Conwell is such a force
in the world. He went into the ministry because he was sincerely and
profoundly a Christian, and because he felt that as a minister he
could do more good in the world than in any other capacity. But being
a minister is but an incident, so to speak. The important thing is not
that he is a minister, but that he is himself!

Recently I heard a New-Yorker, the head of a great corporation, say: "I
believe that Russell Conwell is doing more good in the world than any
man who has lived since Jesus Christ." And he said this in serious and
unexaggerated earnest.

Yet Conwell did not get readily into his life-work. He might have seemed
almost a failure until he was well on toward forty, for although he
kept making successes they were not permanent successes, and he did not
settle himself into a definite line. He restlessly went westward to make
his home, and then restlessly returned to the East. After the war was
over he was a lawyer, he was a lecturer, he was an editor, he went
around the world as a correspondent, he wrote books. He kept making
money, and kept losing it; he lost it through fire, through investments,
through aiding his friends. It is probable that the unsettledness of
the years following the war was due to the unsettling effect of the war
itself, which thus, in its influence, broke into his mature life
after breaking into his years at Yale. But however that may be, those
seething, changing, stirring years were years of vital importance to
him, for in the myriad experiences of that time he was building the
foundation of the Conwell that was to come. Abroad he met the notables
of the earth. At home he made hosts of friends and loyal admirers.

It is worth while noting that as a lawyer he would never take a case,
either civil or criminal, that he considered wrong. It was basic with
him that he could not and would not fight on what he thought was the
wrong side. Only when his client was right would he go ahead!

Yet he laughs, his quiet, infectious, characteristic laugh, as he
tells of how once he was deceived, for he defended a man, charged with
stealing a watch, who was so obviously innocent that he took the case in
a blaze of indignation and had the young fellow proudly exonerated. The
next day the wrongly accused one came to his office and shamefacedly
took out the watch that he had been charged with stealing. "I want you
to send it to the man I took it from," he said. And he told with