flesh at such times. But, of course, we could
never think of the portrait, so in these letters I have tried to draw a
likeness of him. Every line and shadow of it is as true as I can make
it to what he really was. I reckon plenty of people back there on his
circuits will recognize it, although I have changed names so as not to
be too personal. They will remember him, although he was not what is
known as an up-to-date preacher.

I have often thought about it since I have been up here, what William
didn't know or dream of. I never heard him mention evolution. His
doubts were not intellectual and his troubles were just spiritual. He
never suspected that there were two Isaiahs, never discovered that
David did not write his own Psalms, or that Genesis was considered a
fable, never noticed anything queer about the way Moses kept on writing
about himself after he was dead and his death certificate properly
recorded by himself in the Scriptures. He was a man of faith. All of
his ideas came out of that one little mustard seed. I doubt if he'd
have been surprised if some day he had come upon a burning bush along
one of the bridle paths of his circuit.

As for me, I do not care what they say here in New York, or even in the
Pentateuch, I'd have a sight more confidence in that Scripture of the
burning bush if William had recorded it instead of Moses--I never set
much store by Moses as a truth teller. He may have been a good hand at
chiseling out the Ten Commandments in the tables of stone, and he may
have been strong enough to tote them down by himself from Sinai, but
Moses was too much of a hero to tell the truth and nothing but the
truth about himself. I never knew a hero who could do it. Their
courage gets mixed with their imagination.

Then again, you can see that I could not write about a man like William
in the modern forked-lightning literary style, as if he was a new brand
of spiritual soap or the dime-novel hero of a fashionable congregation.
The people he served were not like those in New York, who appear to
have been created by electricity, with a spiritual button for a soul,
that you press into a religious fervor by rendering an organ opera
behind the pulpit. Or, maybe the preacher does it with a new-fangled
motor notion that demonstrates a scientific relation between some other
life and this one.

The people William served were backwoods and mountain folk, for the
most part, who grew out of the soil,