"This meeting in the Tyler block was a feature of a meeting which was in progress at the Walnut-street church and to this it was tributary. In the evening those who had been reached by the services at the mission were invited to the church. They were largely of a class not often seen in the church but they came, and when they came the church welcomed them.
"Then there was rejoicing in the presence of the angels, for many sinners were repenting and returning. I saw the Gospel net dragged to the shore enclosing fish that no one would have been willing to take out of the net except Steve Holcombe. But it is far different with them to-day. Changed by the power of God, these repulsive creatures are honored members of the various churches, heads of happy families and respected and useful citizens of the community.
"At the end of three months the meetings in the storeroom were discontinued. Mr. Holcombe had won thousands of friends, hundreds had been put in the way of a new life and the whole city was in sympathy with the work.
"We were now to select and secure a suitable place for the permanent home of the mission. Another search brought us to the room on the south side of Jefferson between Fourth and Fifth streets, No. 436. It had been occupied as a gambling room, and the gambling apparatus was still there when we took possession of it. In a few days the house was fitted up and the 'Gospel-Mission' was opened.
"The work was now thoroughly organized. There was, in addition to the regular services, a Sunday-school for the children whose parents never went to church. Colonel C. P. Atmore was superintendent. The 'Industrial School' also was organized, where Christian women taught the girls to sew, furnishing them the materials and giving them the finished garments. It is especially worthy of remark that the old associates of Mr. Holcombe, the gamblers, contributed more than $500 toward the expenses of this work.
"This house became an open home for any weary, foot-sore wanderer who was willing to come in, and through the years many were the hearts made happy in a new life.
"The year following the organization of the work, Rev. Sam P. Jones conducted a meeting at the Walnut-street church, and his heart was strangely drawn to that mission. He himself conducted many services there and he was more impressed with the character of the work and of the man who was in charge of it than with any Christian work he had ever seen. During this meeting of Mr. Jones a programme of street-preaching was carried out by Mr. Holcombe and his fellow-workers. Mr. Holcombe himself preached several times on the courthouse steps, and, even in the midst of the tumult, souls were converted to God."
This is the end of Dr. Morris' account of the beginnings of Mr. Holcombe's work, though the reader will probably wish it were longer, and even more circumstantial.
Mr. Holcombe's family lived in the same building, over the mission room, and whenever men in need or distress applied, he gave them board and lodging. Mrs. Holcombe says that for three months they had never less than twenty men eating two meals a day. Of course, among so many there were, doubtless, some imposters, but it took a pretty keen man to play imposter without being spotted by the keen man who was in charge of the enterprise. Mr. Holcombe had mixed with men long enough to know them. He had spent most of his life among bad men. He had studied their ways and he knew their tricks. And it is not necessary to say to the reader who has perused the foregoing pages, that Mr. Holcombe was not afraid of any man. His former experience in sin and his former association with sinners of every sort led him to see that it was necessary for him rigidly to protect the work he was now engaged in and he determined to do so. Men would come into the meetings, sometimes, in a state of intoxication; sometimes lewd fellows of the baser sort would come in for the purpose of interrupting the service and still others for other purposes; but when Mr. Holcombe had put a few of them out, they saw that this man in getting religion had lost neither common sense nor courage, and that Steve Holcombe, the converted gambler, was not a man to be fooled with any more than Steve Holcombe, the unconverted gambler; so that all such interruptions soon ceased. But nobody should get the impression that Mr. Holcombe was harsh or unsympathetic. On the contrary, he is one of the most tenderhearted of men, and few men living would go farther, do more or make greater sacrifices to save a drunkard or a gambler or an outcast of any sort, than Steve Holcombe. For days he has gone without meat for himself and his family that he might have something to help a poor drunkard who was trying to reform. Indeed, his pitying love for wretched men and women of every class and degree, manifested in his efforts to look them up and to do them good in any possible way, is the chief secret of his wonderful success in dealing with hardened and apparently inaccessible cases. The following account of his last and perhaps most desperate case is taken from one of the Louisville daily papers and will illustrate what has been said:
