He did so, and looking grave, sounded my lungs, put his ear to my chest and then asked, “What is the matter with your left lung?”

I replied, “I don’t know.  Three doctors told me, more than fourteen years ago, that it was all gone.”  “Well,” he said, “you stay quietly in bed till I come again at half-past eleven.”

When he returned, he bade me get up and dress, and then gave me a cupful of something very hot with cayenne, at the same time telling me that I should be quite strong enough to preach by twelve o’clock.

So I was.  I preached that morning, and again in the afternoon; after that I went to bed till six o’clock, when I took another dose, and in the strength of it preached a long, loud sermon to a crowded congregation; after which I attended the after-meeting, and was there till twelve o’clock at night.  I then set off to the station, accompanied by at least two hundred people, and left by the one o’clock train for Birmingham, to the house of my new friend the herbal doctor.  He nursed me like a mother, and let me go on my way home to Cornwall the next day.

I never heard any more of the rector of the parish, or of the Bishop, but was frequently cheered by letters saying that the work thus begun was going on week after week in the same place.  Some years after, when I was passing, I stopped there for a few days, and gave them “a lift,” as they called it; and I then saw with half a glance that they had become practised workers—­that both clergymen and people were fitted to missionize the whole country side.

One’s great object in this mission work is not only to save souls, but to encourage believers to do their part; that so the effect of a mission may be continued and extended.  God has a twofold blessing for us.  He says “I will bless thee and make thee a blessing;” and it is well to remember that the benefits we receive are not so much to be kept for self, as to be imparted and transmitted to others, even as they were transmitted to us.

CHAPTER 24

Sanctification.

Then I returned from the far-off mission in Staffordshire, whether from over fatigue or other causes, I was much depressed in mind as well as body, and quite out of heart with the Church of England.  It is true I found the converted people in Staffordshire were not so leavened with Dissent as in Cornwall, and that there was some attachment to the Church; but still I could see that Churchmen there, as elsewhere, distrusted spirituality, and preferred to work on their own ecclesiastical or sacramental lines; they chose to draw water to quench their thirst, rather than to ask, and receive (directly from Christ) the living water.

If a bishop accidentally invited me, of if a clergyman cordially did so, they were marked exceptions.  I felt myself to be obnoxious to the majority of my clerical brethren who professed to represent the Church; but somehow, I was convinced that, as a converted clergyman, I represented the Church of England more truly than they, and that the principles of the Reformation were the principles I was working upon.  This was trial from outside, which, however trying to flesh and blood, is by no means so bad as misgiving from within.