FRIDAY, June 17.  Dine and feed our horses in Moorefield, and get to Nimrod Judy’s, where we stay all night.

SATURDAY, June 18.  Get home.

SUNDAY, July 24.  Go to Ritchey’s schoolhouse, in the Gap.  Isaac Rodecap’s wife is baptized.  Dine at Philip Ritchey’s, and have evening meeting at Addison Harper’s.  A few references to the life of Brother Addison Harper may not be out of place here.  The Editor was intimately acquainted with him.  Brother Harper’s early life was largely passed on the Atlantic ocean as a sailor.  He settled in Rockingham County, Virginia, in the later years of his life, and openly avowed his disbelief of holy revelation.  A few years prior to the date above given he was honored by the people of his county with a seat in the Virginia State legislature.  When the Rebellion broke out in 1861 he raised a company of Confederate volunteers and served as their captain through the war.  Very soon after the surrender, when worldly ambition had succumbed to the direful state of the Southern people, his mind seems to have sought for something more enduring than aught the world could offer.  He turned to religion with the honest purpose of seeking to learn if that might have in it such proofs of its genuineness and reliability as would give better hopes to his soul than those which had so sadly disappointed him in life.  One day as he and I were riding together to attend a meeting in which we both took part, I asked him to tell me the secret of the power that had made him a minister in the church of the Brethren.  Said he, “It is all traceable to two great facts:  first, the humble, peaceful, moral and charitable lives of the members; last, the simple and unperverted truths they teach.”  “Without the first,” continued he, “the last would have made no impression on my heart; but the proofs they gave of their honesty in the first led me to believe there must be truth in the last; and the more I learn about it, the more I am convinced that I was right.  Johnny Kline repeatedly preached at my house before the war, but I paid very little attention to what he said.  I always admired his earnestness, and the simplicity of his manner, but beyond these I paid him but little respect outside of the civilities of common decency.  But now it is different.  I would willingly part with all I have to enjoy but one hour’s conversation with him, to but tell him how I now feel toward him in my new life, and how much I now appreciate what I then could not understand.”

SATURDAY, August 6.  Love feast at Michael Wine’s, in the Gap.  Absalom Rodecap and wife are baptized by Jacob Miller.  Fine day and evening.  I officiate at love feast.  Brother Martain Miller is with us, and his feelings are very deeply moved as he proceeds in his discourse.

The Editor will here add what a very dear sister, now gone to heaven, told him shortly before her death.  He read to her the above note in the Diary, and all at once her face beamed with the happy recollection and she exclaimed:  “I was there at that love feast, and Brother Martain Miller grew so warm and so happy in his theme that he got from behind the table, came out into the middle of the room, and spoke as if talking to each one personally.”