By COLEMAN E. BISHOP.

V.—A METHODIST DON QUIXOTE.

The place of Lorenzo Dow in the American pulpit is peculiar. He might be called “The Great Disowned.” He passed his life a wandering, outcast preacher; did a great work alone, generally unacknowledged by any religious body; opposed by the societies and maligned by many of the clergy, whom he powerfully aided; and in death his name and work would have sunk into undeserved oblivion, but for his own writings in which, with prophetic instinct, he preserved the record of his own sacrifices and successes, and the scant recognition accorded them. He also recorded with impartial fidelity his own “fantastic tricks” and erratic independence, which furnish the only excuse for the treatment he received. He called himself a Methodist, and refused to work inside church lines. A zealous, even bigoted sectarian; he preached in open defiance of all denominational polity. He was a clerical bushwhacker.

The time in which Dow flourished was a remarkable one politically, commercially and religiously. It was the formative age of the Constitution and of the American Republic. It saw the creation of American commerce and the opening up of the continent to settlement. And it has been well called “the heroic age of American Methodism.”

As the sense of dependence on the mother country, and of subjection to royal authority wore off, the people began to grow rapidly in mental and moral stature. The population which had timidly hugged the Atlantic coast, as if afraid to lose sight of the British navy, now turned its eyes inland, its thoughts over the whole world. The pioneer spirit awoke. The “Northwest Territory” was organized for settlement; Louisiana and Florida were purchased and the great Mississippi basin was opened up. Indian nations were subdued and “city lots were staked for sale above old Indian graves.” A second war was fought with Great Britain, to drive her from our path of advance on land or sea. Settlers in a thousand directions ramified the wilderness with the nerves and arteries of civilization. The growth of men’s ideas was to correspond with expansion of territory—for “the spirit grows with its allotted spaces.” It became evident, even in the first generation of the Republic, that a new people had been raised up—almost as Roderick Dhu’s men sprang from the brake—to subjugate a continent and to create sovereign states out of the rudiments of empire which yet lay plastic and warm in the wilderness.

The spirit of unrest, of adventure, of expansion, seized all classes and occupations; and the pioneers of the Cross pressed into the wilderness side by side with the bearers of the ax and rifle.

Not the least remarkable feature of the evolution of this people was the deepening of the religious spirit. Wars, indeed, are generally followed by seasons of revival; but now the sobered thoughts of the American people seemed to increase as they receded from the war period, and realized the burdens of a new nationality, of self-government, and of continental subjugation which they had taken upon themselves. They had not only cut loose from the mother country, but had cut loose from all the ancient traditions of government and the experience of mankind. Responsibility brought seriousness; daily perils inclined men’s thoughts to hear whoever would discourse of eternal things. Thus the movement of the time at once prepared the way for the work of gospel spreading, and raised up strong men to do it.

One of the young men who was “set on fire of freedom” to this work was Lorenzo Dow. Never was more unpromising candidate for the ministry. He was eighteen years of age (1795), thin, angular, ungainly, eccentric in manner, illiterate, diffident, and, worst of all, an invalid, supposed to be a consumptive. No wonder the proposition of this sick, gawky boy to go upon circuit without any preparation met with opposition from his parents and brethren, was discouraged by those who dared not contradict his solemn protestations of an irresistible call, and was rejected by all the authorities of a church most liberal in its requirements of licentiates of any then extant.

“I do not believe God has called you to preach,” bluntly declared the minister in charge after having Dow try to preach, and seeing him faint dead away in the pulpit.

“Why?” demanded the weeping candidate.

“For five reasons.—(1) your health; (2) your gifts; (3) your grace; (4) your learning; (5) sobriety.”

“Enough, enough!” exclaimed the boy, aghast. “Lord, what am I but a poor worm of the dust?”

Just the same, all this did not change his determination one whit. Nay, in a foot-note to this incident in his book he makes this finishing reference to his critic of this time with evident satisfaction: “He is since expelled the connection.”

Those who opposed him little knew of the reckless earnestness of his character—the trait which lay at the bottom of his whole remarkable career, and brought him success in spite of all his disabilities and all the external chances against him. He seemed to have accepted as his all-sufficient credentials the Lord’s charge to his disciples in the tenth chapter of Matthew; accepted it as literally and confidently as if it had been delivered specially to a sickly young convert in Connecticut about the close of the eighteenth century, instead of having been given to certain other illiterates in Judea eighteen centuries before. He always took the whole Bible literally, and acted and talked it in dead earnest. So providing neither gold, silver, brass nor scrip in his purse, nor two coats, nor shoes, nor staff for his journey, he started to “go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.” He stood not on the order of his going, but went at once. If any would receive him, well; if not, worse for them, as saith Matthew x:14. He asked no gifts nor collections; rejected most of that which was voluntarily offered—giving frequent offense thereby—taking only what would suffice for the day. Sleeping in woods and under fences was small privation to him, for he never slept in beds, any way; the floor or a bench was his choice, on account of the asthma, he said. He was used to long fasts, and would travel fifty miles and preach half a dozen times without food. Indeed, his defiance of all precautions against sickness, and reversal of all physical conditions gave him rather a grewsome reputation with the simple folk among whom the invalid exploited, and some were afraid to entertain him. What a saint he would have made in those good old times when asceticism, energy, fanaticism, piety and dirt were of the popular odor of sanctity! A modern Peter the Hermit on a crusade!

To talk and to walk were his chief functions, and he rarely intermitted either. At that time the qualifications of a circuit preacher were said to be covered by these points: “Is he converted; is he qualified to preach; has he a horse?” Lorenzo had no need of the last of these qualifications. He was the champion pedestrian of the day. He could out-travel the public conveyances and tire out any horse over such roads. He was known throughout the south as “the walking minister.” But through New England, New York and Canada his quaint figure, queer actions and rude and vehement exhortations soon got him the general sobriquet of “Crazy Dow.” We read in his journal:

Again:

Hardly to be wondered at, one would say. At one time he got an audience into a school house, and planting his back against the door so they could not escape, preached at them two hours, hot and strong. At another time he hired a woman for a dollar to give up one day to seeking her soul’s salvation; and again, following a young woman on the road importuning her to seek God, when she took refuge in a house; he sat on the steps, declaring he would not let her proceed till she had promised to pray. His nervous impatience of rest often impelled him to steal from a hospitable house at dead of night, and at daylight he would be found in another county drumming up a meeting.

These eccentricities, perhaps, brought him as much success as opposition; but the chief source of his troubles came from his independence, and even defiance of his own church. His impatience of limitations, regulations and authority of any kind caused an irrepressible conflict between him and the church from the beginning to the end of his labor. Four times the first year of his ministry did they try in vain to send him home. Though constantly, and with many tears, besieging conferences, bishops and elders for license, as soon as a circuit of appointments was given him, he would fly the track and be found traveling on another minister’s round, as complacent as a hen setting on the wrong nest. Regularity was death to him. Once he had been persuaded to take a circuit, and he says, “I had no sooner consented to try for a year, the Lord being my helper, than an awful distress came over my mind.” He staid the year, with an occasional escapade into other circuits, but says of it: “Scarce any blessing on my labors, and my mind depressed from day to day.” Yet he insisted, to the day of his death, that he was a Methodist preacher, and refused indignantly all propositions of his admirers and converts to organize a following of his own—“Dowites,” as they would call themselves, “Split-off Methodists,” as he dubbed all such schismatics. When his presiding elder, the renowned Jesse Lee, sent him injunctions against irregular traveling, under pain of expulsion, he replied to the messenger: “It does not belong to Jesse Lee or any other man to say whether I shall preach or not, for that is to be determined between God and my own soul. It only belongs to the Methodists to say whether I shall preach in their connection.”

“But,” said his monitor, “What will you call yourself? The Methodists will not own you, and if you take that name you’ll be advertised in the public papers as an impostor.”

“I shall call myself a friend to mankind,” said Dow, expansively.

“Oh,” exclaimed the advocate of regularity, “for the Lord’s sake—don’t! You are not capable of that charge—who is!”

One would think so, for Dow was at this time only eighteen years old, and the callowest fledgeling in all green New England. It was no use. This young eccentric would not work to any line. He obeyed only dreams, impulses and “impressions,” which he accepted as divine guidings. At one time they thought they had laid out for him in Canada a field sufficiently large, wild, unorganized and forbidding to give him “ample scope and verge enough” wherein to wander, preach and organize churches. It did seem that almost the whole boundless continent was his. But a continent has limitations. That thought tormented him. He tramped till he got to the edge, and then was seized with “a call” to carry the gospel into Ireland! and despite all remonstrance, opposition and threats he sailed for Ireland without a government passport, without church credentials of any kind, minus an overcoat and change of linen. Three dollars, a bag of biscuits, and unlimited confidence in his ability to “get through some way,” constituted his missionary outfit. His real reason for going, however, was the hope that a sea-voyage would improve his health, as he admits in his “Journal.”

Thereafter, wherever Dow pushed his peculiar mission he found the reputation of a schismatic and rebel against church authority had preceded him, and turned the Methodist clergy and laity against him, and generally closed their homes and houses of worship to him. This coldness, and sometimes enmity, he had to overcome before he could begin his work in any place. Nevertheless, he prosecuted it vigorously for over forty years with few interruptions, diverting all the converts of his ministry into the Methodist church that he could, and giving not only his services, but much of the proceeds of the sale of his books to that body. To the last he declared, like Wesley, “my parish is the world!” and extended his circuits to all parts of the Union, to Balize, the West Indies, and the United Kingdom. He would lay out routes of three or four thousand miles, covering appointments months or years ahead, and he rarely failed to appear on time or to find an audience awaiting him.

“The camp meeting era,” which began about the commencement of Dow’s ministry, was his great opportunity. These meetings were free, catholic, and welcomed all workers. They were the legitimate outcome of the religious necessities of the time. The land was ablaze from backwoods to sea-beech with that popular excitement which soon got the expressive name of “The Wildfire.” A host of preachers—Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers—went from camp to camp preaching, singing, exhorting. The meetings were going continuously. The country seemed to give up all other pursuits for religion. Twenty thousand often assembled at one place, coming hundreds of miles. One Granada, “the western poet,” wrote many “Pilgrim Songs,” rude but spirited, for camp meeting use, and these traveled, unprinted, on the air. That peculiar psychological phenomenon called “The Jerks,” appeared and spread like an epidemic. Penitents in this death-like trance were laid in long ranks under the trees and the weird torchlights, as if ready for interment. Three thousand fell in one night at Caneridge, Kentucky. It was common practice to prepare the camp meeting grounds by cutting all the saplings about six feet from the ground, leaving the stumps for the infected ones to grasp, to keep them from falling, and Dow records that the ground around them was torn up as if horses had been hitched there. At times a sudden influence would come over the multitude, which would strike preachers, singers, mourners and listeners speechless, so that not a word could be spoken for a period—a hush more awful and inexplicable than the jerks or the shoutings.

Into this work Dow plunged with the abandon of a knight-errant, and with wonderful success. His thin, skeleton frame, pale, sharp face, luminously black eyes, long hair, curling to his waist, sharp, strident voice, fierce, jerky sentences, qualified him to add intensity to the prevalent excitement. And he was fond of appealing to the fears and superstitions of humanity. He was full of dire predictions. The world was in travail for the last day. Napoleon was wading knee-deep in the blood of Europe. The last vial of wrath seemed to have been poured out upon the earth. The prophecies and the apocalypse were drawn on for texts, which he used literally. Any local calamity—and a long list of sudden or accidental deaths within his ken—were worked upon the minds of his hearers, as links in the chain of these awful portents. If there was any “scare” in a man or woman or child, he’d frighten them to their knees. He used the argumentum ad hominem liberally, and if there were a conspicuous atheist reprobate or Calvinist in the audience—all of whom he classed together—the man was sure to be singled out for direct attack. A favorite device was to ask the audience to grant him a favor, and require all who were willing to do so to stand. When up, he would bind them to pray three times a day for a week for salvation, and abjure them not to add the perjury of a broken promise to their many other sins. This he exultantly calls “catching ’em in a covenant,” he expecting to make converts of nine-tenths of those who kept the promise into which they had been thus trapped.

The quality which gave Lorenzo Dow his greatest power with the “lower million”—to whom, after all, his mission went—was his courage. He was as bold as a man seeking martyrdom. His mien was defiant and his language brusque and aggressive. He belonged to the church militant by one of those contrasts which make the tender-hearted and sensitive seem rough and pugnacious. He fought against the wild beasts, on two legs, not at Ephesus, but from Boston to Balize. Rowdies dreaded his tongue more than any physical force, to which he never resorted. At New Kent, Va., a large billet of wood was hurled at him through a window. He immediately leaped through the window and gave chase to the assassins, yelling “Run, run, the Old Sam is after you.” Returning, he took the billet, cut the words “Old Sam” in it, and nailed it to a tree, installing it as “Old Sam’s monument.” He then proceeded logically to this demonstration: “You disturbers of the meeting, your conduct is condemnable—which expression means damnable; hence, to make the best of you, you are nothing but a pack of damned cowards, for not one of you durst show his head.” “Old Sam’s monument” stuck to the tree for years, and Dow records with great satisfaction that one of the ringleaders in this assault, a few months later had his nose bit off in a fight, and another was flung from a horse and had his neck broken—all of which he cited as redounding to the glory of God and the vindication of Lorenzo Dow.

On another occasion, being apprised of the approach of a mob of several hundreds, sworn to take his life, he left the pulpit, took his wife by the hand, and marched out to meet the enemy. When met, he mounted a stump and poured out upon them a tirade of hot reviling, the very boldness of which overawed them. The result was that he led them back to camp, and in a short time had the most of them on the anxious seat.

At times, however, his enemies and opponents were too much for him. Detraction and back-biting hurt him worst, coldness cut him deeper than opposition. At one time, every man’s hand was so against him that he cut his way into the depths of a Mississippi cane swamp, built a hut, and there he and his wife lived recluse for months, surrounded by wolves and snakes, whose society he found less objectionable than that of the best friends he had in the country. One of the chief causes of enmity was jealousy, because he had made a little money by the sale of his writings. I fancy, too, that the popular feeling was mingled with one of contempt for a circuit-rider, who could be so easily beaten in a horse trade—a man who, equipped with a gallant mount on Monday morning, would turn up before the week was gone on a sorry, broken-down “plug,” against which he had paid beside more “boot” than his own horse was worth—could not command the respect of such people as he labored among.

It is hard to realize that the man is an invalid, working without fee or reward, unrecognized, and receiving more curses than coppers, of whose exploits we read such passages as these:

But we can not forget Peggy. Peggy was one of Lorenzo’s earliest converts, and throughout the most of his crusades was his faithful companion, through exposures and trials, through evil report and good report. She was the loveliest trait in his character. The courtship was unique. Let him tell it:

He continues:

When about going away, he remarked that he was going a circuit of a year and a half in the South.

An ardent popping of the question, surely! But she waited, and they were married, and were happy. He was a very devoted husband, subsidiary to his appointments. He was away preaching when both their children were born, and on one occasion left his wife among strangers in England, ill, so that her death was hourly expected, and their infant child also being ill and dying in another place, for a chance to preach. Neither parent attended the child’s funeral. Peggy never murmured. She was as consecrated to his work as he—perhaps more unselfishly so. Minister’s wives often are, I have heard.

Applying to Lorenzo Dow a purely intellectual analysis, I should say he was a man born with a morbidly nervous temperament, which only ceaseless activity could satisfy. Rest was physical and mental poison to him. This helps explain his extraordinary energy. Egotism took the form of conceit for haranguing and influencing masses of people, and of believing himself competent to fill a world-wide field. Consciousness of his own weakness and supersensitiveness led him to shrink from the restraint and criticisms and evade the duties of church affiliation. He wanted the notoriety and gratification of ministerial life, without its responsibilities; he could not take the responsibility of becoming the founder of a sect.

In short, as I read Lorenzo Dow, he had a mania for haranguing people, and he gratified it in the easiest and most popular way then open to an uncultured, lawless, irresponsible nature, with strong natural tendencies toward religious exercises. If Dow had been born seventy-five years later, he would have made a first-rate demagogue and communist, but it is doubtful if he could have got any one to hear him preach in these days. He served the time and purpose well, and reached hundreds whom perhaps no one else could have influenced.

His eccentric behavior was due partly to lack of education and culture, and partly to physical causes, viz.: A morbid, nervous organization, which could only keep keyed up by excitement. His seeming violence and extravagance were probably assumed at first to cover diffidence and sensitiveness, and afterward became habits of pulpit address. He was affectionate, honest, sincere and brave.