During the summer of 1851 the cholera raged in Milwaukee in a most
appalling manner. The whole city was a hospital. For several days
together it was claimed there were fifty deaths per day. Though
earnestly entreated to leave the city, as many others had done, I
declined, feeling that my life was no more precious than the lives of
others. Besides, it seemed to me, if there is ever a time when a people
need the aid of their Pastor, it is when they are in peril and
affliction. When at the height of its ravages, I repeatedly attended
six funerals a day, and visited a dozen sick persons. The very men whom
I met at a funeral one day, I would bury the next. Mingling thus daily
with the sick and dying, I could not well escape myself. I suffered two
attacks during the season, but through great mercy, the lives both of
myself and family were spared.
During this terrible visitation I had frequent opportunities to test the
value of the Christian religion. So marked was the difference between
the death-bed scenes of Christians and the unconverted that even
Infidels themselves could not refrain from referring to it. As if to
teach the people this great lesson, there were a few instances of
triumphant deaths, and a few of the opposite class. One good sister, as
she was gliding across the stream, enquired, "Is this Jordan?" She was
told it was. "How calm and placid are its waters," she added. "I
expected to find the billows running high, but, glory to Jesus! there is
not a ripple upon all the stream."
Unlike this scene was the death of a young man who had sent for me in
great haste. On entering the room, I recognized him as a young man whom
I had repeatedly urged, during our meeting of the previous winter, to
give himself to the Saviour. He was now in the throes of dissolution and
I could hardly hope to reach him. Wild with frenzy, he seemed to pray
and curse with the same breath. As a momentary interval occurred between
the paroxysms, I sought to arrest his attention and divert his thought
to Christ. He turned his piercing eyes on me and said, "Oh! it is too
late. Last winter, if I had yielded to your kind admonitions, all would
now be well, but it is too late, too late." Another paroxysm seized him,
and he was lost to all consciousness, and soon ceased to breathe.