Hardly to be wondered at, one would say. At one time he got an audience into a school house, and planting his back against the door so they could not escape, preached at them two hours, hot and strong. At another time he hired a woman for a dollar to give up one day to seeking her soul’s salvation; and again, following a young woman on the road importuning her to seek God, when she took refuge in a house; he sat on the steps, declaring he would not let her proceed till she had promised to pray. His nervous impatience of rest often impelled him to steal from a hospitable house at dead of night, and at daylight he would be found in another county drumming up a meeting.
These eccentricities, perhaps, brought him as much success as opposition; but the chief source of his troubles came from his independence, and even defiance of his own church. His impatience of limitations, regulations and authority of any kind caused an irrepressible conflict between him and the church from the beginning to the end of his labor. Four times the first year of his ministry did they try in vain to send him home. Though constantly, and with many tears, besieging conferences, bishops and elders for license, as soon as a circuit of appointments was given him, he would fly the track and be found traveling on another minister’s round, as complacent as a hen setting on the wrong nest. Regularity was death to him. Once he had been persuaded to take a circuit, and he says, “I had no sooner consented to try for a year, the Lord being my helper, than an awful distress came over my mind.” He staid the year, with an occasional escapade into other circuits, but says of it: “Scarce any blessing on my labors, and my mind depressed from day to day.” Yet he insisted, to the day of his death, that he was a Methodist preacher, and refused indignantly all propositions of his admirers and converts to organize a following of his own—“Dowites,” as they would call themselves, “Split-off Methodists,” as he dubbed all such schismatics. When his presiding elder, the renowned Jesse Lee, sent him injunctions against irregular traveling, under pain of expulsion, he replied to the messenger: “It does not belong to Jesse Lee or any other man to say whether I shall preach or not, for that is to be determined between God and my own soul. It only belongs to the Methodists to say whether I shall preach in their connection.”
“But,” said his monitor, “What will you call yourself? The Methodists will not own you, and if you take that name you’ll be advertised in the public papers as an impostor.”
“I shall call myself a friend to mankind,” said Dow, expansively.
“Oh,” exclaimed the advocate of regularity, “for the Lord’s sake—don’t! You are not capable of that charge—who is!”
One would think so, for Dow was at this time only eighteen years old, and the callowest fledgeling in all green New England. It was no use. This young eccentric would not work to any line. He obeyed only dreams, impulses and “impressions,” which he accepted as divine guidings. At one time they thought they had laid out for him in Canada a field sufficiently large, wild, unorganized and forbidding to give him “ample scope and verge enough” wherein to wander, preach and organize churches. It did seem that almost the whole boundless continent was his. But a continent has limitations. That thought tormented him. He tramped till he got to the edge, and then was seized with “a call” to carry the gospel into Ireland! and despite all remonstrance, opposition and threats he sailed for Ireland without a government passport, without church credentials of any kind, minus an overcoat and change of linen. Three dollars, a bag of biscuits, and unlimited confidence in his ability to “get through some way,” constituted his missionary outfit. His real reason for going, however, was the hope that a sea-voyage would improve his health, as he admits in his “Journal.”
Thereafter, wherever Dow pushed his peculiar mission he found the reputation of a schismatic and rebel against church authority had preceded him, and turned the Methodist clergy and laity against him, and generally closed their homes and houses of worship to him. This coldness, and sometimes enmity, he had to overcome before he could begin his work in any place. Nevertheless, he prosecuted it vigorously for over forty years with few interruptions, diverting all the converts of his ministry into the Methodist church that he could, and giving not only his services, but much of the proceeds of the sale of his books to that body. To the last he declared, like Wesley, “my parish is the world!” and extended his circuits to all parts of the Union, to Balize, the West Indies, and the United Kingdom. He would lay out routes of three or four thousand miles, covering appointments months or years ahead, and he rarely failed to appear on time or to find an audience awaiting him.
“The camp meeting era,” which began about the commencement of Dow’s ministry, was his great opportunity. These meetings were free, catholic, and welcomed all workers. They were the legitimate outcome of the religious necessities of the time. The land was ablaze from backwoods to sea-beech with that popular excitement which soon got the expressive name of “The Wildfire.” A host of preachers—Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers—went from camp to camp preaching, singing, exhorting. The meetings were going continuously. The country seemed to give up all other pursuits for religion. Twenty thousand often assembled at one place, coming hundreds of miles. One Granada, “the western poet,” wrote many “Pilgrim Songs,” rude but spirited, for camp meeting use, and these traveled, unprinted, on the air. That peculiar psychological phenomenon called “The Jerks,” appeared and spread like an epidemic. Penitents in this death-like trance were laid in long ranks under the trees and the weird torchlights, as if ready for interment. Three thousand fell in one night at Caneridge, Kentucky. It was common practice to prepare the camp meeting grounds by cutting all the saplings about six feet from the ground, leaving the stumps for the infected ones to grasp, to keep them from falling, and Dow records that the ground around them was torn up as if horses had been hitched there. At times a sudden influence would come over the multitude, which would strike preachers, singers, mourners and listeners speechless, so that not a word could be spoken for a period—a hush more awful and inexplicable than the jerks or the shoutings.
Into this work Dow plunged with the abandon of a knight-errant, and with wonderful success. His thin, skeleton frame, pale, sharp face, luminously black eyes, long hair, curling to his waist, sharp, strident voice, fierce, jerky sentences, qualified him to add intensity to the prevalent excitement. And he was fond of appealing to the fears and superstitions of humanity. He was full of dire predictions. The world was in travail for the last day. Napoleon was wading knee-deep in the blood of Europe. The last vial of wrath seemed to have been poured out upon the earth. The prophecies and the apocalypse were drawn on for texts, which he used literally. Any local calamity—and a long list of sudden or accidental deaths within his ken—were worked upon the minds of his hearers, as links in the chain of these awful portents. If there was any “scare” in a man or woman or child, he’d frighten them to their knees. He used the argumentum ad hominem liberally, and if there were a conspicuous atheist reprobate or Calvinist in the audience—all of whom he classed together—the man was sure to be singled out for direct attack. A favorite device was to ask the audience to grant him a favor, and require all who were willing to do so to stand. When up, he would bind them to pray three times a day for a week for salvation, and abjure them not to add the perjury of a broken promise to their many other sins. This he exultantly calls “catching ’em in a covenant,” he expecting to make converts of nine-tenths of those who kept the promise into which they had been thus trapped.
The quality which gave Lorenzo Dow his greatest power with the “lower million”—to whom, after all, his mission went—was his courage. He was as bold as a man seeking martyrdom. His mien was defiant and his language brusque and aggressive. He belonged to the church militant by one of those contrasts which make the tender-hearted and sensitive seem rough and pugnacious. He fought against the wild beasts, on two legs, not at Ephesus, but from Boston to Balize. Rowdies dreaded his tongue more than any physical force, to which he never resorted. At New Kent, Va., a large billet of wood was hurled at him through a window. He immediately leaped through the window and gave chase to the assassins, yelling “Run, run, the Old Sam is after you.” Returning, he took the billet, cut the words “Old Sam” in it, and nailed it to a tree, installing it as “Old Sam’s monument.” He then proceeded logically to this demonstration: “You disturbers of the meeting, your conduct is condemnable—which expression means damnable; hence, to make the best of you, you are nothing but a pack of damned cowards, for not one of you durst show his head.” “Old Sam’s monument” stuck to the tree for years, and Dow records with great satisfaction that one of the ringleaders in this assault, a few months later had his nose bit off in a fight, and another was flung from a horse and had his neck broken—all of which he cited as redounding to the glory of God and the vindication of Lorenzo Dow.