to write it here. James Carleton was present at
the evening service. He was the first man to reach the altar when the
invitation to penitents was given. He was soundly converted, and lived
a changed life from that hour.

The next night Sister Carleton was not in her accustomed place for the
first time in nearly forty years. A month later she passed away,
having already received the joy of her reward in the salvation of her
children.

I have noticed that rich people do not have this kind of faith in
prayer. They want, as a rule, only those things that can be bought
with money, and they buy them. I have never seen a rich father nearly
so anxious for the salvation of his children as he was for their
success in the world. And the same thing has been my observation in
regard to rich mothers. Sometimes they pray for their sons and
daughters, but they do not often mean what they pray, and God knows it,
for he never horrifies one of them by granting their prayer.

Still, there is a kind of sacrilegious confidence in prayer that always
offended some delicacy in me, and William felt it too, only he never
learned how to condemn it. His sense of reverence was not sufficiently
discriminating. And there was an occasion where I had to rid him and
his congregation of this sublimated form of spiritual indecency.

As I have said, we were sent now to small stations, village churches,
or mission churches in the factory edges of the big cities. But
William's years, the hardships and anxieties, both earthly and
unearthly, to which he had been exposed began to tell on his strength.
And the year we were at Springdale as the summer came on he felt
unequal to conducting the usual six weeks' protracted meeting without
help. And while six weeks may seem a long time to hold such services,
it is really a very short time for people to get revived and
heaven-minded in when all the rest of the year they have been otherwise
minded. The wonder to me was that men who had driven hard bargains and
hated some one or more neighbors for ten months; that women who had
given themselves over to the littleness and lightness of a small
fashionable life in a small town, or to gossip about those who did,
could so quickly recover their moral and spiritual standards in a
revival.

I remember that it was William's custom, as soon as there was the least
interest manifested, to have a very searching service for his church
members in which he called upon