at defiance. This is owing to the presence of a German,
lager-beer-drinking, law-defying population, Godless and Christless,
and that turn the Lord's day into a holiday. This tendency had begun
to be apparent before I left Iowa.

When it became manifest that I could not any longer find a field of
labor in Southeastern Iowa, I was recommended to the churches in the
counties of Schuyler and Brown, in the Military Tract, Illinois.

My first introduction among them was dramatic, if, indeed, we could give
to an incident almost frivolous and laughable, the dignity of a dramatic
incident; and yet the matter had a serious side to it. I had been
commended by Bro. Bates, editor of the _Iowa Christian Evangelist_, to
the church at Rushville, where I held a meeting of days. The meetings
grew in interest, there were some important additions, and the church
was greatly revived. Twelve miles from Rushville was the town of Ripley,
a small village, where the people were engaged in the business of
manufacturing pottery ware. Here two Second Adventist preachers, a Mr.
Chapman and his wife, were holding forth. This Mr. Chapman was a devout,
pious, and earnest man, and a good exhorter, and had an unfaltering
faith that the Lord was immediately to appear. But his wife was the
smartest one in the family. She was fluent and voluble. She had an
unabashed forehead and a bitter and defiant tongue. It was her hobby to
declaim against the popular idea of the existence of the human spirit
apart from the body. With her this was equivalent to a witch riding on a
broomstick or going to heaven on a moonbeam. Spirit is breath--so she
dogmatically affirmed--and when a man breathes out his last breath his
spirit leaves his body. But it was her especial delight to declaim
against the Pagan notion of the immortality of the soul, and to affirm
that the Bible says nothing of the immortality of the soul. A Bro.