In addition to his duties as spiritual adviser to the community, it was his office to preach; also to hold himself at the call of the afflicted, to anoint their heads with oil and rebuke their fevers.  He took an especial pleasure in this work of healing, being glad to leave his fields by day or his bed by night for the sickroom.  By couches of suffering he watched and prayed, and when they began to say in Amalon that his word of rebuke to fevers came with strange power, that his touch was marvellously healing, and his prayers strangely potent, he prayed not to be set up thereby, nor to forget that the power came, not by him but through him, because of his knowing his own unworthiness.  He fasted and prayed to be trusted still more until he should be worthy of that complete power which the Master had said came only by prayer and fasting.

The conscientious manner in which he performed his offices was favourably commented upon by Bishop Wright.  This good man believed there had been a decline of late in the ardour of the priesthood.

“I tell you, Elder, I wish they was all as careful as you be, but they’re falling into shiftless ways.  If I’m sick and have to depend on myself, all right.  I’ll dose up with lobelia or gamboge, or put a blister-plaster on the back of my neck or take a drink of catnip tea or composition, and then the cure of my misery is with the Lord God of Hosts.  But if I send for an administrator, it’s different.  He takes the responsibility and I want him to fulfil every will of the Lord.  When an Elder comes to administer to me and is afraid of greasing his fingers or of dropping a little oil on his vest, and says, ’Oh, never mind the oil! there ain’t any virtue in the olive-oil; besides, I might grease my gloves,’ why I feel like telling such a Godless critter to walk off.  When God says anoint with oil, anoint, I don’t care if it runs down his beard as it ran down Aaron’s.  And I don’t want to talk anybody down or mention any names; but, well, next time when I got a cold and Elder Beil Wardle is the only administrator free, why, I’ll just stand or fall by myself.  A basin of water-gruel, hot, with half a quart of old rum in it and lots of brown sugar, is better than all his anointing.”

To make his days busier there were the affairs of the Church to oversee, for he was now President of the local Stake of Zion; reports of the teachers to consider in council meeting, of their weekly visits to each family, and of the fidelity of each of its members to the Kingdom.  And there were the Deacons and Priests of the Aaronic Order and other Elders and Bishops of the Order of Melchisedek to advise with upon the temporal and spiritual affairs of Israel; to labour and pray with Peregrine Noble, who had declared that he would no longer be as limber as a tallowed rag in the hands of the priesthood, and to deliver him over to the buffetings of Satan in the flesh if he persisted in his blasphemy; to rebuke Ozro Cutler