The pews soon filled to overflowing; people even sat up the steps of
the pulpit and stood against the walls; every place was taken save in
the front pew that was being kept for penitents. Annie had told Ishmael
of its import, and he stared at it in morbid fascination.

There was a stir and a sound throughout the chapel when the preacher
made his appearance. Quite an ordinary-looking man, thought Ishmael with
a sense of flatness, unable to note the height of the brow and its
narrowness at the temples, the nervous twitching of the lids over the
protuberant eyeballs and the abrupt outward bulge of the head above the
collar at the back. Abimelech Johns was a tin-miner who had spent his
days in profane swearing and coursing after hares with greyhounds until
the Lord had thrown him into a trance like that which overtook Saul of
Tarsus, and not unlike an epileptic fit Abimelech himself had had in
childhood. Since the trance he was a changed man; his passion for souls
was now as great as his passion for pleasure had been before, and he had
a name for working himself and his congregations up to a higher pitch
than any one who had been on that circuit for years past. It was known
to be a terrible thing to see Abimelech wrestling with the Lord.

The meeting began quietly enough with a long extemporary prayer from the
preacher that was more a confident button-holing of the Almighty, and
Ishmael began to feel bored and at the same time relieved. Then the
first thrill of instinctive protest ran through him as the voices of old
and young arose in a hymn:

"There is a dreadful hell
And everlasting pains,
Where sinners do with devils dwell,
In darkness, fire and chains."