These meetings usually began late in the fall, about the time or just after the farmers had finished their fall work. The first symptom usually appeared in the slightly extra fervor which the minister put in his sermons and prayers on Sunday. Then a special prayer meeting would be set for some evening during the week. Other special meetings soon followed, so that, if all things were favorable, the revival or “protracted meeting” would be at a white heat within two or three weeks. In the meantime the fact would become known far and near, and the “protracted meeting” would be the leading event of the neighborhood. If the sleighing became good, parties would be formed miles away to go sleigh riding with this “protracted meeting” as their objective visiting point, often from idle curiosity or for want of something more instructive or entertaining to do. Others went equally far, through storm and mud, in wagons or on foot, from a higher sense of personal responsibility and duty. With many it was a most grave and serious business. The house was usually packed to repletion. Professional ambulatory revivalists, often from remoter parts of the state or county, would stop there on their religious crusades through the land, to attend and help at these meetings. Many of these were specially gifted in the kind of praying and speaking that was usually most successful at such times. It is not overdrawing to say that many times on a still night the noise of those meetings was heard a mile away from the church. In one occasion I saw a leading exhorter at one of those meetings enter the pulpit, take off his coat, hurl it into a corner, and standing in his shirt sleeves begin a wild and excited harangue. After possibly half an hour of most violent imprecations and raving he came down from the pulpit, jumped up on top of the rail which extended down the center of the room and divided the seats on the two sides of the house, and from there finished, and exhausted himself, begging and pleading with sinners to come forward and be converted, and invoking “hell fire” and all the torments supposed to accompany this kind of caloric, upon those who dared to smile or exhibit a sentiment or action not in accord with his. The principal argument at those meetings was something to excite fear through most terrible picturings of hell, and the length of an eternal damnation and death. Scores would be converted, and many would backslide before the probationary season had ended. Some were annually re-converted, and as often returned again to their natural state. Many remained true to the new life, and became useful and prominent members of the church and community. It cannot be successfully denied that many were reached and reformed at those meetings whose consciences never could have been touched by any milder form of preaching. They had to be gathered in a whirlwind or not at all. THE SECOND ADVENT