The population of Nova Scotia in 1781 numbered twelve thousand, of whom there were about one hundred Acadian families, and exclusive of Cape Breton, three hundred warriors of the Micmac, and one hundred and forty of the Malicete tribes of Indians. Places of worship were few and widely scattered over a large extent of country, and so destitute were the people of religious privileges that many of them seldom heard a sermon, and as some of these people had been brought up in the bonds of the faith, they naturally felt very keenly their condition. These facts could not fail to impress very deeply such a sensitive soul, rejoicing in his first love, and possessed of a burning passion for the salvation of men, whose lips had been touched with holy fire. When his labors had been so richly blessed in the conversion of many souls, while preaching in the time spared from his labor on the farm, his mind was led toward a complete consecration to the work of a Christian minister, and when he had arrived at the age of twenty-one years, he dedicated himself wholly to the cause of Christ, as the first Methodist missionary in the Maritime Provinces. Without any college training, or the help of any minister or church institution, he left his father's home on November 10th, 1781, and commenced a career of undaunted energy, and boundless influence, laying foundations for others, and becoming essentially the founder of Methodism in Eastern British America. During the eight years of his life from 1781 to 1789, he passed from the position of a raw youth, entering alone amid great difficulties upon the work of a pioneer evangelist, to that of Superintendent of the Methodist Church in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland. With the zeal of an apostle he entered upon a career of usefulness, which for courage and incessant travelling and preaching, place him side by side with John Wesley and Francis Asbury. Here and there, all over the province he went proclaiming the message of salvation, preaching every day, and sometimes more frequently, as we learn of him preaching eighteen times in eight days, and upon another journey which occupied eighteen days, he preached twenty-four times.