growing in grace by proselyting Quakers all the way, and onward till he stabled his horse with the steeds of the Ohio circuiteers. With inspiration swiftly upon him, Colby reined about and by June he was back in Vermont rounding up sinners, saving them like Methodists and baptizing them like Baptists. His favored weapon was the prophecy of death. An occasional fulfillment and many a "You're next" made candidates for the river, regardless of the time of year. On January 19, 1813, he immersed a man and wife at Burke, Vermont, a path having been shovelled through the deep snow to the brink and "a hole cut through the ice for their burial with Christ in baptism." The choir sang "Am I a Soldier of the Cross?" Fifty went into the water with Colby during his first summer and in the six years of his itinerant evangelism eastward to Eastport, Maine, and southward as far as Providence, Rhode Island, between August 12, 1810, and November 28, 1816, he baptized six hundred and forty persons. Colby's borrowed spark from the West glowed brightest in his native New Hampshire, in the County of Carroll and the towns of Sandwich, Tamworth, Conway, Ossipee and Effingham. It was a region of towering mountain ranges and deep valleys clad with virgin forest. Widening their clearings, the sturdy pioneers were pulling such gigantic, grotesque stumps as those which still fence the road to the Chickville meeting house in the neighborhood where the old settlers of Ossipee heard Colby preach. A few rods away flows the Beech River into which Colby waded and drove his baptismal stake. And yonder in God's Acre sleep most of that congregation who sang by the waters the resurrection hymn. These people were of the same rugged rural mold that went westward. They also had their struggle with a wilderness. And the Cartwright kind of preaching that had bent knees from the Scioto River of Ohio to the Sangamon of Illinois and thence across the Mississippi brought the farmers and loggers of New Hampshire weeping to John Colby's mercy seat. It was "Thou art the man!" and "Thou art the woman!" as the burning arrows sped from his pulpit. The holy fire that impelled Colby to preach twice and three times a day for almost seven years finally consumed him. He died on November 28, 1817. In passing, he handed on his torch to Clarissa Danforth, of Sutton, Vermont, one of the first woman evangelists in America. After her conversion by Colby, this young woman "of extraordinary talents, good parentage and much grace" preached to great throngs throughout Vermont for three years. The high sheriff of her county was among the first of her converts. This was of the tradition. Peter Cartwright always brought down his sheriffs when riding the circuit of salvation. W CHAPTER XI THE MORMON MOSES On Jordan's stormy banks I stand To Canaan's fair and happy land SAMUEL STENNETT, 1727-1795. HILE the clean frontal flame of the westering revival was steadily lighting the way across the country, other fires, luridly gleaming under a constantly shifting pall of unwholesome smoke, were burning back and forth over the ground behind, blistering souls and blighting minds. Over and over again the same rural regions would be seared by the withering blasts of diverse demonologies burgeoning from the innate superstition of the ignorant, credulous and excitable naïve rustics. Variegated New Lights blazed through and after them hydra-headed sects whelped from conjury with Scrip tures. Every latter-day inspiration gathered followers over night about the exorcist who howled from the ash-heaps that it had been vouchsafed to him direct from heaven and spoke in mystical phrases so close to the Holy Writ that he was accepted with the "Word" he was bearing. His converts would take his name or lend it with themselves to his doctrine. Like noxious weeds, this month the Hoskinites would spring up; the next year the Scrogginarians |