. Watts. For a year and a half I dwelt 
 under the roof-tree of this incomparable couple in great com- 
 fort and affluence — and all without charge. Mr. Watts has 
 become one of the opulent merchants and great churchmen of 
 Arkansas. In some respects Mrs. Watts was the brightest 
 woman I have ever known. Their care for me was singularly 
 sweet and tender and away and beyond any claims I had upon 
 them and infinitely far above my deserts. I most humbly 
 record my deepest gratitude to these dear people for pouring 
 their rich lives into the very being of one so little deserving 
 their love and hospitality. In my third year at college I won 
 for Ouachita the Intercollegiate State Oratorical Medal. This 
 was the first time the trophy had ever been captured by a rep- 
 resentative of our Institution. I tried with becoming modesty 
 to use the prestige of this high honor to advance the Kingdom 
 of my Lord and Master. Following my success in the State 
 Oratorical Contest, came an invitation to deliver the Commence- 
 ment address at my old high school at Monticello. In some 
 respects this was the proudest moment of my life, for here 
 the insuperable trials of impecunious youth flowered in the 
 
PASTORATES IN THREE STATES 55 
 
 victories of triumphant manhood in the arena of former 
 defeats. 
 
 My face was now turned toward Texas. This was but the 
 logic of birth and parental influence. The first creeping of all 
 my mother's children must have been toward the west. All 
 came to the Lone Star State so soon as they were old enough. 
 There is not one of my name in Arkansas except those who are 
 under the sod. The church at Jefferson, Texas, issued me an 
 invitation to visit them with a view to a call. I went to that 
 historic old town whose commercial supremacy had long since 
 vanished, and preached in the building that had in the seventies 
 housed the Southern Baptist Convention and where the emi- 
 nent W. W. Landrum had been ordained. Though the call 
 was extended me, I declined and accepted instead the church 
 at Longview, both because the latter city was farther out in 
 Texas, a throbbing young town, and because the church was 
 ambitious and aggressive. 
 
 On the Monday of my return from Jeiferson to Arkansas 
 I was caught in one of the most terrific railroad wrecks of the 
 century. The two fast North and South Cannon Ball trains 
 collided head on at full speed on a curve a few miles north of 
 Queen City. The impact of the smashing engines as they 
 thundered into each other derailed and wrecked car after car. 
 I believe seven were killed and many times that number were 
 injured. In a wondrously mysterious and a peculiarly gracious 
 manner the Lord preserved me from all physical harm. On 
 boarding the train at Jeiferson I carried my luggage into the 
 chair car, the coach I invariably occupied when traveling. 
 Though there were numbers of vacant seats, I walked imde- 
 cidedly down the aisle into the first puUman, through this into 
 the second puUman, not stopping until I stretched myself out 
 to rest on the lounge in the smoking compartment at the rear 
 of the second pullman. I was lying here when the crash came. 
 The horrors of the wreckage, the frightened screams of the 
 hurt, and the ghastly faces and moans of the dying benumbed 
 me into a rigid calm. The terrible reaction came some days 
 later. In my sleep the maddening crash of destructively tele- 
 scoping trains and the piteous horrors of dying men and wailing 
 women would come upon me with painful vividness and shock 
 me with unbelievable severity. Whatever the critics and seep- 
 
56 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 tics may say, I shall hold to my original conviction that the 
 Lord saved me by his own special providence and protected me 
 by the might of his outstretched arm. 
 
 In September, 1894, I entered upon the duties of a delight- 
 ful and prosperous pastorate at Longview. The youthfulness 
 of the church and congregation and the western self-assertive- 
 ness of a growing town, caused them to follow my leadership 
 with a devotion and spontaneity rarely beautiful and nobly in- 
 spiring. In October I attended the Baptist General Conven- 
 tion of Texas, which met in the First Church at Marshall. This 
 session was notable for precipitating the great State-wide Bap- 
 tist war, originating in individual ambitions and personal feuds 
 which for so many years wrought untold harm to vital religion 
 and denominational integrity, and the final effects of which are 
 just now being forever effaced in the growing fraternity and 
 sweeeter fellowship of a better day. The atmosphere was not 
 good for young pastors and plastic boys. I must confess that 
 for two years I was on the wrong side in the great controversy. 
 I might plead my immaturity, my environment, and my ad- 
 visors, but my brethren forgave my defection with unaffected 
 graciousness and for more than twenty years have with open 
 arms welcomed me to their inner councils. But this is a digres- 
 sion. It is not my purpose to write the history of Texas 
 Baptists, but my own life. 
 
 At Longview I found my wife and here our first child was 
 born. In the spring 1895 my first hard sorrow came in the sud- 
 den death of my father on his little farm in Arkansas. Since the 
 hour the yellow slip, telling me the awful news, was placed in 
 my hands, I have been afraid of telegrams. With my bride a 
 sad journey was made back to my native State, where in a 
 woodland cemetery the body of my dear parent was put among 
 the graves of strangers on a spot unmarked to this day. The 
 heart-rending pathos of the funeral was that I had to read the 
 scripture at my own father's burial. 
 
 It took all the property possessed by my father to liquidate 
 his debts and to give his body the plainest interment. Every- 
 thing went under the hammer ; houses, lands, live-stocks, and 
 chattels and movables of all descriptions. I think my mother 
 had some pillows, three or four featherbeds, and some fairly 
 comfortable wearing apparel for the family left. The family 
 
PASTORATES IN THREE STATES 57 
 
 consisted of three brothers, my mother, and her orphan niece. 
 They all came to live with me and my young wife in the parson- 
 age at Longview. Thus in less than three months after I 
 married, I was the head and only visible support of a family of 
 seven. The filial duty was imperative, however backbreaking 
 the burden for one so young and so poor as I. It took nearly 
 two-thirds of a month's salary for me to pay the railroad fare 
 of my loved ones to my home. 
 
 I know now that I sinned grievously in my ignorance, my 
 pride, and my boundless ambition for the progress of my trans- 
 planted relatives. Often I was too exacting with my poor 
 little country brothers, but I meant them good with all my 
 heart, and I loved them with a passionate devotion. But this 
 relation of two families in one small pastor's home could not 
 last and a few weeks before our first baby was born my mother 
 set up housekeeping on a modest scale in a rented house, where 
 she taught a private school and somehow kept the wolf from 
 the door. 
 
 After not quite two years' service at Longview, I entered 
 upon the pastorate of the First Baptist Church at Palestine. 
 The prime cause of my move was that I was afflicted with the 
 mania for what was then called "a larger field." Palestine was 
 larger than Longview, but the church was not so wealthy nor 
 so commanding as the one I left. The building was what was 
 known as "The Nickel Church." It was erected thru the 
 genius and tireless energies of Major W. E. Penn, the famous 
 evangelist. Money was gathered from all parts of the globe 
 for this enterprise. The first story was built from nickel con- 
 tributions, therefore the name. But in order to complete the 
 building, subscription standards had to be raised and larger 
 contributions were invited and accepted. For many years this 
 was the most commanding church building in the city, on a 
 location that showed rare wisdom and foresight. The congre- 
 gation had been gathered by evangelists from the four winds 
 and in consequence the church never had been a substantial, 
 aggressive, and dependable fraternity. Pastors came and went 
 with comic and alarming frequency. The audiences were uni- 
 formly large, but their consistency was nebulous. This does 
 not mean that there were not many very fine people in the 
 church, nor does it mean that a great deal of Kingdom work 
 
58 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 of the highest value was not done. It only means that the 
 conditions were not ideal. 
 
 The parsonage was an old sprawling brick building far up 
 the rambling red hills beyond the church. It was a blue day 
 for my lovely wife when I carried her and our round young 
 baby to that desolate abode. With the furniture that we had it 
 was simply impossible to make that grotesque piece of archi- 
 tecture look like anything on the inside. In time, however, we 
 learned to love the old place and to appreciate the comforts of 
 the thick walls and friendly roof. New acquaintances ripened 
 into friends and my brief but intensive ministry was in some 
 respects phenomenally successful. Crowds waited upon the 
 Word, scores were converted and baptized, and my machine 
 gun attacks upon popular vices made the indifferent and wicked 
 old town acknowledge my presence and rise in antagonistic 
 answer to my assaults. There were many puissant souls who 
 supported me with a courage and devotion beyond praise. Some 
 of these have crossed the River and some are crossing now, 
 while others are yet left to carry the heavier loads of the newer 
 and weightier responsibilities. 
 
 The remarkable conversion of an aged paralyzed man is 
 one of the outstanding features of my Palestine ministry. The 
 old gentleman had to be brought into the church on the strong 
 and friendly arms of men who were interested in his soul. 
 Three times only did he come. The first sermon he heard, 
 under the second appeal he surrendered, and at his third attend- 
 ance he was baptized. My information is that the happily 
 converted old man was never able to enter the church after the 
 night of his baptism. Soon after this turning point in his long 
 career of sin and doubt, death swept him into the presence of 
 his gloriously reconciled Father. Brother A. M. Glenn, a man 
 of gigantic physical proportions, but with the heart of a little 
 child, will wear in his crown the fadeless star of God's high 
 reward for leading this decrepit and shrinking old man to the 
 foot of the Cross. 
 
 After an absence of twenty-one years I returned not long 
 ago to give my war lectures in the beautiful audience room of 
 the new church at Palestine. My reception was an ovation. 
 Governor Campbell introduced me and friends of the elder 
 days joined the younger throngs in plaudits that almost broke 
 
PASTORATES IN THREE STATES 59 
 
 my heart with joy unspeakable. With a pensive wistfulness I 
 sought the haunts of the past and in my invalid chair I was 
 rolled by the old church and the old parsonage. A grocery 
 store was doing a thriving business in the temple where I had 
 so often preached. I suppose there was nothing wrong in it, 
 but I must confess that there was a mist in my eyes, a choke in 
 my throat, and a tug at my heart when I saw bales of hay, 
 sacks of flour, and cans of coffee and lard in the vestibule of 
 the sacred old house where the feet of the saints had so often 
 trod. The parsonage was the same. I rolled round its squatty 
 walls and thought of the times without number I had left my 
 lonely wife and baby there unprotected, as I went out to visit 
 or preach, and the sensitive soul of a mature man reproached 
 me for my thoughtlessness and neglect. I remember, too, the 
 desperate illness that came so near snatching from us our first- 
 born in the morning of his babyhood, and I saw the very spot 
 upon which the little fellow stood when he first cried for me not 
 to leave him. That appealing wail of the baby awakened to 
 love, thrilled me with a fatherly pride that has sweetened all 
 the years of parental toil and anxiety. 
 
 After a ministry of fourteen months in Palestine I removed 
 to Paris. Here I went to what was known as the orthodox wing 
 of the disrupted First Baptist Church. The character of the call 
 decided me. I had never visited Paris and the congregation 
 there had never seen or heard me. The first intimation I had 
 that I was under consideration for the pastorate was a tele- 
 graphic notification that the call had been extended. My an- 
 swer was a quick and emphatic acceptance. I thought then the 
 manner employed in filling that pulpit was the acme of wis- 
 dom and the epitome of directing grace. I am not so sure of 
 all of this now. Probably there should be a little deliberation 
 and investigation, and surely the preacher should give longer 
 consideration in answering than I did in this instance. Look- 
 ing back from the long distance of two decades I feel, however, 
 no regrets and had I to do it over, with ample time for contem- 
 plation, the course of action should be the same. 
 
 Paris is the loveliest and most beautiful little city in which 
 we have ever lived. There was a bitter legal battle for the 
 possession of the handsome common church property. My 
 faction won in the District and Appellate . Courts, but lost 
 
60 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 finally in the Court of Last Resort. This was as it should be, 
 and the results should teach Baptists to settle their own troubles 
 among themselves without calling up Caesar to intervene. I 
 never saw the inside of the beautiful First Church building 
 while I lived in Paris. Our worship was conducted in three 
 places, a public school building, an improvised tabernacle and 
 Myer's Auditorium. The latter, the permanent church home. 
 Unusual outward success crowned my labors here. A large and 
 regular audience was gathered, conversions were frequent and 
 a spirit of generous responsiveness was developed in the people. 
 The old time truths were stressed, and the emphasis I was 
 forced to place upon the eternal verities and gospel fundamen- 
 tals greatly clarified the religious atmosphere and mightily estab- 
 lished the faith of true believers of every name throughout the 
 entire city. When I had carried the church as far as I thought 
 I could, I handed in my irrevocable resignation and left with- 
 out any favorable outlook for an immediate settlement in an- 
 other pastorate. Despite the strained relation between the 
 two wings of the church and the long drawn out legal con- 
 test I look back upon my Paris ministry and view it in the whole 
 as a labor of delight and a joy continuous. In that city I had 
 the privilege inexpressible of baptizing my youngest brother, 
 and there our second child, now a lieutenant in the army, was 
 born. 
 
 In May, 19 18, I made my first and only return visit to Paris 
 since the day I left twenty years before. The occasion was one 
 of unexampled auspiciousness. I preached in the morning and 
 at night I lectured in the great Greek temple called the meeting 
 house of the First Baptist Church. This is a building of sur- 
 passing beauty and a pile of noble dignity. Over a thousand 
 people crowded the classic upper audience room to hear my 
 lecture in the evening. Many to whom I had formerly preached 
 had embarked for the shore and were already seeing their 
 Pilot "face to face," while others whose love is deathless 
 warmly grasped my twisted hands and heard me with an inter- 
 est that arrested the flow of my fast ebbing life. Rev. W. B. 
 Kendall has been the peerless leader here for twelve years, and 
 to his vision and indomitable preseverance, heartily seconded 
 by an innumerable company of earth's saintliest souls and in- 
 spired by the unfailing charm of Mrs. Kendall, an incomparable 
 
PASTORATES IN THREE STATES 61 
 
 pastor's companion, is this architectural poem in brick and stone 
 attributable. I shall be pardoned for calling the name of an- 
 other : Mrs. Captain D. S. Hammond, the Dorcas and Priscilla 
 of the church, yet abides in sanctified serenity and holy labors. 
 
 My next pastorate was the First Church at Greenville. 
 There was an interval of some two months between my Paris 
 and Greenville pastorates. The call to the latter place had like 
 that of the former come to me without my knowledge or solicita- 
 tion. The news of my election was conveyed to me over the 
 long distance telephone. My only visit to Greneville had been 
 some two or three years before to preach the Commencement 
 Sermon for Burleson College. 
 
 I moved to the city of the blackland prairies in the dead of 
 the dreadfullest winter I have ever known. I slushed in the 
 sable mud of the streets as I staggered in the clutches of the 
 most remorseless attack of the grippe that ever laid siege to 
 my vitals. 
 
 It is with great diffidence that I pen a line of the church 
 conditions as I found them, and what I shall say soever shall 
 be with becoming modesty and self-restraint of uncommon 
 rigor. Suffice to record that the denominational leaders of 
 that era know something of how hard bestead and fiercely set 
 upon I was from the very beginning. The church had had a 
 long tutelage under able men against the plans and policies of 
 the denomination. In fact, this church was the last great bul- 
 wark of the stalwarts of the old regime of reactionism. Burle- 
 son College was sought to be made the educational storm cen- 
 ter around which the defenders of the old gritty uncompromis- 
 ing and unyielding spirit should gather. The religious war that 
 burst around me in most fateful fury was probably the bitterest 
 and most intensive internecine church battle of modern times. 
 The strife was continuous and merciless. Quarter was neither 
 asked nor given. On one side, fought the defenders of the old 
 order ; on the other side were the battling hosts of a sane New 
 Testament denominationalism. The lines were clearly drawn ; 
 the issue was unobscured and the great controversy took place 
 upon an arena swept for action. 
 
 The net results of the last clash of debate and final shock 
 of contending forces were: the church was definitely aligned 
 with the Baptist General Convention of Texas — Burleson Col- 
 
62 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 lege was immutably placed in the correlated school system of the 
 State, and the relation between myself and church as pastor was 
 forever severed. Some abler and more disinterested pen than 
 my own should one day give the public a veracious and elaborate 
 narrative of this unprecedented battle of principles. 
 
 Shortly after the close of my work at Greenville I was 
 called to the church at Nacogdoches, away down in the red- 
 lands and piney woods of East Texas. Historic associations of 
 unusual interest gather around the name and peoples of this 
 old place. Here is the scene of one of the most romantic love 
 adventures of General Houston. There is the oak under which 
 the old General delivered his famous speech called "Another 
 Roar from the Old Lion." In the densely shaded city cemetery 
 is the monument perpetuating the memory of Jeremiah M. 
 Rusk, Secretary of War in the cabinet of the Republic, and with 
 Houston, one of the first senators in Congress of the new state 
 of Texas. A little way out from town is the old Rusk resi- 
 dence, on the edge of the back porch, of which the great war- 
 rior and statesman, heartbroken over the dissolution of the 
 Union and the secession of Texas, in a moment of irresponsible 
 despondency took his own life by blowing out his brains with a 
 shot gun. So weak and helpless are the strongest of men in the 
 unlooked for hour of dissolving calamity. 
 
 The Baptists were relatively late in entering Nacogdoches, 
 but when they did come it was with the swing of confidence and 
 the tread of victory. Always had they been strong in the sur- 
 rounding country. Old North Church, four miles north of 
 the city, claims the honor of being the first non-Catholic organ- 
 ization in the Republic of Texas. 
 
 My inaugural as pastor was celebrated in the just finished 
 new church building. No outstanding features characterized 
 my quiet ministry here. The work was hard but the ingather- 
 ings justified the arduous toils of a nervously anxious man. 
 The contrast between this and my former charge was refresh- 
 ingly restful. The Baptist Church with a bound leaped to the 
 fore. It was so far in advance of the other churches of the city 
 that it had no rival. I held two good meetings with H. S. Wolf- 
 john, a Baptist of Hebrew blood, and a vocalist of unchallenged 
 merit, leading the singing. The strong men of the community 
 heard my preaching and supported my ministry. In the ad- 
 
PASTORATES IN THREE STATES 63 
 
 jacent country my labors were many. The summer excursions 
 that I made to the country-side forged unbreakable bonds of 
 countless friendships and cemented a fellowship with country 
 preachers as lasting as love itself. Among those preachers 
 were Rev. H. M. Hutson, Rev. J. E. BuUard, and Rev. J. A. 
 Smith, now of Carthage, and Rev. W. T. McMullen, the Nestor 
 of the Baptists of Angelina County, and Rev. S. F. Baucom, 
 whose flaming zeal and unquenchable enthusiasm have long 
 since made his name a household word with performing Texas 
 Baptists. 
 
 Within a little more than a year in the midst of my Nacog- 
 doches pastorate two crushing sorrows bore down upon my 
 heart and home. I was called to Longview to see Earle, my 
 baby brother, die. He was ever my peculiar pet, and the pathos 
 of his fatherless state and his trustful confidence in me, and his 
 almost idolatrous affection for me made him more like a son 
 than a brother. The little fellow had just entered Baylor Uni- 
 versity, and was immediately infected with typhoid germ. 
 When I reached his bedside the crisis had come and hope had 
 fled. His mind was clear, he knew us all and could talk. Nerv- 
 ing myself for the ordeal I entered the death chamber and ap- 
 proached his side and said, "Earle, dear boy, do you remember 
 the night in Paris at the tabernacle meeting when you professed 
 faith in Christ and joined the church, and do you remember the 
 next Sunday afternoon when I buried you in baptism in the 
 pool of the West Paris Church? Does that profession and 
 that ordinance hold good yet?" The parched lips opened and 
 the dying boy said, "Yes," and then he turned on his side and 
 was gone. 
 
 The next day we put him away under a mound of flowers 
 in the beautiful Greenwood cemetery at Longview, and as the 
 carriages turned to go I looked back, and the slanting rays of 
 the setting sun shot through the flowers on that new made 
 mound and lit all with flaming glory; and there came to my 
 mind the epitaph the old Scotch teacher wrote for the tomb of 
 the young scholar, "They shall bring the honor and the glory 
 of the nations unto it." 
 
 This was one October, and the very next October death 
 stalked into our own Nacogdoches home almost unannounced. 
 Our third son and baby was Charles Edward, as handsome 
 
64 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 and lovely a child as ever gladdened the hearts of father and 
 mother. He was just twenty-two months old, an age of the 
 most entrancing interest. He had the placid brow and blue eyes 
 of his mother, and he was the joy of the house and the charm 
 and delight of visitors. I can remember but two words that 
 he ever spoke, on a country trip once he mimicked the bleating 
 sheep, and I thought the feat so precocious and cute. One day 
 he had a little cold. The stubbornness of the ailment was not 
 detected, and no alarm was felt. I made a cross country trip to 
 a Baptist association, and on coming home a glance at the baby 
 in bed made me cast a look of frightened inquiry to the mother. 
 She answered my mute question of agony by saying: "Yes, 
 Charles is very sick, he has been getting worse ever since you 
 left." Then I noticed that our physician. Dr. Tucker, was mak- 
 ing very frequent calls. In a little while Dr. Tucker was bring- 
 ing other doctors in consultation. Still later staunch friends 
 and anxious neighbors began to drop in. Whispered dialogues, 
 serious shaking of heads, soft and rapid footfalls upon the 
 floors and baffled expressions upon the faces of doctors warned 
 me to prepare for the inevitable. But I could not prepare. The 
 shock was so sudden. The event so unexpected and the dread 
 issue so undreamed of that I almost sank into a stupor of dumb 
 despair. Before midnight the great enemy had won and the 
 grim, reaper had done his work. Little Charles was dead ! Our 
 baby was gone! And we were left stripped, heartbroken and 
 desolate. As Oliver Cromwell said over the death of his son, 
 even so I say : "It went to my heart like a dagger ! Indeed, it 
 did.'' I was amazed at my own weakness and dumb at my own 
 inability to comfort the stricken mother. 
 
 Tender hands immediately dressed the little body, and some 
 dear woman, thoughtful above the rest, put in the the fast stif- 
 fening and closing dimpled hand of the dead child a beautiful 
 rose. This was clasped to his breast, and it carried to our 
 hearts its message of hope. Along toward two o'clock in the 
 morning loyal friends, young men, bore the casket in the still- 
 ness of that dead hour to the station and placed it upon the 
 train. These friends were led by Thomas B. Lewis, Esq., now 
 of Houston, Texas. He came all the way with us to Longview, 
 and did not leave our side until the last sad rites were over. The 
 journey was made by Shreveport, and every revolution of the 
 
PASTORATES IN THREE STATES 65 
 
 wheels ground the iron of sorrow into our hearts. I remember 
 while awaiting the Texas train in the Louisiana city I saw the 
 rain fall upon the box that held the form of my child, and my 
 heart was hurt again. It hurts now and always will hurt until 
 "death is swallowed up in Victory." At Longview relatives 
 and other friends mingled their tears with ours. A measure of 
 relief came to us when Dr. A. B. McCurdy, himself now these 
 many years in glory, read the scriptures and spoke the words 
 and offered the prayer that told of the life to come. But there 
 was one more wrench. As the casket lid was being closed, the 
 resurgence of grief swept in a passion over my dear wife, the 
 mother of the child, and I never can forget the piercing poig- 
 nancy of her words as she said, 'T don't want them to take him 
 away, I don't want them to take him away." I know some day 
 the shadows will lift, and I shall see my baby again. 
 
 A year or so after the break-up of my Nacogdoches settle- 
 ment I began what was to be my longest consecutive pastorate 
 with the First Church at Monroe, Louisiana. There was no 
 jar in the removal from one State to the other. Church life 
 in both was remarkably similar and the proximity of the two 
 commonwealths gave the citizens of each an opportunity to 
 know the other. Volumes could be written upon my five and 
 a quarter years in Monroe. Probably not in the history of 
 modern Christendom has there been a more unique tumult- 
 uous, nor in some respects a more gloriously successful spiritual 
 ministry. Monroe is a place of glaring contrasts. Ample 
 wealth and dire poverty sat together on almost every block. 
 Virtue and vice looked at each other across every street. Honor 
 and knavery were together in all offices and public places. 
 Since time immemorial the town has been notorious for three 
 things : cotton gambling, poker playing and whiskey drinking. 
 Morally and physically the atmosphere was heavy. Everywhere 
 fetid smoke hung low over green tables. Moral sensibilities 
 were blunted and spiritual discernment was blinded. The peo- 
 ple lived on a low level of a debased fleshiness. I wrote up the 
 town for the Baptist World some years ago in an article en- 
 titled "A Tale of Sin and a City." I shall not burden this volume 
 with things then said. 
 
 With all the objections that could be raised against the town 
 it was in many respects a fascinating place in which to live. 
 
66 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 Cookery was reduced to a fine art and the pleasures of the 
 table were universal and abundant. The social life of all that 
 section was richer and fuller than anything of the kind I had 
 ever known. Vital religion was just beginning to have its day 
 when I arrived in the city. Hitherto the churches had been 
 tolerated, now they had to be reckoned with. A self-assertive- 
 ness strange and incomprehensible to the old inhabitants was 
 marking the activities and coloring the work of some of the 
 more virile Christian bodies in the town. The Baptist Church 
 worshiped in a beautiful frame structure on the finest corner in 
 the city. This entire property was the gift over thirty years 
 before of Mr. Hasley of Trenton, Louisiana. In the first year 
 of my pastorate the church moved me out of the old inadequate 
 parsonage into a commodious home that cost five thousand 
 dollars. 
 
 All the years of my ministry here were crowded with labors 
 varied and abundant. I preached against the crying evils of 
 the day. I struck madly and defiantly, if not always wisely, 
 at liquor, gambing and the social sin. Something was all the 
 time buzzing around my head. Meantime the people crowded 
 the church building and the baptismal waters were constantly 
 troubled. I marvel now that I came out of those awful con- 
 flicts alive. Some wanted me killed and other men offered to 
 do the bloody work. I was slandered, traduced, and spied upon, 
 but in it all the Lord delivered me out of the hands of my 
 enemies. And most of the old time leaders among my foes are 
 now my friends. In December, 1917, it was my precious privi- 
 lege to preach the dedicatory sermon for the debt-free $50,000 
 church edifice that stands in serviceable beauty on the spot 
 where I preached so long. One of my successors. Dr. J. U. H. 
 Wharton, inaugurated this building enterprise, and another, 
 Dr. F. H. Farrington, completed the structure and led the con- 
 gregation in offering it to the Lord clear of incumbrance. 
 
 Within a year or two of my settlement in Monroe my health 
 began to decline. The church and congregation did everything 
 possible for me. Vacations were ordered and I was sent upon 
 trips from Cooper's Wells to a sea voyage. During my resi- 
 dence here two children were born. Our only girl and an addi- 
 tional boy. 
 
 When after five years the state of my health became truly 
 
PASTORATES IN THREE STATES 67 
 
 alarming, and the older children were mature enough to ob- 
 serve the hideous moral conditions of the city, I knew that there 
 must be an immediate and radical change of location. There- 
 fore, I encouraged the overtures of the First Church of Ruston 
 and early one April I assumed the burden and accepted the 
 leadership of Baptist affairs in the cultural center of the Louis- 
 iana hills. For some years the church at Ruston had been one 
 of the leading Baptist congregations of the State, but in the 
 near past it had fallen upon evil times. The old house of 
 worship was not adequate to the needs of the growing city, 
 nor commensurate with the worth and dignity of the church 
 itself. The question of building involved the question of mov- 
 ing. And the latter question brought on all the debate, stub- 
 bornness, and logger-headedness that usually curse a church 
 when once it has entered the field of uncontrolled controversy. 
 Everybody wanted to erect a new temple of worship, but the 
 voters were about evenly divided upon the location. North or 
 South of the railroad, that was the question. Sentiment hard- 
 ened around this one issue. Several good pastors had left the 
 field in utter discouragement. 
 
 I came just about the end of the period of disintegration. 
 The discussion had talked itself out. The fires had cooled, the 
 embers were smouldering, and it seemed that there was no pos- 
 sibility of further conflagration. The leading spirits of the 
 church assured me that my acceptance would be a signal for 
 beginning the erection of a new building. So far as I could 
 see things pointed that way. It seemed that the hour had struck 
 and the moment was propitious. My predecessor had left think- 
 ing the question of location for the new church forever settled. 
 He had succeeded in persuading the church to buy valuable 
 property on the opposite side of the railroad, but he had over- 
 looked the importance of selling the old property. That gave 
 the stand-patters a rallying place, and it furnished the senti- 
 mentalists with all the tears they needed. Thus I found things 
 and it seemed that the deadlock might remain and there would 
 be another disrupted pastorate. Had it not been that the 
 Presbyterian meeting house was accidently burned up by tramps 
 who were without invitation making themselves at home there 
 for the night, my Ruston ministry would not be a story worth 
 the telling, but when the homeless Presbyterian congregation 
 
68 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 made us an offer for our property, there was a quick acceptance. 
 In conference one Sunday morning the necessary formalities 
 were gone through and the deed was done. 
 
 Still the building proposition moved upon leaden feet. 
 There was a sort of suUenness from the reaction of the fast 
 transactions through which I had rushed the church, and it was 
 apparent that the breaking ground for the new temple was 
 many days off. I suffered many things for the lack of a per- 
 manent house of worship. I preached in every airdome, every 
 theater, tent, and in every pastorless church that we could hire 
 in the city. In not a single comfortable and beautiful audi- 
 torium was it ever my privilege to preach. We were home- 
 less, constantly moving from pillar to post and never finding 
 adequate accommodations or rest. I held a meeting in a half- 
 tabernacle structure that netted the church exactly fifty candi- 
 dates for baptism, one of these being my second son. 
 
 The suspense of building bore heavily upon me and doubt 
 as to my ability to see our plans consummated brought on a 
 recurrence of my old time invalidism. My strength was sapped, 
 my confidence was waning, and my nerve was going. 
 
 Here our last child was born and for the first six months 
 of his life the tragic illness of the baby almost cost the lives of 
 his father and mother. Twice did our Sunday school superin- 
 tendent dismiss the Sunday morning service because of the 
 physician's belief that the pastor's baby was dying. Fourteen 
 nights in succession I carried the suffering child in my arms 
 the livelong night. But the Lord was gracious and the child 
 lived and he is now a promising schoolboy nine years old. 
 
 At length subscriptions for funds for the new church build- 
 ing were started on a scale large enough to create confidence 
 and inspire hope, and I had the deep satisfaction of seeing the 
 basement walls of a new church rise from the excavation. Then 
 I left and came back to Texas, but that is another story that 
 will be told in chapters that follow. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 EVANGELISTIC WORK AT LARGE 
 
 I had always wanted to be an evangelist and in every pas- 
 torate I had done more outside work than was good for my 
 home work. Everywhere my charges had complained of my 
 frequent and long absences. I cannot say that the criticism was 
 not just, but the temptation of change was too great for me, 
 and I could not resist the insistent calls that came from every 
 quarter. On retiring from the pastorate in Nacogdoches I had 
 a full and fair chance to try out my evangelistic qualifications. 
 No pastorate opened and I was forced to do the work of an 
 evangelist. For more than a year I held meetings in Texas, 
 Louisiana and Mississippi. During these months we made our 
 home with Mr. and Mrs. J. M. Mobberly, the father and mother 
 of my wife, at Longview. Here our son Joseph, now a lad six^ 
 teen years old, was born. 
 
 While I held some fairly successful meetings and made a 
 support for my family, I do not think it was ever intended that 
 I should startle the world by my evangelistic abilities. My 
 engagements were mostly in the smaller places, and in these I 
 had the happiest results and the best pay. After working as 
 independent evangelist for more than a year, I was confirmed 
 in the conviction that my sphere was to be a pastor and a pas- 
 tor's helper. I do not think that I was a failure, but most 
 certainly I was not a sensational success. I held meetings from 
 Mineral Wells, Texas, to Welsh, Louisiana, and from Royce, 
 Texas, to Crystal Springs, Mississippi. My first engagement 
 was with Rev. John Mare at Lufton, Texas. This useful min- 
 ister of Jesus Christ has long since been gathered to his fathers. 
 Next I had a roaring meeting at Huntington in Angelina 
 County, where there were many converts, a church organized, 
 and where a building fund was raised. Rev. W. T. McMullen 
 was then and is now the pastor of that prosperous congregation. 
 
 My career as evangelist broadened my horizon, widened my 
 
 69 
 
70 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 fellowship, and greatly deepened my love for an enlarging circle 
 of brethren. Therefore, when I reentered the pastorate at 
 Monroe, Louisiana, it was with the fervor of an evangelist. I 
 held meetings without number in every part of the Pelican 
 State. I preached from forty squares below Canal Stret, New 
 Orleans, to within shouting distance of the Arkansas Hne. 
 There is scarcely a parish in the State, the citizens of which can 
 understand English, in which I have not tried to preach the 
 gospel. I preached to the midnight shifts in the saw mills and 
 to the indifferent mobs in the cities. I certainly was in labors 
 abundant and in tears oft, and distresses of many kinds for the 
 gospel's sake. I had every variety of experience to which mor- 
 tal preacher may be heir, and withal many mountain top joys 
 over countless souls coming home to God. While at Monroe I 
 made a trip East to see my brother, going and returning by 
 sea, and in Boston harbor I preached on the battleship Ver- 
 mont ; and aboard the Comus on the homeward bound voyage. 
 I preached one Sunday in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 THE COLLEGE OF MARSHALL 
 
 In November, 1910, I came back to Texas and settled as 
 pastor of the First Baptist Church at Marshall. I was disposed 
 for several reasons to return to the Lone Star State, but I did 
 not want to locate so near the eastern border, and I had never 
 been an admirer of Marshall, or of its churches, but when I 
 saw the substantial old town spread out over its seven hills 
 and manifesting evidences of continued growth, I was im- 
 pressed with its importance as a preaching center. Town and 
 country had been aroused to combat the evils of the liquor 
 traffic and in a fiercely contested campaign the demon rum had 
 been banished from the city and county, so I came to a saloon- 
 less city. A veritable passion of patriotism and rage for 
 cleaner living had made the Prohibitionists victorious. How- 
 ever, I had no illusions about the place or the church. I knew 
 the former was hard and reactionary, and that the latter was 
 provincial and without vision, but my duty seemed clear and 
 opportunity was inviting. I knuckled down to four years of the 
 bitterest toil of my life. I soon discovered that the church did 
 not want to do big things. It shrank from burdens, winced at 
 hardships, and complained loudly when pressed by imperative 
 duties. I saw that my church and the Christian community and 
 the Baptists throughout that section must be torn from their 
 narrow moorings and that their static condition would have 
 to be utterly broken up. To do this there must be a gigantic 
 task and a tremendous appeal. The spiritual and intellectual 
 inertia had to be completely shattered. In a way most splen- 
 didly practical and beautifully providential the means of accom- 
 plishing my desires and achieving my high purposes came to 
 hand. 
 
 There was a whirlwind campaign on for Southern Meth- 
 odist University, Dallas, Texas. On an appointed Sunday a 
 party of eminent churchmen visited Marshall and raised several 
 
 71 
 
72 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 thousands of dollars from the Methodists of the city. So 
 pleased were all concerned at the results of the financial appeal 
 that on Monday night a banquet was given the contributors in 
 the basement of the First Methodist Church. I was one of a 
 number of invited guests. The occasion was one of rare good 
 feeling among our Methodist brethren. Their leading men 
 felicitated each other, praised the educational work of the 
 church, and said not a little concerning the majesty of Dallas 
 and the wealth of central Texas. When called upon to speak I 
 most warmly congratulated my Methodist brethren upon the 
 unparalelled feat of such quick and effective estabHshment of 
 so great an institution as their new university. Then I turned 
 to sing the praises of my own town. I told of its population, 
 wealth, vast surrounding area of backward country and the un- 
 believable distance to higher institutions of learning, and wound 
 up by challenging the Methodists or Presbyterians to make no 
 mean educational coup by planting one of their colleges in 
 Marshall. As I sat down the gentleman at my right, Mr. M. 
 Turney, a capitalist, promoter and withal a leading Methodist, 
 said: "If you will build a Baptist college here I will give you 
 the first thousand dollars." That proposition put ideas into my 
 head. More thoughts about the school came to me, for as I 
 walked home at midnight Mr. P. G. Whaley, another eminent 
 Methodist, said to me, "Build that school and we'll give you the 
 next thousand dollars." 
 
 From that moment the thing would not down and I had no 
 rest. It filled my thoughts while waking and my dreams while 
 sleeping. I trembled in delicious expectancy of the realization 
 of a purpose and a vision formed when I was a tow-headed, 
 barefoot boy. Immediately I began the search for a college site. I 
 knew that we must have lots of land, enough for all school 
 purposes and much that we could plot into lots and sell to pro- 
 cure money with which to build the school. Returning one day 
 with Deacon W. A. Harvey from looking at a prospective site, 
 we stopped in the edge of an oak grove and let our vision sweep 
 through the trees and rest upon the crest of a noble hill. My 
 observation was: "The Lord made this for a college. We 
 must have this land." 
 
 To which Mr. Harvey replied : "Fm afraid you cannot get 
 it. This is the Van Zandt estate and contains a hundred and 
 
THE COLLEGE OF MARSHALL 73 
 
 forty acres. The heirs all live in Fort Worth, and I am told 
 that they will not consider selling a part of this property. The 
 purchaser must buy it all.'' 
 
 From this time on my counsellors were Mr. M. Turney and 
 M. P. McGee, Esq. Mr. Turney furnished the money and 
 the financial advice, and Mr. McGee the nerve force, the optim- 
 ism, boundless zeal, and technical legal knowledge that was nec- 
 essary every day and every hour in the long negotiations. The 
 three of us now centered our thoughts and contributed our time 
 almost without reserve to this college proposition in the prac- 
 ticability of which none believed but us. 
 
 On Thanksgiving night Mr. Turney and Mr. McGee came 
 to my house and advised me to leave on the late night train for 
 Fort Worth, to consult with General Van Zandt with regard 
 to the acquisition of the property we needed. Mr. McGee 
 gave the first actual cash ever contributed to the college. The 
 amount was a ten dollar bill to help defray my expenses to Fort 
 Worth. My wife added to that fund by letting me have part of 
 a marriage fee that I had made that day, and turned over to her. 
 My visit to Fort Worth opened the question of sale and later in 
 the winter Major Jarvis and his wife, other heirs, came to 
 Marshall and made me a definite proposition. They offered me 
 one hundred acres, the choicest and best located part of the 
 estate, for $25,000, one third cash, balance due in one year at 
 eight per cent interest. This proposition was quickly accepted. 
 
 The money for the first payment was borrowed from Mr. 
 Turney's bank and notes were executed for deferred payments. 
 The land was surveyed and fifty acres in the center of the tract 
 was sacredly set apart for specific college purposes. This is the 
 size of the campus. The remainder was cut up into lots and put 
 upon the market. Mr. W. A. Harvey purchased the first and 
 the highest priced lot. We soon sold enough lots to pay the 
 indebtedness on the land. Then there was a great lot sale put 
 on, running up above $40,000 worth to get cash in hand with 
 which to build. Later there was a campaign for voluntary con- 
 tributions from the citizens, the aggregate of this subscription 
 being $47,000. Two years later still, the citizens of Marshall 
 gave $25,000 cash toward the erection of one of the new 
 dormitories. The physical property of the school as it now 
 stands consists of a fifty-acre campus, three brick buildings, 
 
74 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 and three frame structures, and a leased large house, used 
 as a girls' co-operative club. 
 
 The original holding board of trustees was composed of 
 Messrs. E. Key, M. Turney, M. P. McGee, E. L. Wells and 
 myself. I was the only active Baptist on the board. Mr. Wells 
 was president of the City School Board, and in church affilia- 
 tion he was an Episcopalian. He was an inspiring supporter, 
 a gentleman of the old school, whose radiant faith in the poten- 
 tialities of our dream kept us in good hope. The city of Mar- 
 shall responded to our every appeal with alacrity and unprece- 
 dented generosity. From the start the town adopted the school 
 as its very own. In all the distracting commotions of munici- 
 pal jealousies and antagonisms, the school idea and fact have 
 been the one unifying agency. The college has been the rallying 
 center of the energies of the people and the chosen object of 
 their benefactions. The other denominations and the non- 
 Christian portion of our population were far more enthusiastic 
 for the school than were the Baptists at first. Others had more 
 faith in us than we had in ourselves. 
 
 But many pains shall afflict him who is a dreamer of dreams 
 and builder of schools. Only the seer knows with what leaden 
 feet reforms do move and only the creator of a new thing can 
 properly feel the awful pull of the backward surge of an un- 
 aroused peoples' indifference. 
 
 I remained in the pastorate and held on to my pulpit for 
 the power these positions would give me as I pushed the school 
 enterprise. But for two years I did not dare mention the col- 
 lege from my pulpit. I knew that public talk from the rostrum 
 would bring on a violently unfavorable reaction among the Bap- 
 tists. Therefore, I let the leaven work without and from the 
 outside life coals were finally put upon creeping Baptist's backs. 
 In time the church did respond nobly to the appeal and did rally 
 heroically to the enterprise. 
 
 For two years I fought shy of the Baptist newspapers and 
 I had a care as to what I wrote to the denominational press. 
 Our people were overburdened with small, badly located strug- 
 gling schools, some of them just gasping for breath. The lead- 
 ers did not want any more crying babies on their hands, nor 
 were they anxious to furnish crutches to any more limping 
 schools. As fugitive scraps of news would filter out of Mar- 
 
THE COLLEGE OF MARSHALL 75 
 
 shall to denominational headquarters, low rumblings of dissent 
 would be heard. More than once lines like this appeared in the 
 Baptist Standard, *'Let no over-zealous brother start an inde- 
 pendent school or college." This kept up for a year or two. 
 I had a letter from Secretary Barton of the Educational Board 
 and from Dr. J. M. Carroll, then of Oklahoma, asking if rumors 
 about a new college at Marshall were veracious. Those editorials 
 and letters and warnings have not been answered yet. I could 
 not reply without disclosing my plans and these plans would 
 have been regarded as highly chimerical by all who did not see 
 what I saw and feel what I felt. When the hour should strike I 
 meant to reveal all and this I was able to do in perfect time on 
 the stroke of the clock. 
 
 But leadership is a lonely and heart-breaking isolation. I was 
 regarded as a half madman whose wild imagination had got the 
 better of him. After talking an hour one day to a Baptist pas- 
 tor, explaining to him the grandeur of the conception and flam- 
 ingly rhapsodizing over the practical aspects of the whole 
 scheme, his only answer was, "I shall not put any obstacles in 
 your way." And at what I considered an auspicious moment I 
 unfolded the whole idea to the Executive Board of our associa- 
 tion. These good men sat unresponsive, inarticulate, and dumb 
 to my astounding revelation. Ere this, however, all have been 
 converted and all are friends of the institution on the hill. 
 
 Mr. Thurman C. Gardner, now B. Y. P. U. secretary of 
 Texas, was the first president. There was not a brick on the 
 hill when he took charge. His office was the position of money- 
 gathering, promoting and advertising. He did his work well, 
 erected the main building, and sounded the name of the College 
 of Marshall to the corners of the farthest country. Under the 
 presidency of Dr. H. E. Watters the school opened with a large 
 attendance and great expectancy. At the end of the first school 
 year Dr. Watters left for Union University and Dr. John S. 
 Humphreys became president. The college is now on the last 
 lap of the second year. It has survived the war, devastating 
 droughts, crushing reversals, and ravaging epidemics. It now 
 belongs to the Baptists of the entire State. Its destiny is what 
 they shall elect to make it. A superior faculty has been em- 
 ployed and organized and the future seems as bright as the 
 promise of God. It should stay here with its ever-deepening 
 
76 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 services and widening ministries to the hungry-minded youth 
 of East Texas until the Master comes. 
 
 Dr. Truett calls the College of Marshall the romance of 
 religion. It would be unjust to true historicity and outrageously 
 offensive to my own final feelings were I not to here record 
 the distinguished services of Education Secretary A. J. Barton 
 in bringing to fruition the deep-laid plans of local leaders. 
 With wonderful self-poise, marvelous sagacity, and a splendid 
 mastery of a great situation, Dr. Barton remained in Marshall 
 for weeks and made the school triumph over every obstacle. 
 The big men of Marshall to this day regard Dr. Barton as the 
 greatest living Baptist leader. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 THE PERSONAL EQUATION IN MY PREACHING 
 
 If to properly analyze the qualifications and evaluate the 
 mental and spiritual worth of another be a work of wisdom, 
 then a just appraisment of one's self is the task of genius. The 
 manner and content of my preaching were different from the 
 vast majority of other ministers, if not better. I may have been 
 too original. I had to pick up my training and dig out my mat- 
 ter. The first baptistry in a church I ever saw I used it and 
 the first associational gathering I ever looked upon, my church 
 was host to the body. I learned church procedure as best I 
 could by reading, observing, hearing. Proper pulpit manners 
 I had to acquire and I had to school myself severely in the 
 manner of public address. There were many excrescences 
 that should have been toned down by expert training, and there 
 were many deep defects that should have been exorcised by the 
 merciless surgery of capable criticism. But I evidently pos- 
 sessed some elements of strength that might have been weak- 
 ened by a too technical course of training. The papers and ar- 
 dent admirers did sometimes say that I possessed a vigor, a 
 dash, and a command of English, and a pulpit poise, that were 
 the joy of my friends and the despair of my rivals. I make no 
 comment upon the above, but simply record it in passing. 
 
 At times my style of delivery was so furiously forensic 
 that many of my auditors thought me too belligerent. The tor- 
 rential outbursts were the eruptions of my long pent-up Gallic 
 passion. My French impetuosity rushed me into the fine frenzy 
 of the oratory of high abandon. In these onsets of unusual ver- 
 bal fierceness my purpose was to annihilate the evil I was at- 
 tacking. There were, indeed, in my charges and assaults 
 intimations of real warfare and imitations of genuine battle. I 
 thought it my business to demolish every obstruction of the 
 truth. I considered it my province to strike at the head of 
 every error. I thought that by sleepless vigilance and oft-re- 
 
 77 
 
78 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 peated sledge hammer blows I might in a decade or two spy 
 out all sin and eradicate evil from the earth. Therefore, I 
 charged and counter charged. 
 
 Let me not convey the impression here that I was a trucu- 
 lent theological combatant, seeking controversy and ever dying 
 for dispute. I was not. My startling outbursts and aggressive 
 deliverances against certain flagrant sins and devitalizing doc- 
 trines were the exceptions and not the rule in my preaching. 
 But the people will judge a public man by those attributes they 
 see in him which most please or irritate them. Therefore, 
 despite the pleading tones in my voice and the witchery of 
 winsome words which I tried to cultivate, I was all too often 
 loked upon as a storm-tossed battling man who knew not the 
 tenderer side of peoples or gospels. 
 
 Another fruitful source of trouble to me and ground for 
 disappointment upon the part of the people in me was the high 
 expectation aroused by my fiery discourses. When I went to 
 a new pastorate the people listened with ecstasy and sat down 
 in contentment, fully believing that the whole town would rush 
 into our church because of my ministry. They thought, too, 
 that the finances would take care of themselves and they impa- 
 tiently awaited the miracle that never came. I was ever the 
 victim of the high hopes I had inspired. Thus often my best 
 preaching undid me. The psychology of this is understandable 
 to him who thinks. 
 
 Visiting I always abominated. I mean the regular routine 
 of calling from house to house. To this day I do not see the 
 religion or wisdom of it. I drove myself to the task, however, 
 and for fifteen or twenty years I did more visiting than any pas- 
 tor I knew. It was a privilege to minister to the poor, to the 
 stranger, the distressed, the sick and the dying. Upon these 
 classes I freely expended my bodily strength and poured out my 
 heart's best affections in liquid love. The unconverted were 
 my especial care and the unchurched men who labored in store, 
 shop and office, counting-house and factory, received my pas- 
 toral care and kindliest attentions. But I did resent most 
 emphatically being nagged about general visiting. The idea is 
 prevalent among church people almost universally that the 
 pastor should call upon his women parishioners in their homes 
 at oft-repeated times during the year. Where and when this 
 
CONCERNING MY OWN PREACHING 79 
 
 custom arose and what the idea back of it, I do not know. But 
 Ido know that the chief pastor of a modern church cannot meet 
 these puerile demands. Many is the time I have called upon 
 supposedly sick people who were not half so ill as I, or mem- 
 bers of my family, whom I had left uncared for at home. 
 Zealous members have prevailed upon me to neglect pressingly 
 important duties and hurry to homes where was rumored an 
 illness. Again and again I have arrived at such places to find 
 the sick person well and pursuing his usual vocations. 
 
 There is a ridiculous side to it, too, for a man of sensibility 
 and pride. What a spectacle it is for passers-by to see a pastor 
 frantically ringing a door-bell or pounding his knckles blue 
 against the door of a house where no one will answer. It 
 brings over the dominie a feeling of idiocy hard to endure. 
 
 I was never a man of affairs in the pastorate; that is, I 
 was no business manager, and I had no great organizing ability 
 nor facility of administration. Mine was the mission of an in- 
 spirer. Sordid details were beyond me, and the application of 
 the principles I preached had to be made by the hearer. When- 
 ever I had men of vision, responsiveness and executive ability, 
 my church work went forward with a bound. But where vision 
 failed and mental lethargy prevailed the wheels of Zion dragged 
 and I esteemed my work a failure. I could only point out the 
 way, direct the march, and shout the word of encouragement 
 in tones that thrilled redeemed souls. It was never mine to 
 degrade my ministry and debase my calling by looking after 
 tables. I have the indubitable proof from all over the land 
 where I preached that men and women, moved by the high 
 Gospel Word have gotten under the burdens of the churches 
 in a heroic manner and have nobly underwritten all the agen- 
 cies of the kingdom. This is compensation sufficient to atone 
 for my personal limitations in matters of detail. 
 
 I think that I should never have been pastor in a small place. 
 My consuming zeal too quickly burned over a village and my 
 restless soul clamored for change and when my audience was 
 the same, the pressure I put upon it was too insistent and too 
 hard for a small community to bear. Mine was a message for 
 the throngs and for the Bedouin tribes that tramped thru the 
 larger places, stopping at each but for a moment to pray and 
 hear, and then hurrying on with flying feet to translate into 
 
80 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 action and transmute into life the messages they had heard. 
 So convinced was one of the most discerning friends I ever 
 had that he told me in great love that I should not stay at any 
 church more than fifteen months. He was kind enough to say 
 that the character of ministry I gave should be passed around, 
 that it was my mission to strike the high places and sound the 
 lofty note of the loud bugle call for advancement, and that it 
 was an injustice both to the churches and myself for me to re- 
 main long at one place. Passing over the implied compliments, 
 I believe there was large wisdom in the good brother's obsierva- 
 tions. 
 
 I have always magnified my ministry and gloried in the 
 Gospel of Christ. I never could conceive a call as the narrowed 
 invitation to serve just a church only. I always felt that my 
 calls were to the city and the entire community. I find that 
 Paul had this opinion. He speaks of his mission to Rome, to 
 Ephesus, to Thesolonica, and Corinth. I never could confine 
 my efforts to the Baptist Church of which I was supposed to 
 be the bishop. I held my commission in holier fear and in vaster 
 perspective. I regarded myself as the accredited ambassador 
 of Jesus Christ to all within the bounds of my diocese. This 
 conception is inimical to the ideas and prejudices of many 
 churches. Not a few of my pastorates were offended at my 
 attitude and self-appointed leaders without number have com- 
 bated the broader view I entertained, but ever pursued the 
 course of my conviction as indicated above, and in not a single 
 instance have the results other than justified my judgment and 
 actions. 
 
 The comic is not absent in the pastoral history of a positive 
 man. Sometimes there is engendered among parishioners the 
 insanest jealousy against the performing preacher. In one 
 place a lawyer member of the church became bitterly envious 
 of me and my reputation as if I had been his successful rival 
 at the bar. A tribute to my talents from a non-Baptist towns- 
 man would turn this man green with rage. 
 
 Always have I felt that personality was the preacher's 
 noblest prerogative. If he cannot so stress his redeemed man- 
 hood as to make a lastingly emphatic impress upon his hearers, 
 he is without doubt an ecclesiastical failure. If the preacher 
 cannot so project himself into the lives of his men and women 
 
CONCERNING MY OWN PREACHING 81 
 
 as to insure thru them the deathless persistency of the moral 
 and religious principle, Ichabod is written over his name. The 
 virtue must go out of him to his people and thus Kingdom 
 leaders will be grown, givers will be developed, missionaries 
 will be found, called, and sent ; teachers and evangelists will be 
 discovered, and the immortal principle of the divinely implanted 
 life upon a personality strong, unyielding, and conqueringly 
 progressive will perpetuate itself in those who hear and will 
 find its sweetest reward in the hardest service and the most 
 quickening sacrifice. If there shall be any reward for me in the 
 realm beyond the starlit dome, it shall be because I have been 
 an inspirer. 
 
CHAPTER XIV . 
 MINISTERIAL MISTAKES 
 
 With only a modicum of courage and a faint trace of intel- 
 lectual honesty, a chronicler might fill volumes on his own mis- 
 takes and shortcomings. Mistakes with the best of us are so 
 numerous that there is no surprise at their confession and no 
 upheaval caused by their recital. I speak here only of the larger 
 errors of my ministry. My first and greatest mistake was 
 doubtless one of sermonic thought and deliverance. I probably 
 attempted an ornateness that was not appreciated or needed by 
 the vast majority of people who heard me. Then my discourses 
 were directed primarily to the heads of my audiences. I should 
 have shot lower, for probably they had hearts. It is a fatal 
 mistake for a speaker to assume that his auditors are in his class 
 in things of which he is master and they are not. The public 
 speaker must be an authority when he dares come with prepared 
 address before the people. They have to be awakened, aroused, 
 interested. No crowd for long can be kept upon a high level of 
 lofty thinking and solemn moral endeavor. Even the intel- 
 lectuals in an audience will fall to the level of the masses and 
 there will soon be a common mental ground. Then the most 
 exquisitely cultivated like to unbend and they do dearly love 
 to be relieved of the labor of hard thinking and the stress of 
 sustained reasoning. I have seen the simplest stories based on 
 the commonest background wake gale after gale of laughter 
 and round after round of applause in the Southern Baptist Con- 
 vention, and in the Texas Baptist Convention. The learned and 
 dignified messengers enjoyed the convulsions of laughing irre- 
 sponsibility. That speaker is a success who can make the people 
 laugh and weep. Tears and laughter show that the elemental 
 forces of a soul have been broken up and there is no going be- 
 hind the fact of the power of him who can play readily upon 
 the first chords. 
 
 My second serious mistake was an internal and social one. 
 
 82 
 
MINISTERIAL MISTAKES 83 
 
 Always have I been possessed of a rage for the society of those 
 I had reason to love, and I was inordinately fond of the pleas- 
 ures of the table. I liked to go to dinners and still more did I 
 like to give dinners. I rarely declined an invitation to dine out 
 since that gave me an opportunity to come in contact with each 
 member of the family and the friends of the household. At 
 the homes of the very modest poor I have made my own en- 
 gagements for meals. I did this to reach working men and 
 boys who were at enmity toward the church and evidently 
 dodging me. Not a little cornbread and bacon have I eaten on 
 such occasions to the glory of God. The result in nearly all 
 cases amply justified the audaciousness of the scheme. 
 
 But reciprocity was my rule and practice. From the very 
 beginning the people have come across the parsonage threshold 
 in a continuous stream. Christian workers at large, denomina- 
 tional agents, country preachers, and God's poor who were 
 without the price of a meal were, of course, ever made welcome 
 to the best we had. Then I did my best to capture and entertain 
 the celebrities who came to town. I did this for the joy of their 
 companionship and for the effect their uplifting personalities 
 might have upon my family. That was an exacting and an ex- 
 pensive sort of hospitality. Last of all, we kept open house 
 day and night to our parishioners and local friends. Scarcely 
 did we ever sit down to a meal that we did not have a table 
 guest from the very vicinage of the parsonage. Every order, 
 organization, and unit of the church we honored by receptions, 
 always followed by refreshments. A turkey dinner was the 
 annual feast prepared for the deacons and their wives. At 
 less formal meetings of the deacons the collations were substan- 
 tial, but more modest. My good wife, who is very conservative 
 in utterance, says that we have averaged a guest at every meal 
 since we have been keeping house. And she has often half- 
 humorously and half-vexedly remarked that I must have gone 
 down with a shotgun and have compelled some nomadic Bap- 
 tist to accompany me home to dinner, for, surely, in no other 
 way could I have had diners with such unfailing regularity. 
 
 This course of mind had its favorable side and there were 
 many compensatory results, but on the whole that line of pas- 
 toral procedure was a colossal blunder. It destroyed the 
 privacy of the home, made my overworked wife a slave to the 
 
84 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 appetites and caprices of guests, emptied the family larder, 
 and drained the preacher exchequer. The gains were too in- 
 consequential for such substantial outlay. While I revelled in 
 the rgle of host, my wife toiled in the kitchen, and guests, filled 
 to satiety with appetizing viands, too often lightly discounted 
 the work of the pastor's wife and on leaving the table forgot the 
 church. 
 
 Let me set it down here as my opinion that it is a mistake 
 for a minister to live next door to his meeting-house. The 
 manse should be a comfortable distance from the church so that 
 the residence might be a real home and not a free hotel con- 
 ducted by the pastor's wife. 
 
 My third and f atallest and most irretrievable blunder related 
 entirely to money. This came by inheritance, by example, and 
 by training. So far back as I can trace my ancestry, there is not 
 on either side of my house a single forebear who had three 
 grains of financial sense. I say this with becoming reverence 
 and with all due filial piety, but it is a fact of such magnitude 
 for untold harm in the entire race, that truth compels me to 
 record it here. Few dollars, indeed, did I ever possess when I 
 was a boy on the farm and I thought these were made to spend 
 so soon or before they were earned. I could have a great day 
 in town on half a dollar and sometimes I made it through with 
 a quarter. The value and power of money were never taught 
 us. We handled too little of coin and currency to be enamored 
 of the magic of its worth. As a usual thing we saw money but 
 once a year at harvest time in the fall when the cotton was 
 gathered and marketed. The marts of trade were far removed 
 from our humble abode, and so in the home there was little 
 occasion and probably less disposition to instruct the children 
 in the intricate mazes of financial affairs. 
 
 The preachers scouted the idea of accumulating money and 
 giving attention to what they called worldly things. When we 
 went to high school and college we met the same frigid atmos- 
 phere of affected contempt and disrespect for gold. Economics 
 had not been properly correlated with our school systems. 
 Everywhere the warning was shouted into our ears that we 
 must beware of the lust for gain and treat with lofty disdain 
 the circulating medium of the realm and everything that repre- 
 sented property. This long indoctrination of false teaching has 
 
MINISTERIAL MISTAKES 85 
 
 brought me many pains through the years, and borne 
 much bitter fruit in the garden of my ministry. I never was 
 able to completely face about and rectify the false trend given 
 me in the beginning. The early twig was bent and so the tree 
 did grow. 
 
 Humiliating embarrassments have crowded upon me at 
 every turn in the stony pilgrimage of my upward climb. I 
 thought it beneath my heavenly calling to bargain with churches 
 over salaries. I never in my life set a figure or made a monetary 
 demand. I took what was offered me and received it when it 
 was collected, sometimes long overdue. I bore in my own 
 body the complaints of creditors and their cold-blooded busi- 
 ness exactions. I never did get money enough to come clear 
 with my living expenses. I was always paying out, but never 
 able to entirely overcome the incubus of debt. I had never 
 lived in a commodious and attractive parsonage unless I built 
 it or led the church in buying it, and of all my pastorates, but 
 one ever increased my salary. My active ministry was at an un- 
 fortunate period in denominational development. The churches 
 were outgrowing the old c ^.% "r and were struggling to adjust 
 themselves to the new. The imancial was the last and most dif- 
 ficult phase of the ecclesiastical transition. Everywhere I went, 
 disintegration had set in, and I was usually too impatient to 
 await a time of settling and the new day. Therefore, I was 
 always preaching to churches that were in the formative pe- 
 riod. I rarely reaped the benefits of my own labors or those of 
 my predecessors. Mine was the solitude of the pioneer. I 
 wrought not often on another man's salvation. Sometimes I 
 tore down with the fury of an iconoclast in order to clear the 
 ground for the kind of structure I hoped to erect. 
 
 I conclude this chapter by expressing the opinion that there 
 should be a school of business for preachers in all our colleges, 
 and that the economic side of the ministry should receive due 
 stress in our seminaries and theological institutions. Shorn of 
 economic independence, the pastor is an unspeakable slave and 
 a mendicant without the dignity of membership in the order of 
 the begging friars. The churches must be taught their duty 
 and their responsibility, for have we not all heard Dr. Gambrell 
 tell the story how the old Mississippi deacon in his prayer said : 
 "Lord, keep our pastor humble. We keep him poor." 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 PUBLIC ISSUES AND PLATFORM COMBATS 
 
 Ever since the lyceum course at Hineman University School, 
 Monticello, I had longed to be a lecturer. The freedom of the 
 platform appealed to me, and the applause of enraptured audi- 
 ences was sweet to my vaulting ambitious soul. Not a few 
 times during my school days did I try my powers upon school, 
 church and court-house platform. I went out of town surrep- 
 titiously with a look of far away importance on my face and, 
 according to my reception, returned beamingly radiant or un- 
 mistakable crest-fallen. I have these last few days received a 
 letter from a country school superintendent in far Western 
 Texas, telling me that he heard me in an Arkansas mountain 
 town over twenty-five years ago. I was sent out to represent 
 the college president, and this Texas educator is one of a num- 
 ber of mountain boys who heard me. I never knew of 
 his existence until his letter came. The young undergraduate's 
 address surely was not in vain if it created leaders of light and 
 learning for Texas plainsmen. 
 
 I was hardly settled in my Longview pastorate before I was 
 out on the road, filling speaking engagements at the smaller 
 places. I first assayed to trace the life of Christ by the lines 
 of a chart, but this was foreign to my method of address and 
 I soon exchanged the map for high-sounding titles at the head 
 of my extemporaneous lectures. As opportunity offered, I car- 
 ried my messages to surrounding communities, going as far 
 afield as from Carthage to Big Sandy. The expenses of my itin- 
 erary were borne by voluntary contributions at the close of the 
 speech. I believe these always met my traveling outlay, but 
 there was not much additional left for an honorarium. I think 
 six dollars was the maximum offering I received, but the travel- 
 ing was good, the fellowship was fine, and the experience was 
 educational to a degree. 
 
 I remember about this time fulminating against the Cath- 
 
 86 
 
PUBLIC ISSUES AND PLATFORM WORK 87 
 
 olics, and hurling anathemas against the saloon, this latter 
 from my own pulpit. Later high schools and colleges so be- 
 sieged me with invitations for special speeches and commence- 
 ment addresses that all my desires in this line were more than 
 gratified. My circuit extended over nearly all Texas and my 
 taste was so democratic that I went with marvelous facility 
 from the largest to the smallest places and vice versa. My 
 church at Paris starred me in a pay lecture. This was the first 
 time that I ever had real tickets sold for hard money. My 
 theme was, "Shall we Fight?" having to do with the imminency 
 of war with Spain. I strongly urged that we take the initiative 
 in the outbreak of hostilities. My audience was in warmest 
 sympathy and heartiest accord with all I said ; and so soon as 
 news of my attitude got to the public thru the papers, the Con- 
 gress declared war on Spain! This was probably the most 
 dynamic international deliverance that ever fell from my lips ! 
 
 After going to Louisiana I became the protagonist of every 
 variety of subjects for the commonweal. I campaigned for 
 local school taxes and I precipitated a prohibition contest, the 
 bitterest and most dangerous I have ever known, which culmi- 
 nated only last year in a victory for the forces of righteous- 
 ness. Under local superintendents and the State Superintendent 
 of Public Instruction, I was tirelessly engaged in tax cam- 
 paigns throughout the hill section, and the State Superintendent 
 was kind enough to say that I never lost in an election. While 
 at Ruston I revived my pay-as-you-enter lecture scheme. In my 
 old pastorate at Monroe my new offering on "Democracy and 
 Leadership" was graciously received by an audience of flatter- 
 ing size and a monetary response that should satisfy the un- 
 spoiled desires of a normal man of provincial fame. Then 
 the educational institutions of the State called upon me and I 
 spoke in the chapel of colleges from Ruston to the Gulf. Be- 
 fore leaving the State my last engagement was with the Normal 
 at Natchitoches, where the now widely-known Congressman 
 Aswell was then president. 
 
 When on coming back to Texas my lyceum star dimmed and 
 hung low in the firmament. So exhausting and arduous was 
 my pastoral toil that I had neither time nor strength for the 
 noblest fancies and the highest flights. I bore burdens like a 
 pack-horse and wallowed in the bogs of unrequited toil like 
 
88 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 an ox, and never again did my imagination take wings, nor did 
 my stage oratory again blaze into glory until the conflagration 
 of the world war broke my heart and set on fire my tongue. 
 
 One amusing weakness that I was never often permitted 
 to indulge will excite the risibles and bring laughter to the lips 
 of my readers. The dearest wish of my vain heart was to ap- 
 pear upon the stage in the evening in full dress. Of course, I 
 could not do this in the church, and my scissor-tale coat and 
 acre of shirt front had to be reserved for secular institutions. 
 While speaking in Ruston there was great uneasiness on the 
 part of my wife and watchful friends in the audience. In all 
 the redolence and pride of a borrowed dress suit I was labor- 
 ing in many difficulties in the midst of my lecture when, lo, 
 my handkerchief began to slip from its moorings under the 
 vest. Loved ones in watchful waiting thought my shirt was 
 coming out and their consternation can be better imagined than 
 described. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 MY MOTHER 
 
 My mother was a Vaughan and was born seventy-three 
 years ago on the Warrior River in Alabama. She was the eld- 
 est of three children, and was brought up by her father, her 
 mother having died when the children were very small. My 
 mother does not remember her mother. My grandfather evi- 
 dently was a man of dignity, fair education, good property, and 
 a heart of great tenderness for his children. The family was 
 not rich, but in comfortable circumstances. The land-holdings 
 were not unduly large, and the number of negro slaves was 
 limited to the needs of a small but paying plantation. The best 
 educational advantages of the day and the locality were given 
 my mother, her sister and brother. I have an idea that my 
 grandfather taught the children himself, and then employed 
 tutors and governesses. Somehow he succeeded in inculcating 
 into his children the hardier rudiments of learning, and he must 
 have instilled into their hearts at a very early age the most 
 impressive lessons of honor to parents, reverence for age, and 
 sympathy for affliction. One of the strong outstanding charac- 
 teristics of my mother has been her idolatrous devotion to the 
 memory of her father. Though I never saw him, through her 
 I know him. The aged, too, have been her special care. She 
 has consistently through a long life risen up before the hoary 
 head and honored the face of the old man. She has been, too, 
 the self-appointed attorney of the outcast and the poor. In her 
 the veriest white trash had a staunch friend and a brave de- 
 fender. 
 
 What of my grandfather's property was left by the war was 
 dissipated or utterly destroyed in the wreckless ravages of 
 reconstruction. Like ten thousand other householders, my aged 
 grandfather sat around his desolate fireside, surrounded by his 
 needy children and looked intently into the dead ashes of his 
 hopes. As has been set forth in the first chapter of this book, 
 
 89 
 
90 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 when a young woman, my mother married my father, a middle- 
 aged widower with grown children. Conditions in that part 
 of the South then were deplorably bad. Nearly everything 
 worth having had gone up in the flame of war, or was having 
 the life tramped out of it by the dominance of the black hordes 
 of irresponsible f reedmen. 
 
 There was nothing for self-respecting poor whites to do 
 but move. My father with his older family and new wife was 
 constantly on the go. Not a few communities in Alabama 
 claimed them as citizens and probably more in Mississippi. 
 They lived and labored and suffered in every section of the 
 two states. Reverses, financial and industrial, met them at 
 every hand. Moving upon unimproved places and turning the 
 new soil undermined the health of the entire family. Sixteen 
 years ago I held a meeting on Lake Roe Buck in the Mississippi 
 Delta, where more than thirty years before my mother had had 
 typhus fever. 
 
 My mother was a small, dark woman, with remarkable 
 recuperative powers. She gave birth to six sons. I am the 
 second. I remember only the picture and the grave of my old- 
 est Httle brother. Only three of the boys are living now, myself, 
 Lieutenant-Commander W. B. Tardy, United States Navy, and 
 Percy Tardy, a railroad man at Bryan, Texas. Stanley Tardy, 
 the fifth boy, a young physician in Shelby County, died sud- 
 denly some years ago. I traveled all Saturday night and Sun- 
 day on the train from Monroe, La., and then some miles by 
 hack to reach the place of interment in time for the funeral. 
 I just did arrive in time to look upon his face before the last 
 words were said. It was a heart-breaking trip, and I was the 
 lone relative of my dead brother at that strange graveyard. 
 
 My mother was a Baptist of the old school. She believed 
 in a heart change so radically vital as to be almost cataclysmic. 
 She wanted full repentance, complete surrender, and undimmed 
 spiritual illumination. How well I remember her face as she 
 listened to the sermons and joined in the devotions at the 
 country church. It was one alternating picture of tearful con- 
 trition and soul radiance. Her voice had in song a haunting 
 sweetness that brings to my heart calm and peace and blessing 
 to this day. Her prayer life at home was constant. She 
 slipped to some part of the dwelling, or place, every day where 
 
MY MOTHER 91 
 
 she communed alone with her Lord — "and faith she did need it." 
 What with the hurly-burly of farm life, the rough pioneering 
 of the backwoods, the clashing interests of double families 
 under one roof, and the petulant cries of five growing boys, a 
 place where the Lord was wont to meet his petitioner was the 
 supreme need of my worn, distracted mother. 
 
 She, too, had problems of her own. She was not a placid, 
 submissive creature. How could she be? Surely, the mother 
 of six boys must have a good deal of the lion in her, but she 
 fought bravely and faithfully to put the good in the ascendency. 
 She watched over her boys with ceaseless vigilance. Her ambi- 
 tion for them knew no bounds and her love was limitless and 
 her sacrifices in their interests she counted a joy. In many 
 respects I have never known such a woman. She had the most 
 capacious mind for the names of persons I have ever met in my 
 life. She was a quick and intent listener, an alert observer, 
 and the most voracious feminine reader that ever conned the 
 printed page. Had my mother been a man in war time she 
 would have been a general, and in peace a governor. To this 
 day she is an authority on personnel, from the days of her 
 girlhood on the Black Warrior River in Alabama to the last city 
 ward in which she has lived in Texas. 
 
 But, oh! the pathos of her life! Always did she want a 
 permanent earthly home, but never had one. She would have 
 dearly loved to be settled, but it was her fate to live all over 
 four different states. She was pushed or dragged from pillar 
 to post all her married Hfe, and after the death of her husband, 
 twenty-five years ago, the peregrinations continued. And 
 troubles have closed in upon her with remorseless grip. Her 
 brother and sister are long since dead and three of her boys 
 have been gone these many years, and for five years this writer 
 has been an incurable invalid. Ten years ago she fell and broke 
 her hip and for this decade has walked perilously on crutches. 
 
 Tho a small and frail woman and tho of the intellectual 
 type, my mother has done every sort of manual labor that falls 
 to the lot of the hungry poor in the remotest regions. She has 
 hoed corn and chopped cotton and picked cotton with her little 
 boys when they were too small to understand the dire necessity 
 of sticking at the toil of the fields. She has washed and 
 scrubbed and starched and ironed and sewed and mended and 
 
92 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 carded and knitted and spun and most of the time in health so 
 indifferent as to involve the gravest physical hazard. 
 
 Times without number when I thought myself abused and 
 imposed upon by my father and other members of the family, 
 I meditated running away from home. Clothes would be se- 
 creted and boyish plans of immaturity formed, but at night the 
 white face and pleading look of my mother would visit me in my 
 dreams and in the morning thoughts of fleeing had vanished. 
 My mother still abides in my humble rented house. Her hair 
 has long since been as white as the driven snow, her hands are 
 twisted, and her face is wrinkled. I believe she has lived this 
 last half dozen years just to help take care of me. Her knotted 
 hands are smooth and gentle as they tenderly touch my aching 
 brow and with unexampled patience and a strength born of 
 love unfathomable, she has tried, oh, so hard, to rub the pain 
 out of my spine. I know that each night as she gives me the 
 farewell kiss and goes sadly to her room that she has the 
 dread fear that she will never see me alive again. But, surely, 
 she has served her day and generation well, both in her own per- 
 sonal endeavors and thru her, her children in church and State, 
 and, oh ! the hundreds she has taught in Sunday school in coun- 
 try, town and city. 
 
 This poor tribute to her who bore me, nourished me, and 
 loved me to the end, I write for the book that tells the tale of 
 my own unworthy life. It will not be long, it cannot be long 
 before her Savior will come to claim his own. She has ever 
 been fond of singing, 
 
 "Even down to old age all my people shall prove. 
 My sovereign eternal unchangeable love." 
 
 My hope in Him is that beyond Jordan's parting waters, 
 mother and I shall both be made whole. 
 
 il! 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 THE WONDER WOMAN— MY WIFE 
 
 She has been mine for nearly a quarter of a century. I 
 found her at Longview twenty-four years ago, when I entered 
 upon the pleasant pastorate of the Baptist Church in that city. 
 I saw her for the first time teaching a Sunday school class of 
 girls up behind the organ. She was dressed in purest white, 
 and that vision of entrancing loveliness lingers with me to this 
 hour. When once in love my courtship was almost barbarously 
 aggressive. I clamored, argued, and pleaded for my prize. It 
 seemed that the answer was cruelly delayed. Months of wait- 
 ing were like years to me. She was the daughter of Colonel 
 and Mrs. James M. Mobberly, originally of Davies County, 
 Kentucky. My wife was the eldest of seven girls, her name 
 was Daisy, and she was brought up at Longview and educated 
 at Potter College, Bowling Green, Kentucky. She was strong 
 in mind, commanding in her native dignity, improved by train- 
 ing, sweet in character, lovely in disposition, and beautiful in 
 person. On the night of our wedding my chief groomsman 
 told me before I had been permitted to see the veiled bride that 
 she was the prettiest woman he had ever beheld. 
 
 Contrary to the usual experience, my marriage strength- 
 ened me in my pastorate. The woman I had won was of 
 character so high and of superiority so universally recognized 
 that there were no petty jealousies about my marriage nor 
 criticism of my choice. It seemed to be the one thing to do 
 and it was so apropos that in one chorus of praise the people 
 acclaimed me most fortunate. My love was ever of the blood- 
 red rose type. From my earliest recollection I have lived in a 
 realm of romance; always some day did I expect to have a 
 beautiful bride. The nethermost heat of a Gallic tempera- 
 ment, when set on fire with passion's deathless flame, is not 
 always pleasant companionship in the home. The too fervid 
 lover is often unreasonably exacting and his demands may 
 
 93 
 
94 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 degenerate into basest selfishness. To my jerky and persistent 
 romanticism and furious frenzy of life's young love, there was 
 as an offset my wife's calm imperturbability. A thousand times 
 has she saved the day by her unruffled placidity. 
 
 From the start our pace together has been most rapid and 
 always have we had a hard time, but the saints and the world 
 never knew it, for together we smiled at obstacles and with 
 the inexhaustible resiliency of morning's glad strength we 
 laughed away the Gorgon monster that crouched in our path. 
 Children large and numerous were born unto us. For fifteen 
 years, spaced about two years apart, the babies came, until 
 there had been born six boys and one girl, all yet living except 
 the little fellow about whose death I have written in another 
 place. Can any fond husband ever forget the cries of young 
 motherhood ? White and half-crazed, he is forever afterwards 
 a changed man. My wife never rhapsodized over children 
 and never sentimentalized about wanting babies, but she has 
 made the sanest, steadiest, and most resourceful mother of my 
 knowledge; and though she candidly admitted when pressed 
 that she was not anxious for the pains of motherhood, she has 
 borne the birth agony of all our children heroically and un- 
 complainingly. So much for the contrasts in desire and doing. 
 
 My wife was a lover of home and her dearest wish was for 
 a lifetime habitation in some congenial place. This was never 
 to be. We moved and moved and moved. Without upbraiding 
 or loud bemoaning our fate, she lovingly followed me from 
 town to town and church to church and house to house. Our 
 wedding furniture was bruised and broken and our bridal gifts 
 were smashed in transit. The little things that are so precious 
 to a woman's heart have nearly all been destroyed or lost. The 
 delicate reminders of maidenhood and the sweet mementos of 
 girlish beauty and innocence have been ruthlessly consumed in 
 life's fiery holocaust. She has been my pilot when I was on a 
 ship where two seas came together. She has warned me off 
 the treacherous rocks and has pointed my eye to the polar star 
 and ever been the first to give the glad cry of land ahead. She 
 has never upbraided me for my costly financial errors, nor has 
 she chided me over the hugest ecclesiastical shortcomings. Her 
 low, broad brow and tender blue eyes have turned to me alway 
 with restful welcome and calm confidence. These virtues were 
 
THE WONDER WOMAN— MY WIFE 95 
 
 forged in fierce heat and these graces flowered in a scorching 
 school. What a patient hearing she gave my sermons for over 
 twenty years and with what sweet interest she listened to all 
 my wild schemes and with a maternal sympathy, born of an 
 understanding that passes the knowledge of man, she soothed 
 my ruffled brow, assuaged my uncontrollable grief, and in- 
 stinctively pointed out to me the line of least resistance. 
 
 But her fortitude grew to maturity in the long agony of 
 my unrelievable affliction. Probably no woman aside from 
 conditions of war ever bore more irksome burdens or faced 
 more serious responsibilities so suddenly thrust upon her. The 
 bolt that felled me shattered me so utterly that all who cared 
 for me were stunned. My family and loved ones reeled under 
 the blast. The problem of living was acute, the matter of bread, 
 medicine, and nursing loomed menacingly large. I became 
 such a care as in all probability never for so long taxed the 
 strength, challenged the love, and wore upon the patience of 
 mortal woman. My wife so completely lost herself in the ex- 
 acting absorptions and huge demands of her helpless family 
 and suffering husband, that her course seemed the simple line 
 of duty rather than the heroic immolation that it was. With 
 such quiet assurance, marked efficiency, and resigned dignity 
 did she follow the thorny path of her appointed task that only 
 the discerning immediately understood the marvels of her ex- 
 cellence and the wonder of her love. Without the faintest 
 show of reticence she accepted the decree of her hard sentence 
 and proceeded to serve her long term with a song. 
 
 In addition to care of me which was constant day and night, 
 she had in the house a young family and my crippled mother. 
 She was called to my bedside from one to twenty times each 
 night. She took a correspondence course from the University 
 in Home Economics and became an expert and scientific cook 
 and an acceptable teacher. She made bread, the very odor of 
 which would make one ravenously hungry. This she sold at 
 a fancy price. She had classes in household economics, com- 
 posed of the leading women of the city. Between demonstra- 
 tion and lecture she would rush to my room to relieve my dis- 
 tresses. She carried on a magazine subscription business that 
 covered the city and reached to three states. She became an 
 irresistible literary solicitor both by person and by mail. How 
 
96 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 she found the time to do all of these things, none will ever 
 know. 
 
 Then the first spring that we lived in the old rented house 
 whose friendly shelter was tlie best we could obtain, the days 
 were unspeakably calamitous. One boy fractured his arm, the 
 baby had an almost fatal attack of pneumonia, the second son 
 was operated on for appendicitis, and my wife's dear mother 
 died. These adversities pounded on her heart like the blows of 
 a trip hammer, but they neither made her afraid nor dismayed. 
 I continued to live, but grew daily a heavier burden and a 
 more dependent charge. There was not one thing I could do 
 for myself ; physically I was a lump of helpless clay. Macaulay 
 says, speaking of the death of Warren Hastings, that the great 
 British Proconsul at a ripe old age sank into his grave with 
 no degrading symptoms manifesting themselves in the malady 
 that bore him away. Not so of me. She of whom I write has 
 had to perform the most revolting service and endlessly return 
 to the most repulsive duties, and in it all she had the wit to 
 humor my whims. She has assisted me in imaginary business 
 enterprises. She has stinted to buy stamps that I might carry 
 on a correspondence that pleased me and made me think I was 
 doing something. 
 
 Had it not been that she was a strong woman, both of us 
 had long since been in our graves. The grief of my heart is 
 that her shoulders are bent from the leaden load she has carried 
 so long and her white hands once so beautifully patrician are 
 reddened and distorted by the cruel penalty of a sort of toil that 
 it seems no woman should ever be called upon to endure. And 
 in the cave of my physical horrors with every mental halluci- 
 nation aiding and abetting the writhing agonies of a tortured 
 body, she brought a sweetness and a light that made it possible 
 for me to bear, to live, to think, and to work. 
 
 Considerate treatment of me was the supremest test to 
 which mortal could be put. Mine is the disease of the nerves. 
 There is not a n.ive in me that does not tingle with pain or 
 flare with flame. This causes an irascibility that will make an 
 enraged hyena's screams sound impotently harmless. Always 
 an irritable man and unreasonably oppressive to those I loved, 
 my illness has accentuated my irritability often to the point of 
 desperation. But in all my provoking outbursts of temper in 
 
THE WONDER WOMAN— MY WIFE 97 
 
 only the rarest of instances has there been a reply in kind from 
 the wonder woman. 
 
 For two years my wife has been the superintendent of the 
 dining hall of the College of Marshall, where by long hours of 
 unmitigated and stressful toil and by an amiable demeanor 
 beyond praise she has earned for us all our food and shelter. 
 For over a half year she has not even been to church, so com- 
 pelling are the calls, of home and her position of public trust. 
 If modestly meeting the urgency of a great situation will insure 
 a crown to any woman, then the stars are already being fash- 
 ioned that will blaze in the diadem that shall encircle the brow 
 of my wife. She rose to the occasion and a great destiny is 
 hers. And so with the quenchless love of a dying man, I pay 
 this all too unworthy homage to the wonder woman, my wife. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 THE CHILDREN OF THE MANSE 
 
 Since an autobiography is expected to be a family homily 
 and an exemplification of unblushing egotism I insert this 
 chapter. I can write about my own children with due restraint 
 because I have been their severest critic. I certainly can never 
 be accused of too great leniency toward the weaknesses, fail- 
 ures, and sins of those of my own household. I had high aims 
 for my children and I drove them like Jehu. I made the mis- 
 take of finding more faults with them than I did with all the 
 other children of the parish. But with the older ones the 
 strenuous discipline of the early day has already borne favor- 
 able fruit. If only the good die young, our children are all 
 predestined to unparalleled longevity. Every one of them had 
 the temper of his father and all the dangerous Adamic pro- 
 pensities. When my oldest boy was a little fellow I had to 
 hurry to Sunday school to keep the young irrepressible from 
 systematically fighting his way down the church aisle. That 
 kid was some scrapper in his day. He fought thru his resi- 
 dence in two towns and then his belligerent reputation aided 
 him in bluffing his way thru all other places. 
 
 My children were a surprise to me. This is trite to all ex- 
 perienced parents, but it was as new to me when I made the 
 discovery as if I had been the first father to whom the reve- 
 lation had ever been vouchsafed. The repressive atmosphere 
 of the parsonage only made the lid soar higher when it did 
 go off. I have seen outcropping in my children nearly every 
 sin I ever committed and even the evil desires that I have suc- 
 cessfully repressed. I should like to write an elaborate treatise 
 on the pathos of parenthood. 
 
 Our children were all large, fine looking, and evidently quite 
 healthful at birth, but accidents, illness, and diseases to which 
 all flesh is heir have been from the beginning our bitter portion. 
 The oldest and the youngest boys survived painfully baffling 
 
 98 
 
THE CHILDREN OF THE MANSE 99 
 
 physical ailments and their sufferings almost slew us. I can 
 never forget the piercingly unconscious wails of my eldest son 
 as he was coming out from under the anesthetic after an opera- 
 tion. Surely the grass will never grow on the ground where 
 I walked while the surgeons were busy with their instruments 
 of pain ; and Halley's Comet was to me a familiar trail of fire 
 in the eastern sky, for I saw it every morning for two weeks, 
 because at that time I was bearing in my arms the livelong 
 night the emaciated form of my scarcely recognizable baby boy. 
 
 The comicalities of babyhood were an endless source of 
 merriment. When the mumps invaded our home and found 
 none 'of us immune, my oldest boy, who was the first to take 
 it, came down stairs one morning with his face swollen as from 
 the sting of bees and said : "Daddy, I had so big night, my jaws 
 hurted me all night long." But I must make this chapter brief 
 and as conveniently modest as one of my disposition can. 
 William Thomas Tardy, Jr., is now a First Lieutenant in the 
 373rd Infantry, San Juan, Porto Rico. He attended the Loui- 
 siana Industrial Institute and Baylor University. He has 
 taught school in three places, the last in the West Indies. He 
 is inclined to be a linguist and is enamored of Latin America, 
 and has been a journalist on newspapers in both Havana and 
 San Juan. He graduated in the first oflticers' training camp at 
 Porto Rico, received his commission, and became an instructor 
 in the two following training camps. He assisted in training 
 the Porto Rican Army for duty overseas and this contingent 
 was to sail for France about the time the armistice was signed. 
 He then became Intelligence Officer of the Island and a member 
 of the Headquarters Staff, and he is yet furiously indignant 
 because the Huns by their untimely collapse kept him from 
 the Continent and, as he says, made it necessary for him to use 
 spurs to hold his feet on his desk. 
 
 James Noel Tardy is a Second Lieutenant in the Porto 
 Rican Army, 373rd Infantry. He is our second son. His 
 middle name comes from his mother's grandfather, who was 
 Captain Noel of Kentucky, and who was killed in the fierce 
 fighting around Franklin, Tennessee. So proud are all of the 
 girls of the family into which I married of their mother's gal- 
 lant father, that already four of them have a child named Noel. 
 James is a curly haired, browneyed, handsome rascal. Those 
 
100 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 who know say that he got his eyes from Mrs. Noel, his maternal 
 great grandmother. So freakish is heredity that emphatic 
 characteristics remain quiescent for years and then break out 
 again in the third and fourth generation. There follow around 
 our fireside Joseph, in the age of indecision and fast running 
 up Dr. Gambrell's famous hill ; the one girl of the house, Mar- 
 garet, comes next. Then there is round-faced Francis, the fat 
 image of his father, and a character. He hates soap, abomi- 
 nates bath water, devours books, and loves all the great out- 
 doors. And little Harold makes our family complete. There 
 is nothing remarkable about these children except that they are 
 mine. The only justification I have for writing about them at 
 all is that I thought those who loved me would like to know 
 something of those whom I loved, and may I not, in closing this 
 chapter that I have written with fear and trembling, plead 
 with those who read these lines to pray for the children whom 
 I may so soon leave? 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 THE TRAGEDY OF A STRICKEN MAN 
 
 The bolt was long poised with unerring precision, but I did 
 not believe it would ever come, and when the blow did strike, 
 it was with dreadful abruptness. An upstanding man believes 
 every man mortal but himself. He cannot conceive that to 
 him the summons shall come, and the more absorbed he is in 
 the pressingly important duties that use and distract him, the 
 more unthinkable that physical activity should cease. So self- 
 centered are we all and so lost are the mightiest of men in the 
 labors of their little day and so circumscribed are the loftiest 
 of souls in thre small orb where their energies are to find an 
 outlet for a brief time. I had had every warning that a smitten 
 creature should need, but the voice of direful disease and pre- 
 monitory pains did not carry to my consciousness the serious 
 meaning of its tremendous import. For years my pallor had 
 deepened, my energies had slackened, and my nerves had flared 
 and slithered. Everything that devoted churches in Louisiana 
 could do for me had been done. Summer vacations were voted 
 me and my expenses were paid, but still the shadows deepened. 
 
 Always had I been a highly strung individual. For twenty 
 years I had lived on edge. I never knew the art of relaxation, 
 my nerves were forever taut. Even my pleasures were bodily- 
 consuming pastimes. I consumed more nerve force in leading 
 the Sunday morning prayer at church than Russel Sage ex- 
 pended in making a hundred thousand^ dollars. Being of 
 French descent, my normal state was one of dissipation. For 
 fifteen or twenty years I averaged more than a sermon or 
 address a day, probably four hundred a year — these in addi- 
 tion to all the other things I tried to do. I read books until 
 eleven o'clock or midnight and then went on a round of calls 
 on the critically ill, and later came back still too distraught for 
 sleep, and read again until breakfast. In some of the cities of 
 my pastorates there is not a block I have not been on every 
 hour of the night and day. The woes of my people were my 
 
 101 
 
102 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 own woes and the iron of a world's death agony entered my 
 soul. Ever have I staggered under the load of a shuddering 
 globe. My sympathy for others devitahzed my being. The red 
 in my blood was burned up and the fluid that coursed in my veins 
 was half water. Inveterate smoking and constant drinking of 
 Louisiana black coffee without doubt made their contribution 
 to my physical demolition. These ancillaries of a too busy life 
 all conspired for my bodily overthrow. The final crisis crept 
 upon me with stealthy and remorseless tread. My paling face 
 and bending form pathetically haunted the resorts of the land. 
 From Marlin to Washington and Hot Springs to Chicago mark 
 a portion of the paths of my itinerary. Women on the Pull- 
 mans marveled at my colorless face and sympathetic men came 
 to my assistance as they noted my tottering steps. My wife 
 cared for me at Hot Springs and for a month at Chicago, where 
 we last sought relief by visitation to the high authorities in the 
 kingdom of modern medicine. Here my wife balanced my 
 wavering body in hotel corridors and trundled me in a roller 
 chair to the office of a physician at the hospital for treatment. 
 So self-deceived may one become about his own condition, that 
 I thought I was improving when the great doctors were con- 
 vinced that I was dying. I was under the care of the famous 
 Dr. John B. Murphy and his staff of eminent specialists. The 
 diagnosis was that I had lateral sclerosis (hardening of the 
 lateral nerves), and I was fatefully near to pernicious anaemia. 
 Though the head of a great Catholic Institution, Dr. Murphy 
 did everything possible for me and placed at my disposal the 
 abilities and services of his incomparable assistants, all free of 
 charge. In fact the only doctor's bill I have paid since my 
 affliction was to a Baptist doctor at a hotel in Chicago. But the 
 authorities in Dr. Murphy's office after a month dubiously 
 shook their heads and advised my wife to bring me home on 
 the earliest possible train for Texas. That was tantamount to 
 a death sentence from experts. It took my breath and un- 
 nerved me. I sent for Dr. Johnston Myers, pastor of Im- 
 manuel Baptist Church. His presence comforted me and his 
 prayer of faith dammed up life's outflowing stream. The trip 
 home was a fearsome experience and one long suspense. My 
 wife and the porter nursed me all the way from Chicago to 
 Saint Louis in the Pullman. Hot milk and strychnin kept a 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF A STRICKEN MAN 103 
 
 spark of life in me. Any moment that I should have ceased to 
 strive, I should have died. I fought harder for life than ever 
 did the French to keep the Germans out of Paris. The desire 
 for life within me was never so strong, the demands upon me 
 were never so many, the prospects of usefulness never so 
 bright, and the human reasons for living never so unanswer- 
 able. At Saint Louis we were met by President T. C. Gardener 
 of the College of Marshall. He had been sent by friends to 
 take command in case of the dread eventuality. 
 
 Even when my life hung by a thread, I still possessed a 
 saving sense of the ridiculous. As I was being borne on a 
 stretcher thru the great waitingroom at St. Louis to the Texas 
 train, the crowds thru which we passed were smitten with 
 amazement and sorrow at my forlorn estate. Some braver 
 than the rest peered under the brim of my large Stetson hat 
 which was over my face. They were evidently determined to 
 see if I were alive. To prove my vitality I mischievously and 
 maliciously winked at them, one and all. Yes, dear reader, I 
 actually winked and sent the observers back to their seats, sur- 
 prised but greatly relieved. 
 
 The arrival home was unqualifiedly premonitory. A score 
 of friends met the train to receive the sinking pastor. A re- 
 porter came to the stateroom door, looked in upon me, and 
 wrote of my precarious condition. The parsonage was filled 
 with anxious and self-invited guests. Only three of our chil- 
 dren and my mother were at home. The other children were 
 scattered from Havana, Cuba, to Bryan, Texas. Prayer was 
 made that I might live until they could gather around my bed- 
 side. Great love was shown me by all classes and conditions 
 and every rank and every sex and every race of the entire com- 
 munity. One by one the children all came safely home and 
 though my death was constantly imminent, it was not imme- 
 diate. The marvel deepened and I did not die. 
 
 Then the inevitable happened. I saw into the mysteries of 
 the psychology of a people's grief. Folks like for their public 
 men to get well or die quickly. Long sustained grief is impos- 
 sible to the multitude and continuous interest of the masses in 
 the case of one person is unthinkable. Some had made up their 
 minds to have a great ecclesiastical funeral and they seemed to 
 be piqued because I was so inconsiderate of their lugubrious 
 
104 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 whims as not to die. To this day they act as if they had been 
 cheated out of something to which they had an unquestioned 
 right. Disappointed expectancy wrought badly in their feel- 
 ings toward me. To be denied the relief of an outburst of 
 grief was to many oppressively stifling and they resented it. 
 Even my little boy Francis, while sprawling on a lounge and 
 eating in my room, said : ''Daddy, I bet if you die, you'll have a 
 big funeral, for people on the train and everywhere are asking 
 about you." 
 
 In the fall when the matter of my longevity was still prob- 
 lematical, it became necessary for me to be removed from the 
 parsonage to give place to a successor who was able to preach. 
 The church had been seized with a panic for its own safety and 
 it was obsessed with the one thought of its own preservation. 
 When my salary as pastor stopped, there was not a dollar in 
 the treasury of any Baptist organization in Marshall, in Texas, 
 in the South, or in the whole round world for a preacher in my 
 condition. That has been the tragedy of being a Baptist 
 preacher. I rejoice that the stigma is in process of removal 
 and I am entertaining the comforting assurance that no other 
 stricken minister shall ever pass through my Gethsemane of woe. 
 
 On a bleak day of rain and mud in early November, in a 
 borrowed ambulance I was carried from the parsonage to an 
 unsightly old rented house, the only outside persons who aided 
 in the transfer of my wrecked body were the ambulance driver 
 and President C. H. Maxon of Bishop College, who with my 
 second son looked after me on the inside. Our oldest son was 
 in college and the next boy was a senior in the high school. 
 Both could not have earned money enough to pay house rent 
 and the upkeep of our dwelling. The world will never know 
 how truly desperate was our plight. The financial outlook was 
 the gloomiest in all our checkered career. We were even want- 
 ing in some of the costliest and most necessary furnishings of 
 a home. The shades to the windows and the gas kitchen range 
 belonged to the parsonage. Every dollar we had ever possessed 
 was gone, our credit was exhausted, and our prospects were as 
 dark as an engulfing storm-cloud. Had it not been for the 
 business-like intervention of a group of worldly and non-Baptist 
 friends, I do not yet see how we should have escaped starva- 
 tion. Mr. H. M. Price, a prominent Methodist and a journalist. 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF A STRICKEN MAN 105 
 
 wrote two articles in his daily paper about me, and in answer 
 my friends in the city gave me a never-to-be-forgotten pound- 
 ing. One rich Jew presented us with a gas cooking-stove; 
 another Jewish merchant carpeted the dining-room; window 
 shades came from other sources; and food of great variety 
 and abundance was generously put into our pantry ; and, upon 
 the initiative of Mr. Frank Davis, banker and capitalist, a 
 number of men covenanted together to put approximately a 
 hundred dollars a month in the bank for my wife. This ar- 
 rangement was expected to go on about a year and it did. In 
 that length of time it was reasonable to believe that I should be 
 either well or dead. This unprecedented liberality by friends 
 outside of my former parish, while praiseworthy beyond the 
 power of words to describe, is not surprising when it is re- 
 membered that my congregations were a cosmopolitan crowd, 
 and that the City of Marshall regarded me as the founder and 
 promoter of one of its most substantial and promising enter- 
 prises. To this day these same will do anything for me in their 
 power. 
 
 I lay prone upon my bed for one year. In all those months 
 of suspense and anguish I was not dressed and I never had 
 street clothes on until friends garbed me and held me in posi- 
 tion on the back seat of a large automobile that I might make a 
 brief and weak address at the breaking of dirt for the main 
 building of the College of Marshall. I spoke twelve minutes 
 and was carried home exhausted and limp. So tender was my 
 flesh that the sun blistered my hands. But the hardy adventure 
 gave me courage and inspired hope. And after that day in 
 July, with growing frequency I was dressed and pushed down 
 town in a roller chair. In November I made an address to the 
 State Convention of Negro Baptists in the chapel of Bishop 
 College. I had a tumultuous welcome and my words a hilarious 
 reception. That afternoon a committee of stalwart colored men 
 called at my room and presented me a bag containing twenty- 
 five silver dollars, which they averred was in appreciation of 
 my speech and in token of the love of the race for me. This 
 is the very first money that I had made since the beginning of 
 my bedridden condition, and I shall never cease to be grateful 
 to my brethren in black. This is the story of how I was 
 stricken and smitten and wounded. Other things are yet to be 
 said and more tales are to be told. 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 MY SOUL TORN BY THE GREAT WAR 
 
 The assassination of the Austrian Archduke brought to 
 mobiHzation Germany's fifty years of half stealthy assault 
 upon the civilization of the ages. Under duress Austria was 
 forced to exhume the bullet-pierced body of the heir to the 
 throne and make the corpse a cause for war. The German 
 thrust through Belgium was so irresistible, the long line of men 
 in dusty grey so numberless, the pillaging so planned, the bru- 
 tality so shockingly barbarous, the destruction so complete, and 
 the rape of France so fiendishly systematic, and the whole army 
 movement so thorough, and all on a scale of such stupendous 
 magnitude, as to abash thought and wound imagination. 
 
 I was at the lowest physical depths when the battle flare 
 blazed over Europe. I was compelled to lie still and suffer, as 
 half the planet was made one vast shambles. I closed my eyes 
 and saw Belgium destroyed and France devastated. I saw the 
 ash piles where proud universities had stood aiid the battered 
 arches of cathedrals that had been the glory of the centuries. 
 I saw chateaus of the rich and the noble pounded into dust. 
 I heard the screams of unprotected women and children on the 
 coast of England and even in the heart of London as they scur- 
 ried to cellars to escape the deadly bombs from cloud-riding 
 Zeppelins. The lurid flames of burning ships in channel and 
 mid-ocean grew red on my sight as the submerged assassins of 
 the sea did the bidding of their Hohenzollern masters. Cotton 
 in the states went down to six cents and the German even de- 
 stroyed industry, commerce, and the livelihood of millions in 
 neutral and pacific America. The children cried in vain for 
 toys and the aged and sick perished for want of delicacies and 
 medicines. And the irksome restriction of all was that we 
 were non-combatants, suffering the calamitous consequences of 
 a war in which we could have no active participation. Our 
 commerce was driven from the sea by the pirates of the deep. 
 Our flag was insulted, our property was destroyed, and our 
 
 106 
 
MY SOUL TORN BY THE GREAT WAR 107 
 
 government was humbled in the person of its innocent interned 
 citizens. Men who could read the letters of fire on the sky 
 knew that America must some day be drawn in, but the Lusi- 
 tania went down with its invaluable cargo of precious human 
 freight and still we did not fight. Were the truth known, we 
 could not fight, since at that time our country was over eighty 
 per cent pacifist and German influences were dominant in more 
 realms than we knew ; but at last when Paris was almost cap- 
 tured, when England was exhausted and Italy was bleeding 
 from a terrible beating, and Russia was disintegrating and 
 changing front, patient America armed and quietly announced 
 that she was going to see it through. 
 
 There is no tongue that can tell the tale of this war's havoc. 
 It is unquestionably the most sordid and sodden record of 
 carnage in the annals of time. America came in with a swing, 
 a preparation quick and vast, a purpose high, and with a soul 
 white and clean ; but it was war she entered and the awful war 
 of the Hun's own making. It was suffocating death from gas, 
 shell-hole graves, incineration in the air, or desperate drowning 
 in the icy seas. The parting with our boys was a wrench un- 
 speakable. We were a land people and going to fight overseas 
 was a new and stupefying experience. 
 
 Then, too, the world was starving, and is yet. Forty mil- 
 lions of men were engaged in destruction. When peace is 
 finally established, America will have to send Jersey cattle to 
 the Isle of Jersey, and Holstein to Holland. Then plagues 
 always come in the wake of war. In Australia and New 
 Zealand the sheep died by the millions, and in Argentina the 
 beef-cattle perished on the pampas. In Texas the droughts 
 claimed a fearful toll of livestock and the unprecedented sever- 
 ity of the following winter froze what the heat had not con- 
 sumed. Then our boys died by the thousands of pneumonia 
 in the camps and later the influenza came to claim a million 
 victims. But our country heroically paid the price and arrived 
 at the front in time to save from destruction a quivering world. 
 We were not in the battle's zone long, but we were there nu- 
 merously and mightily. In all we have contributed a quarter 
 million lives to stem the tide of Teutonic ferocity and to insure 
 for democracy an open road. 
 
 I do not share the opinion of many publicists and theolo- 
 
108 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 gians that this war will usher in the reign of righteousness. 
 The problem of sin will remain when the last gun is fired. 
 Neither do I think when our boys come home that they will all 
 be transparent saints. Many of them will doubtless be changed 
 for the better. Many more will be hospitable toward gospel 
 truth, while some may be embittered and hardened. Neither do 
 I think reconstruction and readjustment and rehabilitation will 
 be accomplished with ease and celerity. For us all the rough 
 road will be the route to the goal of peace and plenty again. I 
 am not so sure about the speedy coming of a great revival of 
 religion, but I am prayerful and hopeful. And there are not 
 unpropitious signs in the moral skies. 
 
 But let no man deceive himself. The mature men and 
 women of this age will never be the same again. All are 
 changed. In the welter of blood and hell of battle it could not 
 be otherwise. Every serious and thoughtful person on the 
 globe will be permanently saddened and millions of little chil- 
 dren will not live long enough to get out from under the shadow 
 of the great war. Privates are coming home seasoned, sedate, 
 disillusioned, transformed. Chaplains and ministers have aged 
 almost beyond recognition within a few months. Great gen- 
 erals have utterly broken and retired to give place to younger 
 men. Nurses who went in young have come out old. All has 
 tragically changed. I doubt very gravely if the present gen- 
 eration can ever again be hilarious or possessed with the noble 
 rage of living. It shall be ours to rebuild the altar fires and 
 glimpse the glory and sense the serenity of Him who said, "Be- 
 hold, I make all things new." 
 
 The one emerging lesson of supremest moment is that men 
 from this world debacle shall learn the high values of the purely 
 spiritual. Materialism has proved its impotency and may not 
 the world come into its own in the realm of the unseen? 
 Money-madness, pleasure-chasing, debauches of the most dar- 
 ing sensual violence, were debasing and damning us all. Let 
 us believe that the perdition of war with all its dread accom- 
 paniments shall save us from the slime pits of sin and the bot- 
 tomless gulf of moral turpitude into which we were slipping. 
 And shall we not pray the God of all grace for an era of healing 
 for the world and reconciliation for the torn souls whose blood 
 is the sign of their agony? 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 LECTURING FROM A ROLLER CHAIR 
 
 After being shut in a year and a half there was marked 
 improvement in the muscular strength of my body. I was out 
 in my chair nearly every day and I soon began to take out-of- 
 town trips by automobile. It was a joy beyond expression 
 when I found that I could speak from a rocking-chair in any 
 auditorium. This I did a few times at least with great grati- 
 fication to myself. Then I got business in my brain and estab' 
 lished a little real estate office down town where I went daily 
 for four or five months, and when spring and summer came 
 I canvassed the county in a petty political campaign and went 
 in a new Ford to every portion of the county. My campaign 
 was intense, but the results were disastrous, for I was not 
 elected. At this time I could drag around the room on crutches, 
 but my leaden feet and twisted back and sleepless nights did 
 not allow this temporary improvement to deceive me. I was 
 actually called to two churches, to a village church for half 
 time and to a country church for one-fourth time, and I 
 preached for a year. My conveyance was a Studebaker road- 
 ster more than half paid for by my brother. 
 
 In the fall of our entrance into the war and when I saw I 
 could no longer be a peripatetic preacher, I accidentally evolved 
 some war lectures. My old church at Ruston was to dedicate 
 the building and I was to speak on the high day of dedication 
 when the house was consecrated to God and the notes of in- 
 debtedness were burned. The trip was a fearsome one, since 
 I had not been away from home at night for over three years 
 and I was very cowardly concerning the outcome of the adven- 
 ture. My wife went along as nurse and a football giant went 
 to carry me in his arms and to roll me in my chair. This trip 
 was so successful financially and socially and religiously that 
 others were soon planned. And that is how it came about that 
 from my wicker chair, given me by friends in Mansfield, Loui- 
 
 109 
 
no TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 siana, I spoke to audiences all over Texas and Louisiana and 
 a part of Arkansas. I even had return calls to many important 
 places. My itinerary was oppr^^dvely hard even for a well 
 man, and eight months of it was enough to destroy what strength 
 I had accumulated during my bedridden days. I traveled from 
 Sherman to Houston and from McKinney to Orange, from 
 Longview to Beaumont and from Temple to Texarkana and 
 Tyler too. I went from Lakes Charles to Monroe, Louisiana. 
 I spoke to capacity houses and my remuneration was surpris- 
 ingly large. Everywhere I met friends of former years and 
 always I was greeted by converts of my ministry in other 
 places. These were dear reunions and glorious trophies of 
 the wonderful gospel even when poorly preached by me. My 
 travels were one triumphal procession. I was conquering 
 despite the most serious physical limitations that could be suf- 
 fered by mortal man, and I was having poured upon me the 
 devoted love of those whom I thought had forgotten me. I 
 went to all my ex-pastorates in Louisiana and Texas but two ; 
 and oh, such welcome and such tender love as were mine ! The 
 good pastors of the land did me wonderful service and be- 
 stowed upon me high honors. They threw wide the doors of 
 their churches to me and then pried open the purses of their 
 parishoners for me. 
 
 Never was a decrepit pilgrim so caressed and so served by 
 the choicest characters and sweetest souls of the earth as I was. 
 Pastors put themselves out for my convenience and comfort 
 and exerted every intelligent effort to give me a great hearing 
 at every point. The Lord will reward these earnest and pious 
 men for their unselfish and whole-hearted devotion to my needs. 
 What a princely retinue of pastors follow in the train of Jesus 
 Christ! How high their calling, how glorious their mission, 
 how sweet their sacrifices, and how assuredly wonderful their 
 destiny! From Dallas to Carthage the preachers gave way 
 for me. It was worth all the pain to enjoy the fellowship of 
 the saints and to feel that my messages were indeed a source 
 of inspiration to fathers and mothers who had sent their sons 
 overseas to die. And it was no little consolation to be told 
 that I was making some worthy contribution to America's part 
 in the great war. 
 
 But I pressed too eagerly forward. The second Sunday in 
 
LECTURING FROM A ROLLER CHAIR 111 
 
 June I had a veritable field day at Tyler. Then I came home 
 and was forced oflf the platform until the second Sunday in 
 July, when I went to Bryan and came near never getting home 
 alive. Since that date I have not been out of town. My roller 
 chair is vacant and lonely as the wind whips it up and down 
 on the front porch. It is more than probable that I shall never 
 speak from its friendly embrace again. It is reasonably sure 
 that I have delivered my last lecture. More than a year and a 
 half ago I received a love letter from Bishop H. C. Morrison 
 of the Methodist Church, South, in which he said, **I have held 
 my last conference and shall ask soon to be retired. And it 
 will not be long until I shall try the realities of another world, 
 but my brother, we shall meet again.*' So it is as my dear 
 roller chair rumbles up and down the porch. It may be getting 
 ready to bear me away where chairs will not be needed. But 
 surely if I am so fortunate as by the blood of the Crucified 
 One to enter the realms of bliss eternal, the Master will some 
 day let me speak upon heaven's high themes with unfaltering 
 tongue and unclouded brain. 
 
CHAPTER XXII 
 THE HOPE THAT IS WITHIN ME 
 
 One of the most heartbreaking and despairing stabs that 
 drives its ruthless blades into mature consciousness, is the reali- 
 zation that so soon as a man has sense enough to live he is either 
 old enough or sick enough to die. But this is the philosophy 
 of life and the penalty of sin. There is no remedy for it. 
 There is the mystery of affliction. Occasionally there are wise 
 ones who think they have parted the veil and entered the coun- 
 cil chambers of eternal wisdom, but they deceive none but 
 themselves. My long night of pain is a baffling problem as 
 nonunderstandable as the book of Job. There have been bless- 
 ings innumerable upon my heart and head and in my home, 
 since my brow and frame were blasted. I have had a reve- 
 lation of the wealth of the love of the living saints. In every 
 conceivable way has this affection been shown. It has come in 
 checks from Richmond to Dallas. Words of appreciation for 
 my writings and for sermons of former years, and then just 
 plain love letters from those who could do nothing but love. 
 The mighty in the earth and the great in the Lord have been 
 visitors at my bedside in my humble home, and probably the 
 most blessed thing that has come to my own heart is that I have 
 been forced to think and I have had time to love. The response 
 in me has been eager and full and joyous has been the experi- 
 ence. Then I have been compelled to contemplate the change 
 awesome and inevitable that must come to us all, but especially 
 soon to me who have been so long time the prisoner of Jesus 
 Christ. It is usually not an entirely safe thing for an individual 
 to speak of his innermost exercises and soul emotions. No man 
 knows his own heart and how can he sound its depths so that 
 others will understand? But there are some foundations and 
 truths immovable and steadfast and there are experiences that 
 shall not pass away. The word of the Lord remaineth sure 
 and his judgments and righteousness altogether. My creed is 
 
 112 
 
THE HOPE THAT IS V/ITHIN ME 113 
 
 very brief and my theological system is as transparent as the 
 New Testament. The atonement of Jesus Christ was my theme 
 when I preached and his unmerited grace is my hope now, my 
 ground for a favorable issue at judgment, and the basis of my 
 anticipation of entering into the joy of my Lord. In my own 
 name I have not a single claim on divine favor. Of myself I 
 am utterly lost and undone. 
 
 "In my hand no price I bring. 
 Simply to Thy cross I cling." 
 "Nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness can avail for 
 me. 
 
 The sky line is not always clear, neither has the vision 
 always been cloudless. I have had to fight for my faith ever 
 as I have fought for my life. Not an hour for five years have 
 I been in bodily ease and my disease was such as to make terr 
 rible inroads upon mind and soul. But the story of my suffer- 
 ings can never be told and ought never be told. In weakness 
 beyond conception and pain all but unbearable I am dictating 
 this last chapter of my little book. I am pressing to my own 
 heart the precious truths I have preached so often to others, 
 and while I have no spiritual exhilaration and no buoyant, 
 bounding soul throbs, I am resting in Him who carries the 
 lambs in His bosom and whose Father willeth that not one of 
 these little ones should perish. "Rock of Ages cleft for me, 
 let me hide myself in Thee." "In the Cross of Christ I glory, 
 towering o'er the wrecks of time, gathering harvests rich and 
 golden, sown in poverty and tears." And in the faith that I 
 shall gather round the throne and see the King some day, I 
 lay my twisted hand in His pierced palm and lay my tired head 
 on His love-torn heart. 
 
CHAPTER XXIII 
 THE AUTHOR'S DEATH 
 
 [On the very day that the manuscript of this book was mailed 
 to the printer the author died. After he had gone I wrote to his 
 bereaved wife and asked her to write a closing chapter, thus giving 
 an account of his closing hours. This she has done in the words 
 that follow.— J. B. C] 
 
 On February 24, 1919, about three weeks after the last 
 words of this little book were dictated, the author fell asleep. 
 He had fought a good fight. The Apostle Paul could not 
 have had a harder nor a longer battle than his. For five long 
 years this man of colossal energy had been a helpless invalid. 
 For a year and a half, after all medical skill had been ex- 
 hausted, even by the world renowned Doctor Murphy, of 
 Chicago, he lay upon his bed unable so much as to hold a 
 piece of bread in his hand. During this time, with the aid of 
 a stenographer, he wrote constantly, producing some of his 
 best articles. Then his health improved and he accepted 
 the pastorates of two churches — one in a little town near by 
 and the other in the country. After serving these for awhile 
 he found that by having a strong Negro man to lift him, he 
 could go from city to city and this he did, delivering his war 
 lectures to great crowds. 
 
 In June, 1918, however, he again became too feeble to be 
 carried away from home. On Friday before Christmas his 
 trouble became more acute and his suffering more intense, 
 and from that time until the end he was able to sit up during 
 only a small portion of each day. Surely the three younger 
 children will never forget how on Christmas Eve he sat in 
 the shadow of their gaily decorated tree and told them again 
 the Christmas story, adding that before another Christmas 
 he would leave them, and then in a most beautiful prayer 
 he commended each of them to the keeping of Him whom he 
 had so faithfully served. 
 
 After Christmas he began what might be called a race 
 
 114 
 
THE AUTHOR^S DEATH 115 
 
 with Death. Long had he planned to write his Auto- 
 biography that he might inspire others to bravely battle 
 against great odds and at the same time leave a source of 
 income for his wife and little children. Some days he would 
 be too weak to dictate more than a few paragraphs. Again 
 he could write a chapter or more a day. But always with the 
 question : "Shall I live to finish it?" So great was his belief 
 in prayer that he sent out appeals to friends and churches 
 who were very dear to him asking them to pray that he 
 might be spared to finish the work on which he had so set 
 his heart. At last the book was completed and when he 
 knew it was in the hands of the publishers he said, "It is 
 finished. I have lived to see my dream, the College of 
 Marshall, come true; I have seen the close of the greatest 
 of wars ; my two lieutenant boys have come home ; my little 
 book is done — why should I pray to live longer in this 
 tortured and twisted old body that cries for rest?" Often 
 would he quote from Kipling's "L'Envoi" : 
 
 "We shall rest for an aeon or two and, faith! we shall 
 need it." 
 
 The second week in February he enjoyed a six days' visit 
 from his Lieutenant-Commander brother, who he had not 
 seen for five years. Then he seemed to grow more and 
 more feeble and on a calm, bright day a little after noon he 
 quietly went to sleep in the Master's arms to wake on the 
 farther shore. 
 
 Colonel Roosevelt's death a few weeks before had made a 
 marked impression on him. It was such a marvel to him 
 that that tumultuous soul should pass out so quietly. He 
 had often spoken also of how Cromwell's death had seemed 
 more fitting when an awful storm raged around his palace 
 that night. But this equally tumultuous and storm-tossed 
 soul slipped away even more quietly. As he had wished, 
 there was no moaning of the bar when he put out to sea. 
 
 The next morning a most beautiful service was held over 
 his casket in the handsome auditorium of the College for 
 which he had practically given his life. Among those who 
 gathered to pay their last tribute of respect were a number 
 of his colored friends whom he had loved and to whom he 
 had often brought messages of cheer. 
 
116 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 
 
 That afternoon loving hands laid him to rest in beautiful 
 Greenwood Cernetery, at Longview, beneath a wealth of 
 flowers. Surely he has seen his *Tilot face to face" since he 
 "has crossed the bar." 
 
Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
 Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
 Treatment Date: April 2006 
 
 PreservationTechnologies 
 
 A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 
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