CHAPTER I.

I came to Kansas in the spring of 1855, having been preaching in that part of Illinois known as the Military Tract, during the three preceding years; but my residence was in Cedar County, Iowa, one hundred and fifty miles from my field of labor, and twenty-six miles to the northwest of the city of Davenport.  I had been employed for one year in Iowa as a co-laborer with Bro.  N. A. McConnell; but the church at Davenport, which was the strongest and richest church in the Cooperation, determined to sustain a settled pastor, and this left the churches too poor to support two preachers, and I was left to find another field of labor.

When I first came to Cedar County I came simply as a farmer; and there were but nine families in the township in which we settled.  But when the country came to be settled up the result was not favorable to the expectation that we should have prosperous churches in that region.  Those who have watched the progress of the temperance reform in Iowa have noticed that, while the prohibitory law is enforced almost throughout the State, there are yet exceptions in the cities of Davenport and Muscatine and the adjacent counties.  Here the law is set at defiance.  This is owing to the presence of a German, lager-beer-drinking, law-defying population, Godless and Christless, and that turn the Lord’s day into a holiday.  This tendency had begun to be apparent before I left Iowa.

When it became manifest that I could not any longer find a field of labor in Southeastern Iowa, I was recommended to the churches in the counties of Schuyler and Brown, in the Military Tract, Illinois.

My first introduction among them was dramatic, if, indeed, we could give to an incident almost frivolous and laughable, the dignity of a dramatic incident; and yet the matter had a serious side to it.  I had been commended by Bro.  Bates, editor of the Iowa Christian Evangelist, to the church at Rushville, where I held a meeting of days.  The meetings grew in interest, there were some important additions, and the church was greatly revived.  Twelve miles from Rushville was the town of Ripley, a small village, where the people were engaged in the business of manufacturing pottery ware.  Here two Second Adventist preachers, a Mr. Chapman and his wife, were holding forth.  This Mr. Chapman was a devout, pious, and earnest man, and a good exhorter, and had an unfaltering faith that the Lord was immediately to appear.  But his wife was the smartest one in the family.  She was fluent and voluble.  She had an unabashed forehead and a bitter and defiant tongue.  It was her hobby to declaim against the popular idea of the existence of the human spirit apart from the body.  With her this was equivalent to a witch riding on a broomstick or going to heaven on a moonbeam.  Spirit is breath—­so she dogmatically affirmed—­and when a man breathes out his last breath his spirit leaves his