"You do not know what a struggle my life is," he said once to a friend. "Only God and my own heart know how far short I come of what I ought to be, and how often I mar the use He would make of me even when I would serve Him."
And again, at the Golden Jubilee services, in honor of his fiftieth birthday, he said publicly what he many times says in private:
"I look back on the errors of by-gone years; my blunders; my pride; my self-sufficiency; my willfulness—if God would take me up in my unworthiness and imperfection and lift me to such a place of happiness and love as this—I say, He can do it for any man.
"When I see the blunders I unintentionally make in history, in mathematics, in names, in rhetoric, in exegesis, and yet see that God uses even blunders to save men—I sink back into the humblest place before Him and say, 'If God can use such preaching as that, blunders and mistakes like these; if He can take them and use them for His glory, He can use anybody and anything.' I let out the secret of my life when I tell you this: If I have succeeded at all, it has been with the conscious sense that as God has used even me, so can He use others. God saved me and He can save them. My very faults show me, they teach me, that any person can be helped and saved."
Speaking of his sermons, which are taken down by a stenographer and typewritten for publication in the "Temple Review," he said, with the utmost dejection, "Positively they make me sick. To think that I should stand up and undertake to preach when I can do no better than that"
He has ever that sense of defeat from which all great minds suffer whose high ideals ever elude them.
In manner and speech, he is simple and unaffected, and approachable at all times. When not away from the city lecturing, he spends a certain part of the day in his study at the church, where any one can see him on any matter which he may wish to bring to his attention. The ante-room is thronged at the hour when it is known that he will be there. People waylay him in the church corridors, and on the streets, so well known is his kindly heart, his attentive ear, his generous hand.
Not only do these visitors invade the church, but they come to his home. Early in the morning they are there. They await him when he returns late at night. As an instance of their number, one Saturday afternoon late in June he had one hour free which he hoped to take for rest and the preparation of the next morning's sermon. During that one hour he had six callers, each staying until the next arrived. One of these was a young man whom Dr. Conwell had never seen, a boy no more than seventeen or eighteen. He had a few weeks before made a runaway marriage with a girl still younger than himself. Her parents had indignantly taken the bride home, and the young husband came to Dr. Conwell to ask him to seek out these parents and persuade them to let the child wife return to her husband.
He has a knack of putting everybody at ease in his presence, which perhaps accounts for the freedom with which people, even utter strangers, come to him and pour into his ear their life secrets. This earnest desire to help people, to make them happier and better, shines from his life with such force that one feels it immediately on entering his presence and opens one's heart to him. He helps, advises, and, because he is so preeminently a man of faith and believes so firmly that all he has done has been accomplished by faith and perseverance, he inspires others with like confidence in themselves. They go away encouraged, hopeful, strengthened for the work that lies ahead of them, or for the trouble they must surmount It is little wonder the people throng to him for help.
His simple, informal view of life is shown in other things. During a summer vacation in the Berkshires he was scheduled to lecture in one of the home towns. His old friends and neighbors dearly love to hear him, and nearly always secure a lecture from him while he is supposed to be resting. Entirely forgetting the lecture, he planned a fishing trip that day. Just as the fishing party was ready to start, some one remembered the lecture. There would not be time to go fishing, return, dress and go to the lecture town. But Dr. Conwell is a great fisherman, and he disliked most thoroughly to give up that fishing trip. He thought about it a few minutes, and then in his informal, unconventional fashion, decided he would both fish and lecture. He packed his lecturing apparel in a suit case, tied a tub for the accommodation of the fish on the back of the wagon and started. All day he fished, happy and contented. When lecturing time drew near, rattling and splashing, with a tubful of fish, round-eyed and astonished at the violent upheavals of their usual calm abiding place, he drove up to the lecture hall, changed his clothes, and at the appointed time appeared on the platform and delivered one of the best lectures that section ever heard.