his own restless energy in the building of
temples, the slaying of unbelievers and in general in
the work of glorifying God's name on earth.

That is what Jesse hungered for and then also he
hungered for something else. He had grown into maturity
in America in the years after the Civil War and he,
like all men of his time, had been touched by the deep
influences that were at work in the country during
those years when modern industrialism was being born.
He began to buy machines that would permit him to do
the work of the farms while employing fewer men and he
sometimes thought that if he were a younger man he
would give up farming altogether and start a factory in
Winesburg for the making of machinery. Jesse formed the
habit of reading newspapers and magazines. He invented
a machine for the making of fence out of wire. Faintly
he realized that the atmosphere of old times and places
that he had always cultivated in his own mind was
strange and foreign to the thing that was growing up in
the minds of others. The beginning of the most
materialistic age in the history of the world, when
wars would be fought without patriotism, when men would
forget God and only pay attention to moral standards,
when the will to power would replace the will to serve
and beauty would be well-nigh forgotten in the terrible
headlong rush of mankind toward the acquiring of
possessions, was telling its story to Jesse the man of
God as it was to the men about him. The greedy thing in
him wanted to make money faster than it could be made
by tilling the land. More than once he went into
Winesburg to talk with his son-in-law John Hardy about
it. "You are a banker and you will have chances I never
had," he said and his eyes shone. "I am thinking about
it all the time. Big things are going to be done in the
country and there will be more money to be made than I
ever dreamed of. You get into it. I wish I were younger
and had your chance." Jesse Bentley walked up and down
in the bank office and grew more and more excited as he
talked. At one time in his life he had been threatened
with paralysis and his left side remained somewhat
weakened. As he talked his left eyelid twitched. Later
when he drove back home and when night came on and the
stars came out it was harder to get back the old
feeling of a close and personal God who lived in the
sky overhead and who might at any moment reach out his
hand, touch him on the shoulder, and appoint for him