With such training, and in such a community, it is not strange that my biblical and doctrinal examination was pronounced entirely satisfactory. After I had gone to school for ten years it, probably, would not have been so satisfactory. Indeed, I was strongly advised not to go to college, as it was likely to rob me of my spirituality; and besides, many souls would be lost while I was getting an education.
Though I continued for a time on the farm or in the coal mines, yet I was told to go out and preach somewhere on Sundays. Accordingly, I would ride ten or twenty miles on Sunday to preach in different schoolhouses. Putting the rein over the horn of the saddle, I would plead before the cold gray sky for an unknown God to renew my happy feelings as a token of His existence. But no happiness, or assurance, came to me. When the time came to preach, I felt the importance of not throwing our lives away in sinful living, and so was able to give them some very earnest advice. Then on the return trip I would continue to pray to an unsympathetic sky. Nothing, however, ever came of it except a deeper depression of spirits. Though the dynamo was running at a terrific rate, yet the circuit of my thoughts was broken beyond my ability to repair. So I decided to go to college at any sacrifice.
Boarding a train for the first time, I went two hundred miles for my preparatory course in connection with the college where I expected to graduate. But no religious experience came to me until the middle of my sophomore year. Then while studying Mark Hopkins' little book, "The Law of Love, and Love as a Law," I got a new insight into the human soul. I could see that if one would bring all his powers into harmony, and then relate them to the beautiful enfolding universe, all things must work together for his good,--if by his good one meant the perfect unfolding of his life. Instantly there came a great joy in living. It took shape in the thought, "All things work together for good to them that love God." I felt that no proposition in geometry was more capable of proof. A life with its powers united in the will of God must unfold to match the harmony without, even as the rose unfolds to the light and warmth of the sun. Besides, I now had entertainment and beautiful friends. Almost any good thing seemed possible. "This," I said, "must be what intelligent people mean by Christian experience." The only remaining question was the old one, "Is there a God?" Is God "The Allness of things about us?" This, however, seemed too pantheistic. And the personal God still evaded me. So I decided that the question of God was too much for me, and that I would just wait until I should meet the "wise men" who knew. In the meantime I would assume that there was a God; for the college president believed that there was, and prayed to Him every day at chapel.