Such faithful work of the pastor, such earnest, active work of the people could not but tell.  The family feeling which is the ideal of church fellowship was so strong and warm that it attracted and drew people as with magnetic power.  The church became more and more crowded.  In less than a year it was impossible to seat those who thronged to the Sunday services, though the auditorium then had a seating capacity of twelve hundred.

“I am glad,” the pastor once remarked to a friend, “when I get up Sunday morning and can look out of the window and see it snowing, sleeting, and raining, and hear the wind shriek and howl.  ‘There,’ I say, ’I won’t have to preach this morning, looking all the while at people patiently standing through the service, wherever there is a foot of standing room.’”

[Illustration:  The Samaritan hospital of the future]

The membership rose from two hundred to more than five hundred within two years.  A question began to shape itself in the minds of pastor and people.  “What shall we do?” As a partial solution of it, the proposition was made to divide into three churches.  But, as in the old days of enlistment when two companies clamored for him for captain, all three sections wanted him as pastor, and so the idea was abandoned.

Still the membership grew, and the need for larger quarters faced them imperatively and not to be evaded.  The house next door was purchased which gave increased space for the work of the Sunday School and the various associations.  But it was a mere drop in the bucket.  Every room in it was filled to overflowing with eager workers before the ink was fairly dry on the deed of transfer.

Then into this busy crowd wondering what should be done came a little child, and with one simple act cleared the mist from their eyes and pointed the way for them to go.

CHAPTER XIX

HATTIE WIATT’S LEGACY

How a Little Child Started the Building Fund for the Great Baptist Temple.

One Sunday afternoon a little child, Hattie Wiatt, six years old, came to the church building at Berks and Mervine to attend the Sunday School.  She was a very little girl and it was a very large Sunday School, but big as it was there was not room to squeeze her in.  Other little girls had been turned away that day, and still others, Sundays before.  But it was a bitter disappointment to this small child; the little lips trembled, the big tears rolled down her cheeks and the sobs that came were from the heart.  The pastor himself told the little one why she could not come in and tried to comfort her.  His heart was big enough for her and her trouble if the church was not.  He watched the childish figure going so sadly up the street with a heart that was heavy that he must turn away a little child from the house of God, from the house raised in the name of One who said, “Suffer little children to come unto me.”