And now wouldn’t it be nice if I could say here that Cassity was one of those converts? I’d say it, anyway—if I weren’t afraid Peter would tell on me.
MY BEST INVESTMENT
Not Hitherto Published — 1947
By John T. Bristow
Girls — Girls — Girls
After mulling the old thing over, I know now that the boy who sat with me in the reserved section at Evangelist George Graham’s meetings, as intimated in the foregoing article, was not Peter Cassity. It was his brother Bill. Pete tells me that he was farming at the time over on Wolfley creek and did not attend the meetings regular—but don’t ever think Pete did not remember his raising, when he did get in.
Bill Cassity had the nerve and the Biblical knowledge to stand up in a big way for his Maker. That boy had an almost irresistible line, and it was, at times, questionable whether the minister, or the converts—with Bill well out in the lead — were doing most in the matter of gathering in the prospects.
When my uncle, the Rev. Thomas S. Cullom, minister of a Methodist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife Irene, and two daughters, Lora and Clevie, paid a visit to their Wetmore relatives in 1908, the Reverend told me that in his Church, and throughout the south, it was customary during revivals to have “exhorters” stationed in the congregation to give supplementary support to the minister’s pleas for the redemption of lukewarm and tottering souls.
I asked him if his exhorters ever broke in on his impassioned pleas in a discordant manner—that is, a little off key? “Cert’nly,” he said, with fine southern accent. “My exhorters are very devout workers for the Lord, and sometimes when filled to overflowing with the Holy Ghost, they say their lines and then keep right on exhorting and sometimes steal the whole show.” This ungodly reference to his Church as a show was made with a wink and a grin.
And so, with the old time revivals here, the minister’s exhorters, under another name of course, sometimes ran away with the show. This brings us back to Bill Cassity, first born of Newton and Anne Shuemaker-Cassity. Bill did just that on at least two occasions in the Evangelist’s revival here. He had the Christian training to do it courageously.