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
the hundreds before me from Gen. 49: 10. It was free air.
Between thirty and forty spoke after the sermon, so that
without a minute of vacation, the meeting continued five
hours. The opposers were put to shame, and ever since has
that meeting-house been free. Nottingham, therefore, by
many events is kept in my memory."
Although there are several interesting letters written by him about this
time to his relatives and friends, letters that abound in good feeling,
in various incident, and in the devoted spirit of his mission, they
cannot be introduced without sacrificing the material that represents
his later years. Confining ourselves, therefore, to the shortest
statement of his public life, we will follow the direct path of his own
private journal. But in reading letters dictated in the freedom of the
heart, and alive with the inspiration of earnest purposes, one is
conscious of the resurrection of a former period; and with the aspect of
the olden leaf and the evangelical words upon them written, one seems to
drink, for the time, of the same fountain of life that supplied with
energy the self-sacrificing and the God-trusting ones. We know that
forms of thinking and modes of expression are greatly varied by the
succession of time, but we have yet to learn that the pure flame of the
spirit, through any medium and in any time, is other than one with the
latest excellence. Naturalness, energy, courage, persevering devotion to
the welfare of mankind, are qualities that, like gold retained, shine
equally brilliant through all the divisions of time, the same in 1815 as
in 1854.
August 22d, of this year, he announced, through the religious newspaper
at Portsmouth, a paper from which some extracts have been taken, his
intention of attending a general meeting in Bradford, Vt., the first
Sunday in September, and of going thence into the Province of Lower
Canada to visit his relatives, and to renew the friendship of former
times with the churches of his former care. To his father, in a letter
dated Newmarket, August 5th, he says:--
"I am now preaching in Exeter, Stratham, Newmarket, Epping,
Lee, Nottingham Square, Deerfield. Often from one to two
thousand people attend at a meeting. I have baptized
towards one hundred since last January, and the call for
preaching is very general in this quarter."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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