Memoir of Rev. Joseph Badger: Fourth EditionHolland, E. G. (Elihu Goodwin)
History
Memoir of Rev. Joseph Badger: Fourth Edition
Holland, E. G. (Elihu Goodwin)
Badger, Joseph, 1792-1852
centralization of power to the injury of congregational sentiments. At
the meeting which followed the Conference, Sunday, September 8, Mr.
Badger preached the third discourse from Deut. 32: 10: "He found him in
a waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept
him as the apple of his eye." To a people who regarded the church as
being still in the wilderness, as merging by slow degrees out into light
and liberty, and as always dependent on Him who led, taught, and guarded
the ancient Israel of his choice, such a text and sermon were suited to
the time and the occasion.
In 1823, he made a tour into Pennsylvania, accompanied by S. D. Buzzael,
a minister of whom he speaks as being well engaged in the cause.
Preaching on the way in several towns, in Dansville, Naples, Cohocton
and Bath, he arrived, in the early part of the month of March, at the
pleasant village of Lewisburg, in Union County, Pa., a village that lies
embosomed in the wild and attractive scenery of the Susquehannah,
between the towns of Milton and Northumberland. On the way, he held a
quarterly meeting which he had previously appointed among the Methodists
in the town of Cohocton, Steuben County, where he met about forty church
members and two ministers who had thrown off the authority of bishops,
and styled themselves Methodists, rejecting episcopacy both from their
name and their doctrine. To them, in company with D. Millard, of West
Bloomfield, he preached and administered the communion to a free and
happy people, learning at the same time that in New York there were
about six hundred members in connection with them in this their new and
reformatory position.
Crossing the Cohocton and the Canisteo rivers, in company with Mr.
Buzzael, he followed the course of the Tioga to the town of Icoga, Pa.,
then crossing Peter's Camp and the Block House to Lycoming by the
Wilderness road, as it was justly called, he continued his way through
the enveloping night and the descending rain. "We had," says Mr. B., "to
ascend and descend dreadful mountains to obtain a lodging among
strangers in a strange land. We were fatigued and sorrowful; but Brother
Buzzael broke the silence of the way by singing the following lines:
"Though dark be my way, since He is my guide,
'Tis mine to obey, 'tis His to provide;
Though cisterns be broken and creatures all fail,
The _word He_ has spoken will _surely_ prevail."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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