this edifice. Now in Boston, now in New Haven, now at Cincinnati, he
watched its progress, noting a fault, praising an excellence, repairing
mistakes, strengthening weaknesses. It was the business and the delight
of his life. He had his agents throughout the country. The churches
might be many, but the cause was one. Ever watchful, ever active, he
spoke of his measures and his plans in just such terse, homely phrase as
any house-carpenter would use. Doubtless the fragile reverence of many a
clerical cumberer of the ground was shocked by his familiar use of their
sacred edge-tools. One can imagine the thrill of horror with which the
Reverend Cream Cheese, of the Church of the Holy (Self-) Assumption,
would hear the assertion, that "it was as finely organized a church as
ever trod shoe-leather." Our elegant Unitarian friends have probably
quite forgotten, and will hardly thank us for reminding them, that there
ever was a time when they "put mouth to ear, and hand to pocket, and
said, _St-boy!_" Our decorous Calvinistic D.D.s would scarcely recognize
their own dogmas at the inquiry-meeting, where "language of simplicity
came along, and they'd see me talking 'way down in language fit for
children.... And then the language of free agency and ability came along
... and they'd stick up their ears.... But next minute came along the
plea of morality and self-dependence, and I took them by the nape of the
neck and twisted their head off." There must have been great inertness
in New England at the time of his first visit to Boston, when "nobody
seemed to have an idea that there was anything but what God had locked
up and frozen from all eternity. The bottom of accountability had fallen
out. My first business was to put it in again." The coldness and
indifference of the Church, which ministers usually employ the vivid
language of the Bible regarding the ways of Zion to portray, he
described in the equally vivid, but less dignified New England
vernacular. "What did I do at Litchfield but to 'boost'? They all lay on
me, and moved very little, except as myself and God moved them. I spent
sixteen of the best years of my life at a dead lift in boosting." And we
greatly fear that the reverend seigniors in Synod and Presbytery,
notwithstanding their firm faith in Total Depravity, will be sadly
scandalized at hearing it announced, "That was a scampy concern, that
Old School General Assembly, and is still."

But he would make a great mista