Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world!” “Whosoever shall confess me before men, him will I confess before my Father and the holy angels.”  “Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved:  for with the heart man believeth unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.”  A good many tongues are found in the mouth with which men make “confession unto salvation.”  But they all speak the same thing, and the thing which they all speak is humble obedience to the Word of the Lord.  Baptism is one tongue.  Feet-washing is another tongue.  The Lord’s Supper is another tongue.  The Communion is another tongue.  A quiet, honest and peaceable life is another tongue, and one that speaks very loud for Christ.  Temperance in eating and drinking, and abstemiousness in the way of rejecting the use of all unnecessary or injurious things is another tongue of power on the Lord’s side.  Come to Jesus.  Confess him in these ways, and thou shall live.

SUNDAY, December 31.  Meeting on Lost River.  Matthew 2 is read.  Stay all night at Christian Halterman’s.

It is said that the centipede has a hundred feet.  It may have; and it does seem that superstition, or the belief in supernatural things of a trivial nature has quite as many; and, like the fabled animal of ancient times, has also a hundred heads.

This evening I overheard a conversation among some young people where I stayed, in which one said that every New Year’s night, that is, the night in which the New Year comes in, the cattle and sheep all get on their knees, as if they might be in a devotional posture of body.  They talked as if they really believed that this might be so.  I do not know how this impression has come about; but I have heard this before, and guess that some mischievous or sportive person tried to make some one else believe that cattle and sheep kneel only on New Year’s night, when the truth is that they kneel whenever they lie down to rest.  I have often thought it a pity that people are so ready to believe in marvelous and supernatural things which can do them no good, and so backward to believe the most marvelous truth the world has ever known; the truth that God has provided eternal life and salvation for all who are willing to accept it on the easy terms upon which it is offered.

In this year I have traveled, mostly on horseback, three thousand, two hundred and sixty miles.

MONDAY, January 1, 1844.  I feel sure that the work of the year cannot be entered upon more suitably than by making arrangements for building a house of worship unto the Lord.  The need of a house of this kind has long been felt among the Brethren on Lost River.  We have here, as elsewhere, “not shunned to declare the whole counsel of God” publicly, as Paul says he did among the Ephesian brethren, “and that from house to house.”  But it is best to have a stated place of worship, and with this in view we have this day made arrangements to build a meetinghouse, to be known as the Lost River meetinghouse.  Celestine Whitmore, Jacob Mathias and Silas Randall have been elected trustees; and Celestine Whitmore, one of the number, has been elected master builder.