He began a new church work in the old Baptist church building at Lexington, Mass., and he opened in a schoolhouse the mission from which grew the West Somerville (Mass.) Baptist church. He was special counselor for four new Railroad companies and for two new National banks. In Philadelphia, in addition to being the founder of the first Institutional church in America, of a college practically free for busy men and women, and a hospital for the sick poor, he has organized twenty or more societies for religions and benevolent purposes including the Philadelphia Orphan's Home Society. His pioneer work is not all. As a lecturer Dr. Conwell is known from the Atlantic to the Pacific, having been on the lecture platform for forty-three years, speaking from one hundred to two hundred and twenty-five nights each year. As an author he has written books that have run into editions of hundreds of thousands, his "Life of Spurgeon" selling one hundred and twenty-five thousand copies in four months. He has been around the globe many times, counted among his intimate friends Garibaldi, Bayard Taylor, Stanley, Longfellow, Blaine, Henry Ward Beecher, John G. Whittier, President Garfield, Horace Greeley, Alexander Stevens, John Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John B. Gough and General Sherman. He fought in the war of the Rebellion, was left for dead on the battlefield of Kenesaw mountain--in fact, he has had a career as picturesque and thrilling as a Scott or Dumas could picture. Yet the man whose energy has reared enduring monuments of stone, and more lasting ones in the hearts of thousands whose lives he has made happier and brighter, fought his way upward alone and single-handed from a childhood of poverty. He rose by his own efforts, in the face of great and seemingly insurmountable obstacles and discouragements. The path he took from that little humble farmhouse to the big church, the wide-reaching college, the kindly hospital, the head of the Lecture Platform, it is the purpose of this book to picture, in the hope that it may be helpful to others, either young or old, who desire to better their condition, or to do some work of which the inner voice tells them the world is in need. Dr. Conwell believes, with George Macdonald, that "The one secret of life and development is not to devise or plan, but to fall in with the forces at work--to do every moment's duty aright--that being the part in the process allotted to us; and let come ... what the Eternal Thought wills for each of us, has intended in each of us from the first." Or in the words of the greatest of Books, "See that thou make it according to the pattern that was shewed thee in the mount."