“At any rate, I shall know the church. There it was that I first wrought in revivals, and every board and nail in it was precious. I found it. I entered by the basement side-door and stood in the lecture-room where I preached my first sermon, the same day of my arrival in town, to aid Rev. Dr. Jewett. It was a solemn feeling that stole over me. I saw the audience again. The seats were filled with shadowy listeners! It only needed to see a few of the familiar faces—L. H. Scott, Dr. Ketcham, Ball, Gookin, and others—to make it real again! Just then came up the aisle Harry Ross himself! It was the touch needed to round out the reminiscence. Only one fact disturbed the sweet illusion. This was not the same church. The old one had been burned, and this one took its place! It was a gentle shock to my sensibilities. But it stood on the very ground, and was on the old foundations, and upon the same plan, and looked like the old one, and so I inwardly voted that it _was_ the old one and took my comfort of it! The city is wonderfully improved in every way except to those sentimentalists who come hither to renew the past and live over again old experiences. “After the lecture, in a special train, we sped, through darkness and storm, to Indianapolis—three hours’ blessed ride. How different this midnight ride from the first one, thirty-five years before! For three weeks I had labored side by side with Brother Jewett—the first revival in which I had ever taken part! How helpless and wretched did I feel when Jewett sent for me—then newly settled in Indianapolis—to come over and help him! I had no effective sermons. I did not know how to preach in a revival. Yet my elders said, Go. I rode two days the lonely road, through beech forests (now all gone), in a dazed and wondering state. Hardly was my saddle empty before Jewett was at my elbow. ‘You have done well to come. You must preach to-night.’ In a moment the cloud lifted. The reluctance was gone. It has been so all my life. At a distance I dread and brood and shrink from any weighty enterprise; but the moment the occasion arrives joy shines clear, and an eager appetite to dash into the battle comes. “Three memorable weeks at a time when events stamp the memory and the heart as the die stamps the coin! When the time came to return home did ever heart swell with stronger and more unutterable feeling? To go back to the ordinary round of church life from this glowing centre seemed so intolerable that my whole nature and all my soul rose up in uncontrollable prayer. Through the beech woods, sometimes crying, sometimes singing, and always praying, I rode in one long controversy with God. ‘Slay me if Thou wilt, but do not send me home to barrenness. Thou _shalt_ go with me. I will not be refused. I am not afraid of Thee! I will prevail or die!’—these and even wilder strains went through the soul.