two human numerals added together
for a lifetime which made a deficit. Yet we had not been idle or
indifferent workers. For thirty years William had been in the
itinerancy, filling nearly every third and fourth class appointment in
his Conference. He had preached over three thousand sermons, baptized
more than four hundred infants, received nearly four thousand souls
into membership. He had been untiring in his efforts to raise his
assessments, and had paid more pastoral calls than half a dozen doctors
need to make in order to become famous and wealthy.

Time changed us; we grew old. I abandoned my waist-line to Nature's
will and my face settled into the expression of a good negative that
has been blurred by too long exposure to a strong light. Toward the
end William looked like the skin-and-bones remnant of a saint. His
face was sunken and hollowed out till the very Wesley in him showed
through. His beard was long and had whitened until it gave his Moses
head the appearance of coming up out of a holy mist.

So, I say, we aged; but we went on from circuit to circuit with no
other change except that when we saved enough money William bought a
new horse. It is a terrible treadmill, and we could expect no reward
or change in this world, no promotion, no ease of mind except the ease
of prayers, which I never enjoyed as much as William did. I had
feelings that prayers did not put down the desires that they did not
satisfy. There were times when I almost hated prayers, when I had a
mortal aversion to Heaven and wished only that God would give me a long
earth-rest of the spirit.

We found the same kind of sinners everywhere and the same defects in
all the saints. Sometimes I even wished some one would develop a new
sort of wickedness, a kind that would vary the dreadful monotony of
repentance and cause William to scratch his theological head for a
different kind of sermon. But no one ever did; whether we were in the
mountains or in the towns, among the rich or the poor, the people
transgressed by the same mortal "rule of three" and fell short of the
glory of God exactly alike.

At last I came to understand that there is just one kind of sin in the
world--the sin against love--and no saints at all. I can't say that I
was disappointed, but I was just tired of the awful upward strain of
trying to develop faculties and feelings suitable to another world in
this one. And to make things worse, William took on a w