."

In many other places the crusaders met with violence from exasperated
liquor-dealers and their brutish associates. A pail of cold water was
thrown into the face of a woman in Clyde, Ohio, as she knelt praying in
front of a saloon. Dirty water was thrown by pailfuls over the women at
Norwalk. At Columbus, a saloon-keeper assaulted one of the praying-band,
injuring her seriously. In Cincinnati, forty-three women were arrested
by the authorities for praying in the street and lodged in jail. In
Bellefontaine, a large liquor-dealer declared that if the praying-band
visited him he would use powder and lead; but the women, undeterred by
his threat, sang and prayed in front of his saloon every day for a week,
in spite of the insults and noisy interferences of himself and
customers. At the end of that time the man made his appearance at a
mass-meeting and signed the pledge; and on the following Sunday
attended church for the first time in five years.

DECLINE OF THE CRUSADING SPIRIT.

From Ohio the excitement soon spread to other Western States, and then
passed east and south, until it was felt in nearly every State in the
Union; but it did not gain force by extension. To the sober,
second-thought of those who had, in singleness of heart,
self-consecration and trust in God, thrown themselves into this work
because they believed that they were drawn of the Spirit, came the
perception of other, better and more orderly ways of accomplishing the
good they sought. If God were, indeed, with them--if it was His Divine
work of saving human souls upon which they had entered, He would lead
them into the right ways, if they were but willing to walk therein. Of
this there came to them a deep assurance; and in the great calm that
fell after the rush and excitement and wild confusion of that first
movement against the enemy, they heard the voice of God calling to them
still. And, as they hearkened, waiting to be led, and willing to obey,
light came, and they saw more clearly. Not by swift, impetuous impulse,
but through organization and slow progression was the victory to be won.

In the language of Frances E. Willard, in her history of "The Woman's
National Christian Temperance Union," to be found in the Centennial
temperance volume: "The women who went forth by an impulse sudden,
irresistible, divine, to pray in the saloons, became convinced, as weeks
and months passed by, that theirs was to be no easily-won victory. The
enemy was