Into this whirl of successful, happy work, the comforts and luxuries of prosperity, came the grim hand of death.  His loving wife who had worked so cheerfully by his side, who had braved disaster, bitter poverty, hardship, with a smile, died of heart trouble after a few days’ illness, January 11, 1872.  It was like a thunderbolt from a cloudless sky.  In the loneliness and despair that followed, worldly ambitions turned to dust and ashes.  He could not lecture.  He could not speak.  The desolation at his heart was too great.  His only consolation was the faith that was in him, a “very present help,” as he found, “in time of trouble.”  This bitter trial brought home to him all the more intensely the need of such comfort for those who were comfortless.  His heart went out in burning sympathy for those sitting in darkness like himself, but who had no faith on which to lean, nothing to bring healing and hope to a broken heart.  Her death was a loss to the community as well as to her family.  Her writings in the “Somerville Journal” had made a decided impression, while her sweet womanly qualities had endeared her to a wide circle of friends.  Noting her death, a writer in one of the Boston papers said: 

“Mrs. Conwell was a true and loving wife and mother.  Kind and sympathetic in her intercourse with all, and possessed of those rare womanly graces and qualities which endeared her to those with whom she was acquainted.  Her death leaves a void which cannot be filled even outside her own household.  Her writings were those of a true woman, always healthful in their tone, strong and vigorous in ideas and concise in language.”

Other troubles came thick and fast.  He lost at one time fifty thousand dollars in the panic of ’74, and at another ten thousand dollars by endorsing for a friend.  His old acquaintance, poverty, again took up its abode with him.  In addition, he was heavily in debt.  Those were black days, days that taught him how unstable were the things of this world—­money, position, the ambitions that once had seemed so worthy.  The only thing that brought a sense of satisfaction, of having done something worth while, was the endeavor to make others happier, to put joy into lives as desolate as his own.  Such work brought peace.

To forget his own troubles in lightening those of others, he went actively into religious work.  He took a class in the Sunday School of Tremont Temple, that very Sunday School into which Deacon Chipman had taken him a runaway boy some twenty years before.  The class grew from four to six hundred in a few months.  He preached to sailors on the wharves, to idlers on the streets, in mission chapels at night.  The present West Somerville, Massachusetts, church grew from just such work.  He could not but see the fruits of his labors.  On all sides it grew to a quick harvest.