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Nothing that comes to him of light now can lighten those other days far down the years when he lost his way and had no one to preach to him nor lead him. For the one tragedy that marked the course of our lives in the itinerancy was not the poverty and hardships through which we passed, it was the periodic backsliding of William. This is a pathetic secret that I never mentioned during his lifetime.
I had been in it long enough to know that the "witness of the Spirit" is the hero of the Methodist itinerancy, that a preacher without it is as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal, that he is in a rôle of a great play which has been rejected by the "star." I wiped the mourning dew from William's brow, laid my face against his and wept in silent sympathy.
I can feel that I am not setting things down right, not making the latitude and longitude of experience clearly so that you may see as I can when I close my eyes the staggering tombstones in the brown shadows behind the little brown church. But when one has been in the Methodist itinerancy a lifetime one cannot do that.
At the close of the Conference, I found myself appointed Presiding Elder of Fond du Lac District. The appointment was a surprise to both myself and family. But accepting the situation as a legitimate feature of the Itinerancy, we entered at once upon the needed preparations for a removal to Fond du Lac.
The time has now come to send teachers to follow the books: the ideas of the university being circulated through the country as a whole, while residence at a university is reserved as the apex only of the university system. An itinerancy implies central and local management, and travelling lecturers who connect the two.
His appointments have been Summerfield, Janesville, Janesville District, Racine District, Asbury, Division Street. Court Street, Janesville, and Appleton. Brother Tilton is a veteran in the work, having been in the Itinerancy nearly thirty-four years. Having possessed a vigorous constitution and firm health, he has taken his full share of privation and hard work.
The varlets borrowed the grand idea of care-free itinerancy and debased it, as waiters borrow a gentleman's evening dress for their menial uniform, and drunken coachmen wear the same head-gear that a duke wears to a wedding! Why prove evolution by searching for a man with a tail? The performances of human nature must convince any thinking man that we have descended from apes!"
But among the backsliders of the class I have mentioned you will find the bravest moral heroes of the spiritual world, men who have the courage to repent and try again with an enthusiasm that is sublime in the face of the lack of confidence expressed in them on all sides. They are a distinct class, and as we went on in the itinerancy I learned to call them God's annuals.
On the one hand, he was an intimate friend of the Wesleys and other leaders of the Methodist movement, both lay and clerical; he welcomed them at Haworth and lent them his pulpit; he took part in the work of itinerancy, and, in fact, threw himself heart and soul into the Methodist cause.
Going down the scale of indigence we find an itinerancy amounting almost to homelessness, or houses so abject that they are an insult to the very name of home.
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