kept them outside the grog-shop.  Added to all this, there were many whose hearts were yet bleeding with wounds they had received in that terrible struggle out of which the nation had just emerged.  And now, afflicted with poverty, drouth, grasshoppers and starvation, we were left an agglomeration of heterogeneous materials, to fight our own battle as best we might.  We might hope for help from the Lord, but not from our brethren in the older States.  They were too busy debating the divine plan of missionary operations to help us.

The reader may well believe that the writer of these Recollections did not find himself carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease while this was going on, nor did he find himself reposing on a couch soft as downy pillows.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

Whatever may have been thought by a certain class of men, when the writer began his work in Kansas, it is now universally admitted among the Disciples that temperance work is legitimate church work—­that the saloon being an enemy to our homes and our families, and the greatest peril that confronts the church and nation, its extinction is a legitimate object of Christian endeavor.

There was a young evangelist prominently engaged with us in our early work whose history is so sad, and whose relations, who are of the excellent of the earth, have already had their hearts so wounded because of him, that I have not been able to bring myself to write his name.  He was of Irish descent, and before he became a preacher, or even a disciple, and while learning his trade, he had formed the drinking habit.  He was not a young man of brilliant gifts, but they were solid.  Moreover, he was humble, patient, industrious and persevering, and, having excellent health and a good physical organization, he gave promise of enduring usefulness.  In short, he belonged to that class of young men that, while the people do not spoil them with flattery, yet the church set a great store by them.  I can not write the history of his fall, for it was not made known even to his friends; only this, that the time came that he seemed hesitating whether he should continue a preacher, and finally he wholly abandoned the ministry.  His wife, who was a most estimable and Christian lady, was paralyzed with grief.  At length the shameful truth came out—­he was a drunkard!  A brother undertook to admonish him of the awful fate that awaited him in the future world, but this apostate and disgraced preacher turned fiercely around and said:  “don’t talk to me of hell!  I am in hell now!”