MY ODD ADVENTURE WITH JUNIUS BRUTUS BOOTH.

More than twenty years ago, being pastor of a church in one of our Western cities, I was sitting, one evening, meditating over my coal fire, which was cheerfully blazing up and gloomily subsiding again, in the way that Western coal fires in Western coal grates were then very much in the habit of doing.  I was a young, and inexperienced minister.  I had come to the West, fresh from a New England divinity-school, with magnificent ideas of the vast work which was to be done, and with rather a vague notion of the way in which I was to do it.  My views of the West were chiefly derived from two books, both of which are now obsolete.  When a child, with the omnivorous reading propensity of children, I had perused a thin, pale octavo, which stood on the shelves of our library, containing the record of a journey by the Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris, of Dorchester, from Massachusetts to Marietta, Ohio.  Allibone, whom nothing escapes, gives the title of the book, “Journal of a Tour into the Territory Northwest of the Allegheny Mountains in 1803, Boston, 1805.”  That a man should write an octavo volume about a journey to Marietta now strikes us as rather absurd; but in those days the overland journey to Ohio was as difficult as that to California is now.  The other book was a more important one, being Timothy Flint’s “Ten Years’ Recollections of the Mississippi Valley,” published in 1826.  Mr. Flint was a man of sensibility and fancy, a sharp observer, and an interesting writer.  His book opened the West to us in its scenery and in its human interest.

I was sitting in my somewhat lonely position, watching my coal fire, and thinking of the friends I had left on the other side of the mountains.  I had not succeeded as I had hoped in my work.  I came to the West expecting to meet with opposition, and I found only indifference.  I expected infidelity, and found worldliness.  I had around me a company of good Christian friends, but they were no converts of mine; they were from New England, like myself, and brought their religion with them.  Upon the real Western people I had made no impression, and could not see how I should make any.  Those who were religious seemed to be bigots; those who were not religious cared apparently more for making money, for politics, for horseracing, for duelling, than for the difference between Homoousians and Homoiousians.  They were very fond of good preaching, but their standard was a little different from that I had been accustomed to.  A solid, meditative, carefully written sermon had few attractions for them.  They would go to hear our great New England divines on account of their reputation, but they would run in crowds to listen to John Newland Maffit.  What they wanted, as one of them expressed it, was “an eloquent divine and no common orator.”  They liked sentiment run out into sentimentalism, fluency, point, plenty of illustration, and knock-down argument.  How could a poor boy, fresh from the groves of our Academy, where Good Taste reigned supreme, and where to learn how to manage one’s voice was regarded as a sin against sincerity, how could he meet such demands as these?