As a flame of fire, Fisher itinerated all over California and Oregon, kindling a blaze of revival in almost every place he touched.  He was mighty in the Scriptures, and seemed to know the Book by heart.  His was no rose-water theology.  He believed in a hell, and pictured it in Bible language with a vividness and awfulness that thrilled the stoutest sinner’s heart; he believed in heaven, and spoke of it in such a way that it seemed that with him faith had already changed to sight.  The gates of pearl, the crystal river, the shining ranks of the white-robed throngs, their songs swelling as the sound of many waters, the holy love and rapture of the glorified hosts of the redeemed, were made to pass in panoramic procession before the listening multitudes until the heaven he pictured seemed to be a present reality.  He lived in the atmosphere of the supernatural; the spirit-world was to him most real.

“I have been out of the body,” he said to me one day.  The words were spoken softly, and his countenance, always grave in its aspect, deepened in its solemnity of expression as he spoke.

“How was that?” I inquired.

“It was in Texas.  I was returning from a quarterly-meeting where I had preached one Sunday morning with great liberty and with unusual effect.  The horses attached to my vehicle became frightened, and ran away.  They were wholly beyond control, plunging down the road at a fearful speed, when, by a slight turn to one side, the wheel struck a large log.  There was a concussion, and then a blank.  The next thing I knew I was floating in the air above the road.  I saw every thing as plainly as I see your face at this moment.  There lay my body in the road, there lay the log, and there were the trees, the fence, the fields, and every thing, perfectly natural.  My motion, which had been upward, was arrested, and as, poised in the air, I looked at my body lying there in the road so still, I felt a strong desire to go back to it, and found myself sinking toward it.  The next thing I knew I was lying in the road where I had been thrown out, with a number of friends about me, some holding up my head, others chafing my hands, or looking on with pity or alarm.  Yes, I was out of the body for a little, and I know there is a spirit-world.”

His voice had sunk into a sort of whisper, and the tears were in his eyes.  I was strangely thrilled.  Both of us were silent for a time, as if we heard the echoes of voices, and saw the beckonings of shadowy hands from that Other World which sometimes seems so far away, and yet is so near to each one of us.

Surely you heaven, where angels see God’s face, Is not so distant as we deem From this low earth.  ’Tis but a little space, ’Tis but a veil the winds might blow aside; Yes, this all that us of earth divide From the bright dwellings of the glorified, The land of which I dream.

But it was no dream to this man of mighty faith, the windows of whose soul opened at all times Godward.  To him immortality was a demonstrated fact, an experience.  He had been out of the body.