Russell H. Conwell, founder of the Institutional church in America : $b the work and the manBurr, Agnes Rush
Religion
Russell H. Conwell, founder of the Institutional church in America : $b the work and the man
Burr, Agnes Rush
Conwell, Russell H., 1843-1925; Minneapolis (Minn.) -- Biography
But the best illustration that I have now of this thought was found
here in Pennsylvania. There was a man living in Pennsylvania who
owned a farm here and he did what I should do if I had a farm in
Pennsylvania--he sold it. But before he sold it he concluded to secure
employment collecting coal oil for his cousin in Canada. They first
discovered coal oil there. So this farmer in Pennsylvania decided that
he would apply for a position with his cousin in Canada. Now, you see,
this farmer was not altogether a foolish man. He did net leave his
farm until he had something else to do. Of all the simpletons the
stars shine on there is none more foolish than a man who leaves one
job before he has obtained another. And that has especial reference to
gentlemen of my profession, and has no reference to a man seeking a
divorce. So I say this old farmer did not leave one job until he had
obtained another. He wrote to Canada, but his cousin replied that he
could not engage him because he did not know anything about the oil
business. "Well, then," said he, "I will understand it." So he set
himself at the study of the whole subject. He began at the second day
of the creation, he studied the subject from the primitive vegetation
to the coal oil stage, until he knew all about it. Then he wrote to
his cousin and said, "Now I understand the oil business." And his
cousin replied to him, "All right, then, come on." That man, by the
record of the county, sold his farm for eight hundred and thirty-three
dollars--even money, "no cents." He had scarcely gone from that farm
before the man who purchased it went out to arrange for the watering
the cattle and he found that the previous owner had arranged the
matter very nicely. There is a stream running down the hillside there,
and the previous owner had gone out and put a plank across that stream
at an angle, extending across the brook and down edgewise a few inches
under the surface of the water. The purpose of the plank across that
brook was to throw over to the other bank a dreadful-looking scum
through which the cattle would not put their noses to drink above the
plank, although they would drink the water on one side below it. Thus
that man who had gone to Canada had been himself damming back for
twenty-three years a flow of coal oil which the State Geologist of
Pennsylvania declared officially, as early as 1870, was then worth to
our State a hundred millions of dollars. The city of Titusville now
stands on that farm and those Pleasantville wells flow on, and that
farmer who had studied all about the formation of oil since the second
day of God's creation clear down to the present time, sold that farm
for $833, no cents--again I say "no sense."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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