anticipating the day of independent Methodism by baptizing his converts and licensing some of them to preach in his wake.

Another to undertake the redemption of Maryland was John King, who was probably the first to preach Methodism in Baltimore. An anvil borrowed from a blacksmith shop and set up on the corner of French and Front streets was his original pulpit. Again he mounted a table at Baltimore and Calvert Streets and this time the militia, on "training day parade" and lacking an enemy to practice upon, turned their rum-roused bravery upon the parson. The captain intervened and King bellowed on. He was an uproarious exhorter. It was to him that John Wesley had to address the admonition to "scream no more at the peril of your soul."

"God now warns you by me who he has set over you,” Wesley added. "Speak as earnestly as you can, but do not scream. Speak with all your heart, but with a moderate voice. It was said of our Lord-He shall not cry'; the word properly means he shall not scream. Herein be a follower of me as I am of Christ."

The advice was needed by many of the American zealots-like Benjamin Abbott and Lorenzo Dow whose rampageous rantings brought their revivaling into the realm of demonolatry.

Benjamin Abbott played tag with the Devil. The Fiend chased him and he chased the Fiend. Abbott claimed the victory and was not contradicted. In fact, his marvellous recitals of diabolical experience won so many converts in New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware that his score was up with the highest. Before his conversion in 1773 at the age of forty, Abbott had dreamed of a peep into a heaven of dazzling splendor, where he was told "Not yet, Ben

jamin,” and also of super-furnaced hell stoked by spiketailed imps who had him by the head and feet and were about to feed him to the flames when he woke up.

It was during his soul struggle at a revival near Salem, N. J., that he matched speed with Satan. He felt the hot breath on his neck as he slammed the door on the Enemy after a race to his home. Then he had a vision of the Christ that ended his doubts, took away his sin and sent him out to preach till that day in 1796 when he went "shouting home to glory."

Abbott's form of evangelizing was a pursuit of the Devil as dwelling within the bodies of sinners. He came to grips with the Adversary and the wrestlings were marked by down-falling, screaming and prostrating. A whole meeting house full of people would topple under the glare of his uncanny eyes and his thunders of damnation.

Asbury met him and frankly was mystified. All this was apart from Methodist doctrine, but there was the evidence manifest and the clarifying application of psychological analysis was not to be available to the world for half a century. Abbott was not only meddling with hypnotism but was himself the victim of auto-hypnosis.

Lorenzo Dow-"Crazy" Dow he was called-was another votary of visions. A Connecticut Yankee, born at Coventry in 1777, he was probably epileptic from childhood and this may account for his convulsions and trances. He dreamed of realistically operative heavens and hells and, after his conversion by a Methodist itinerant in 1796, his febrile brain, distraught from days of weeping, praying and fasting, conjured an encounter with the ghost of John Wesley enjoining him to preach.

Unaccepted by any Conference, once licensed as a lay exhorter only to jump all bounds, Dow, the self-styled

"Cosmopolite," roamed from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi Valley and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, kicking through the somber traditions of New England pioneering Protestantism in Alabama and Florida, and rowelling his hundreds upon hundreds through turmoils of mental and physical contortion to his peculiar variety of

conversion.

Twice he voyaged to England and Ireland where he vainly tried to innovate the camp meeting idea which captivated him on the Kentucky border and of which more will be told in another chapter. After 1804 his wanderings were shared by a wife, Peggy Miller, ingenuously referred to as "my rib," who acquired a wealth of material for her compilation of "The Vicissitudes of Life," the companion piece to "The Dealings of God, Man and the Devil as Exemplified in the Life Experiences of Lorenzo Dow in a Period of Over Half a Century."

Dow would drop into a place as if a cloud had let him fall there and the revival was on. His hair streamed down his back and his beard tipped his gaunt waistline. It seemed like a reincarnation of the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, albeit a hungry lion, with eyes flashing fire and voice roaring damnation.

As time went on, Dow's preaching got to be a continuous jeremiad and those who came under its influence joined in his moanings and groanings. His bodily afflictions became more acute and many a sermon was interrupted while he suffered a fit in the pulpit. His warped mentality ventured into prophecy with a proneness to calamity and once he had remarkable luck. About a year after a prediction by him the Mississippi Valley was rocked in 1812 by the worst earthquake in the history of the country. That was the peak of his work. Loyal Peggy, "plain as a pipe

stem but a woman of more than ordinary mind," as one who knew her said, trudged along beside Lorenzo whenever his raw-boned nags fell by the wayside till she died in 1820, fourteen years ahead of her eccentric husband.

Abbott and Dow were typical of many itinerant disseminators of individual interpretations of a meaningfulness of religion accepted as Methodistic but actually based upon crude theologizing and irrational tests of spiritual experience.

Among early Methodist evangelists of the solider sort were Robert Williams, Ezekiel Cooper, Freeborn Garretson and Jesse Lee. And they are to be distinguished as revival promoters from such church organization builders as Richard Boardman, Joseph Pilmoor and Thomas Rankin, who were sent over by John Wesley to consolidate the gains made by conversion.

Williams landed in Norfolk, Virginia, in the early Fall of 1769, a volunteer preacher from Ireland. He began his work much as the modern Salvation Army officer sets about it by standing on a street corner and singing a hearty hymn. He got his crowd. He prayed and preached, telling first the Lord and then the people why he was there. Afterward the wife of a sea captain gave him shelter in her home. There Williams prayed her into conversion and also besought the redemption of her husband at sea. It is in Methodist history that the skipper recorded an answer to the prayer that night in the ship's log. Whether this be true or apocryphal or mere coincidence, it happened in a day when to most men miracles were miracles.

Though Williams preached his way to Philadelphia and New York, it was in Virginia that he most advanced the cause of Methodism. Radiating from his famous Brunswick Circuit, the Gospel tidings swept the State in 1775, borne

first by Williams and then by George Shadford and a phalanx of salvationists under the generalship of Asbury himself. In that first year of the Revolution eighteen hundred Virginians were converted. After the war, in 1787, the revival went through again, attaining cyclonic dimensions and drawing more than three thousand to the Methodist altar amid a veritable wildfire of extreme emotional stress. Bending like reeds in a gale, rich and poor, white and black, the people experienced a contagion of vocal and spasmodic tumult that presaged the vortex of overwhelming mass agitation in the frontier camp meetings at the outset of the new century.

In the course of a decade the revival spread northward through New England, westward over the Alleghenies and southward into Baltimore, engulfing Baptists and Presbyterians but finding its greatest power in the Methodists. It was accepted as wholly religious, the way to understanding of the truth. Men of faith preached it and drove it forward. The sincerity was there and the selfsacrifice and courage that proved the exuberant vitality of a church in the making. It was a spiritual overflow, a Springtime freshet likely to have muddy and tumultuous waters, eventually to be cleared as they settled into calmer channels.

The Field Marshal of the Baltimore revival in 1789 was Ezekiel Cooper, one of the early stalwarts of American Methodism. Tall and straight as an Indian, making no pretense to oratorical style, he was a cogent reasoner that could command a multitude. Born in Caroline County, Maryland, in 1763, he had been preaching about four years when he led the singing, praying thousands through the streets of Baltimore to the Methodist mercy seat during that memorable summer. At the climax, with the whole