`` `Yes, they will,' I said, cheerfully, keeping at my work. Whereupon he watched me a few minutes longer and said:
`` `Well, you can put me down for one hundred dollars for the new building. Come up to my livery-stable and get it this evening.'
`` `All right; I'll surely be there,' I replied.
``In a little while another man came along and stopped and looked, and he rather gibed at the idea of a new church, and when I told him of the livery-stable man contributing one hundred dollars, he said, `But you haven't got the money yet!'
`` `No,' I said; `but I am going to get it to-night.'
`` `You'll never get it,' he said. `He's not that sort of a man. He's not even a church man!'
``But I just went quietly on with the work, without answering, and after quite a while he left; but he called back, as he went off, `Well, if he does give you that hundred dollars, come to me and I'll give you another hundred.' ''
Conwell smiles in genial reminiscence and without any apparent sense that he is telling of a great personal triumph, and goes on:
``Those two men both paid the money, and of course the church people themselves, who at first had not quite understood that I could be in earnest, joined in and helped, with work and money, and as, while the new church was building, it was peculiarly important to get and keep the congregation together, and as they had ceased to have a minister of their own, I used to run out from Boston and preach for them, in a room we hired.
``And it was there in Lexington, in 1879, that I determined to become a minister. I had a good law practice, but I determined to give it up. For many years I had felt more or less of a call to the ministry, and here at length was the definite time to begin.
``Week by week I preached there''--how strange, now, to think of William Dean Howells and the colonel-preacher!--``and after a while the church was completed, and in that very church, there in Lexington, I was ordained a minister.''
A marvelous thing, all this, even without considering the marvelous heights that Conwell has since attained--a marvelous thing, an achievement of positive romance! That little church stood for American bravery and initiative and self-sacrifice and romanticism in a way that well befitted good old Lexington.
To leave a large and overflowing law practice and take up the ministry at a salary of six hundred dollars a year seemed to the relatives of Conwell's wife the extreme of foolishness, and they did not hesitate so to express themselves. Naturally enough, they did not have Conwell's vision. Yet he himself was fair enough to realize and to admit that there was a good deal of fairness in their objections; and so he said to the congregation that, although he was quite ready to come for the six hundred dollars a year, he expected them to double his salary as soon as he doubled the church membership. This seemed to them a good deal like a joke, but they answered in perfect earnestness that they would be quite willing to do the doubling as soon as he did the doubling, and in less than a year the salary was doubled accordingly.
I asked him if he had found it hard to give up the lucrative law for a poor ministry, and his reply gave a delightful impression of his capacity for humorous insight into human nature, for he said, with a genial twinkle:
``Oh yes, it was a wrench; but there is a sort of romance of self-sacrifice, you know. I rather suppose the old-time martyrs rather enjoyed themselves in being martyrs!''
Conwell did not stay very long in Lexington.
A struggling little church in Philadelphia heard of what he was doing, and so an old deacon went up to see and hear him, and an invitation was given; and as the Lexington church seemed to be prosperously on its feet, and the needs of the Philadelphia body keenly appealed to Conwell's imagination, a change was made, and at a salary of eight hundred dollars a year he went, in 1882, to the little struggling Philadelphia congregation, and of that congregation he is still pastor--only, it ceased to be a struggling congregation a great many years ago! And long ago it began paying him more thousands every year than at first it gave him hundreds.
Dreamer as Conwell always is in connection with his immense practicality, and moved as he is by the spiritual influences of life, it is more than likely that not only did Philadelphia's need appeal, but also the fact that Philadelphia, as a city, meant much to him, for, coming North, wounded from a battle-field of the Civil War, it was in Philadelphia that he was cared for until his health and strength were recovered. Thus it came that Philadelphia had early become dear to him.
And here is an excellent example of how dreaming great dreams may go hand-in-hand with winning superb results. For that little struggling congregation now owns and occupies a great new church building that seats more people than any other Protestant church in America--and Dr. Conwell fills it!
