secular printing-press. I realised that the vast majority of people,
even in Christian lands, never enter a church, and that it would be an
opportunity of usefulness infinite if that door of publication were
opened. And so I recorded that prayer in a blank book, and offered the
prayer day in and day out until the answer came, though in a way
different from that which I had expected, for it came through the
misrepresentation and persecution of enemies; and I have to record it
for the encouragement of all ministers of the Gospel who are
misrepresented, that if the misrepresentation be virulent enough and
bitter enough and continuous enough, there is nothing that so widens
one's field of usefulness as hostile attack, if you are really doing the
Lord's work. The bigger the lie told about me the bigger the demand to
see and hear what I really was doing. From one stage of sermonic
publication to another the work has gone on, until week by week, and for
about twenty-three years, I have had the world for my audience as no man
ever had. The syndicates inform me that my sermons go now to about
twenty-five millions of people in all lands. I mention this not in vain
boast, but as a testimony to the fact that God answers prayer. Would God
I had better occupied the field and been more consecrated to the work!

The following summer, or rather early spring, I requested an extension
of my vacation time, in order to carry out a plan to visit the "Old
World." As the trustees of the church considered that the trip might be
of value to the church as well as to myself, I was given "leave of
absence from pastoral duties" for three months' duty from June 18, 1870.
All that I could do had been done in the plans in constructing the new
Tabernacle. I could do nothing by staying at home.

I have crossed the Atlantic so often that the recollections of this
first trip to Europe are, at this writing, merely general. I think the