So I do not mind now admitting that William was a poor money-getter, but he actually did have the virtues that look well recorded on his tombstone. I can even recall, with a sort of tearful humor, some of his efforts at practical church thinking. He entertained with naive enthusiasm, for example, a certain proposition for regulating the support of the ministry, and would have sent it as a memorial to the General Conference, but for my interference. He had elaborated a plan by which every Methodist preacher should receive his salary on the pro rata basis as the superannuates do, according to the funds in hand, and according to their needs. It would be taken like any other Conference collection, turned in like any other to the treasury for this purpose. But the preacher on a mountain circuit with a wife and eight children would receive twenty-five hundred dollars, and the one with only a wife, even though he might be the pastor of a rich city church, would receive only a thousand dollars. Such a distribution of income would have placed a premium upon ministerial posterity and would have been as fatal as socialism to competition for the best pulpits in the Church connection. But I did not use this argument to William. He could not appreciate it. He was even capable of claiming that it proved the virtue of his proposition. "William," I exclaimed, when he confided in me, "promise me that you will never mention this dreadful plan, not even to a steward or to the Presiding Elder. It tends to Socialism, Communism and to Church volcanics generally. Your reputation would be ruined if you were suspected of entertaining such incendiary ideas!" He was aghast, having always regarded the very terms I used to describe his plan with righteous horror. And that was the last I ever heard of his pro rata salary system. Still, if all the preachers in the Church were as literally in earnest about living just to preach the gospel as William was, it would have been a good one. The fact is they are not. The very gifted, highly educated pastor of a rich city church feels it down to his spiritual bones that his gospel is worth more than that of the simple-minded itinerant on a country circuit. And most of them would have to experience something more illuminating and stringent even than the "second blessing" before they could be made to see the matter differently. And I do not blame them. We just can't get over being human and greedy and covetous anywhere, it seems, especially in a rich pulpit. William stood a better chance for developing the right heavenly mind in his part of the vineyard. And I ought to have been satisfied to see the way he grew in grace, and in that finer, sweeter knowledge of the Lord and his ways, but I never was.