tement found vent in tears.

"You are safe!" she cried. "Oh, my dear, I will never leave you again
while danger is near--never, never again!"

In the evening of that day further news came from Hiram. The prophet had
preached long and gloriously in the open air. New converts had been
made, and he himself, scarified and bruised as he was, had gone down
into the icy river and baptized them in sight of all. The mob had
shrieked and jeered, but had been withheld by God, as the messenger
said, from further violence.

Susannah made no further effort to find new life in the old doctrines.
All her sentiments of justice and mercy combined to make her espouse her
husband's cause with renewed ardour.

CHAPTER V.

In the summer of that same year, while the wheat in the Manchester
fields was still green, and the maize had attained but half its growth,
while the ox-eyed daisies still stood a happy crowd in the unmown
meadows, and pink and yellow orchids blazed in unfrequented dells, the
preacher Finney, after long absence, chanced to be again travelling on
the Palmyra road. As was his habit, he sought entertainment at the house
of Deacon Croom in New Manchester.

The preacher remembered always that his citizenship was in heaven. From
the thought he drew great nourishment of peace and hope, but as far as
his earthly affairs were concerned the outlook was at present grievous.

He was returning from a long and dreary religious convention held in an
eastern town, where one, Mr. Lyman Beecher, had stirred up against him
the foremost divines of New York and Boston. They had asserted that
Finney's doctrine, that the Spirit of God could suddenly turn men from
following evil to pursuing good, was false and pernicious; that his
method stirred up the people to unholy excitements which were productive
of great evil. Now the accusations of these divines (who, thinking that
a man's change of mind must needs be so slow a thing, some of them,
gray-haired, had not as yet produced this change in a single sinner)
were in many points wholly false, in many exaggerated, and where the
article of truth remained in the accusation there was much to be said in
defence of work that had resulted, if in some evil, certainly in much
palpable good. To such groups of priests and soldiers and publicans as
came forth to John's baptism of repentance, the godly Finney, travelling
now east and now west, had appealed, and that the wide land was the
better f