evangelism of Dr. Wilbur S. Chapman. Alexander had been with Dr. Reuben A. Torrey who carried on for Moody and Gabriel wrote the music for hymns that shook the rafters of William Sunday's tabernacles-"Since Jesus Came into My Heart," "He Lifted Me," and "Brighten the Corner Where You Are."

The Gospel hymn has come a long way and the number of the survivors is remarkable because the melody has always been of the day and the verse attuned to contemporary emotional coloration. Many of the songs could not endure transplanting from the Victorian vineyard to the soil of twentieth-century sophistication. "Easy" to sing, "catchy" and sentimental, they vanished when the only books to contain them wore out and were not restored.

Those that linger on are deeply deserving. They are like conversions which lasted. They are of whatever good there is in the revival. They perpetuate the very spirit of religion, the human response to love divine and the kinship of the generations hearing and answering the voice of the Psalmist who cried-"O sing unto the Lord a new song: sing unto the Lord, all the earth!"

This was the song that filled the heart of man before he gave it words, the song the shepherds may have heard nigh Bethlehem the night the world was new again. Through the centuries never stilled, it has lived in the everlasting evangel hymn. And yet no poet has more than sensed the measure of its majesty. Only in the artless freedom of the earliest song of all have the power and the glory known no bounds.

Such music was brought to America by a stolen and an oppressed people. In their plantation days of servitude and in the "protracted" and camp meetings after their liberation, the Negroes adapted the Christian Gospel and the re

vival to their own fathomless religious tradition and their response in song was from a racial stream flowing from the elemental springs of mankind's nativity.

The crooning of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," the swinging cadence of "The Old Ark's A-Movering" and "All Over God's Heaven," the pulsing pathos of "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" and "It's Me Standing in the Need of Prayer," and the exultant peal of "Roll, Jordan, Roll" and "When the Stars Begin to Fall"—all pour out the ingenuous, unimpeded high feeling of a race with a unique natural musical sensitivity, a soul aglow with the first light of creation. The Negro spiritual is the purest revival melody of all time.

I

CHAPTER X

SALVATION RIDES THE CIRCUIT

Must Jesus bear the cross alone,

And all the world go free?

No, there's a cross for every one,
And there's a cross for me.

THOMAS SHEPHERD, 1665-1739.

Tis the second Sunday of September, 1832. A multi

tude of Methodists are gathered in camp meeting at

Springfield, Illinois, drawn from homes a hundred miles around by the name of one man. A new presiding elder is coming from Kentucky, a bronzed veteran of the circuits whose voice, now the clangor of an alarm bell, now the chime of a throbbing hymn, has been ringing in the wilderness for a quarter of a century, whose renown was borne over the mountains and through the valleys and across the plains as swiftly as the Gospel message he himself is bringing.

Breakfast fires are smoldering as the motley company of backwoodsmen and their families flock to the preacher's stand for the eight o'clock service. The sun shines down from an azure sky and the day is perfect for the far traveller, but he does not appear. The great horn blows for the eleven o'clock convocation, the hour always set apart for the heavy guns to boom from the pulpit, and still the sole expectation of this vast assemblage is not fulfilled. Preaching there must be and one from the circuit ranks