Cross, Jonathan; Evangelists -- United States -- Biography; Missions -- Appalachian Region
A young woman came up to me, having just reached the place, and asked
me for a book. I told her I had given away all that I had brought with
me. She burst into tears, and said, “I left my babe, three weeks old,
in the field where my husband was hoeing corn, and walked five miles
in my bare feet to get a book; and now I am disappointed.” In a few
minutes an old woman who had seen seventy winters came to me with a
crutch under one arm, and a cane in the other hand, and told me she
had come two miles to get books for her sons, who were raising large
families over the mountains, that were as wild as the deers. I returned
soon, and gave the necessary supply.
One day a man entered my room wearing a hunting-shirt and moccasins,
with a gun in his hand and a long knife hanging to a belt at his side,
and asked me if I was the man that gave books to the poor people in the
mountains. I told him I was engaged in that business. “Well,” said
he, “we live in an out of the way place, where we have neither schools
nor preaching; and we met together last Sunday to see if we could not
raise a Sunday-school, and teach our children to read, but all the
books we could find was one New Testament; and some one said there was
a man in F---- that was giving books to the poor, and so I have come
to see you about it.” I gave him all the light I could as to forming
and conducting a Sunday-school, and added twenty Testaments, with fifty
small volumes of Tract Society books, and some tracts. He soon had them
all in the bosom of his hunting shirt, and I have seldom seen a happier
man.
The next Sabbath the school was started. In six months a church was
organized, and soon after a little church built, and a man of God was
preaching to them once each month. That bosom full of books was the
means God blessed to this result.
On another occasion I stopped over night with a good man, who related
to me the following fact.
“A few years ago a minister came to my house late on Saturday night
on his way to preach at L----, about thirty miles distant. Finding he
could not reach the place in time to meet his appointment, he told me
if I would gather in my neighbors, he would preach for us. There were
but a few families in all this valley, and so far as I knew, he was the
first preacher that ever had been in it, at least he preached the first
sermon. I sent my boys out and gathered in my neighbors. At the close
of his sermon he gave every one a tract. Among the rest he gave one to
a poor widow with a large family, but neither she nor any one of her
children knew a letter. She took it home with her without any knowledge
of its contents.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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