whose salvation shout after a record trance of thirty-two hours was responsible for a general soul-harvest. Among those affected by her was a blasphemous young man. A spasm of the "jerks" choked his defiance of God. Finley set no special store by such outward manifestations and in the case of the young man frankly said that all depended upon whether he stopped swearing.

Both Finley and Cartwright took the offensive against the credal epidemic set afoot by the New Lights and the border rang with their denunciations of "Arianism,” "Socinianism," and "Universalism." The first two doctrines were subversive of the Trinity and by the third all mankind was to be saved. It was a duel of revivals. The New Lights lost out. Another crusade was against the rum demon. Cartwright waged his in "class meeting" cross-examination, but Finley invaded the lines of the

enemy.

Not only log-rolling, reaping, husking and barn-raising provided an excuse for alcoholic overindulgence but also the gentler diversion of quilting, the social amenities of weddings and the solemn rites for the dead. Other denominations did not mind, but the "fanatic" Methodists made it a rule of their discipline to restrict liquor to medicinal use.

Finley's overt act was refusing to have a ten-gallon keg of whisky for a "room-mate" and threatening to unchurch its obstinate owner if "anything immoral" transpired at his next-day barn-raising. Then Finley opened fire from the pulpit. An old exhorter advised him to quit and go home if he couldn't "preach the Gospel and let private people's business alone." Finley's reply was a forecast of twentieth-century Methodism.

"I will not go home," he said. "I have a mission from God to break up this stronghold of the devil. By His help I will do it, despite of all distillers and aiders and abettors in the Church!"

He started with one old man, who experimented to ascertain that whisky was the cause and not the cure of his headaches, and he got a thousand on one circuit to sign the pledge. And once he boldly exhorted a crowded barroom, thundering at the bacchanalian brawlers: "Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee life!"

If this was a work of supererogation, so also was the unflagging annexation of Gospel territory as fast as it was settled. The tribe of Cartwright and Finley never yielded, never retreated. Every camp meeting brought out fresh recruits for the expanding revival and one of them went East instead of West.

John Colby, born in the flesh on December 9, 1787, on the side of Tripyramid Mountain at Sandwich, New Hampshire, and reborn of the spirit twenty years later at Billymead, now Sutton, Vermont, alternated his soul-saving novitiate with sufficient secular toil to buy and saddle the horse that took him in the Spring of 1810 to the Zanesville (Ohio) zone of hard-riding righteousness.

What originally set him off was a vision of himself standing in the Day of Judgment on an endless plain with not a New England rock or gray birch to hide him from the wrath sublime that convulsed the earth and sky. Every bolt from the third heavens had him for its target. Suddenly the commotion ceased, the Gates of Glory opened and John was caught up into the Kingdom. This was the source of the "call" that took him across Pennsylvania,

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
And cast a wistful eye

To Canaan's fair and happy land
Where my possessions lie.

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