Still, there is a kind of sacrilegious confidence in prayer that always offended some delicacy in me, and William felt it too, only he never learned how to condemn it. His sense of reverence was not sufficiently discriminating. And there was an occasion where I had to rid him and his congregation of this sublimated form of spiritual indecency. As I have said, we were sent now to small stations, village churches, or mission churches in the factory edges of the big cities. But William's years, the hardships and anxieties, both earthly and unearthly, to which he had been exposed began to tell on his strength. And the year we were at Springdale as the summer came on he felt unequal to conducting the usual six weeks' protracted meeting without help. And while six weeks may seem a long time to hold such services, it is really a very short time for people to get revived and heaven-minded in when all the rest of the year they have been otherwise minded. The wonder to me was that men who had driven hard bargains and hated some one or more neighbors for ten months; that women who had given themselves over to the littleness and lightness of a small fashionable life in a small town, or to gossip about those who did, could so quickly recover their moral and spiritual standards in a revival. I remember that it was William's custom, as soon as there was the least interest manifested, to have a very searching service for his church members in which he called upon all those who were at enmity with one another to rectify whatever wrong they had committed and to be reconciled. Nearly always some stiff-necked steward had had a row with somebody else, apt as not a sinner. He would be expected to go out and find the man, whoever it was, and patch up the difficulty, and to report at the next service. I can see now the old spiritual hard-heads in William's congregations with whom, year in and year out, he had the greatest trouble. They always managed to "fall out with somebody" between revivals. But nothing in or out of the Kingdom of Heaven would make one of them admit he was in the wrong or induce him to go to the other person and attempt a reconciliation. The most you could get out of any one of them would be that if his enemy came to him and asked his pardon, he was willing to "forgive him!" If the said enemy was a good natured fellow, William usually managed to get him to make this concession, otherwise the old hard-head remained cold and aggrieved through out the revival, maybe casting a damper over the whole meeting: a figure in the Amen corner at which the young unregenerated sinners would point the finger of scorn and accusation when they were implored to repent and believe and behave themselves.