In Jesse Bentley’s time and in the country districts of the whole Middle West in the years after the Civil War it was not so.  Men labored too hard and were too tired to read.  In them was no desire for words printed upon paper.  As they worked in the fields, vague, half-formed thoughts took possession of them.  They believed in God and in God’s power to control their lives.  In the little Protestant churches they gathered on Sunday to hear of God and his works.  The churches were the center of the social and intellectual life of the times.  The figure of God was big in the hearts of men.

And so, having been born an imaginative child and having within him a great intellectual eagerness, Jesse Bentley had turned wholeheartedly toward God.  When the war took his brothers away, he saw the hand of God in that.  When his father became ill and could no longer attend to the running of the farm, he took that also as a sign from God.  In the city, when the word came to him, he walked about at night through the streets thinking of the matter and when he had come home and had got the work on the farm well under way, he went again at night to walk through the forests and over the low hills and to think of God.

As he walked the importance of his own figure in some divine plan grew in his mind.  He grew avaricious and was impatient that the farm contained only six hundred acres.  Kneeling in a fence corner at the edge of some meadow, he sent his voice abroad into the silence and looking up he saw the stars shining down at him.

One evening, some months after his father’s death, and when his wife Katherine was expecting at any moment to be laid abed of childbirth, Jesse left his house and went for a long walk.  The Bentley farm was situated in a tiny valley watered by Wine Creek, and Jesse walked along the banks of the stream to the end of his own land and on through the fields of his neighbors.  As he walked the valley broadened and then narrowed again.  Great open stretches of field and wood lay before him.  The moon came out from behind clouds, and, climbing a low hill, he sat down to think.

Jesse thought that as the true servant of God the entire stretch of country through which he had walked should have come into his possession.  He thought of his dead brothers and blamed them that they had not worked harder and achieved more.  Before him in the moonlight the tiny stream ran down over stones, and he began to think of the men of old times who like himself had owned flocks and lands.

A fantastic impulse, half fear, half greediness, took possession of Jesse Bentley.  He remembered how in the old Bible story the Lord had appeared to that other Jesse and told him to send his son David to where Saul and the men of Israel were fighting the Philistines in the Valley of Elah.  Into Jesse’s mind came the conviction that all of the Ohio farmers who owned land in the valley of Wine Creek were Philistines and enemies of God.  “Suppose,” he