While engaged in this work I frequently had to walk ten miles to Sorel
Mountain, one of my appointments, which was a part of this circuit.
My salary was indeed very small, but they fed me and cared for me the
best they could, and God did the rest. I closed my work here with
twenty-three converts added to the church. As I write these lines, I
look back to see the ravages of time and what they have wrought. Those
who were received into the church by me at that time, with very few
exceptions, have finished their battle of life and completed their
labors, long since, and have gone home to render a better service than
they could have rendered here.
I made improvements on the Church buildings of the circuit and was able
to make a good report to the Conference which met at Philadelphia. At
this conference I was received into membership by Bishop Paul Quinn.
It was here that I made for the first time, my acquaintance with Dr.
B. T. Tanner, Rev. T. G. Stewart, Rev. Frisby Cooper and others. Rev.
Joshua Woodland was my presiding elder. I was permitted to attend the
Lincoln University, in Chester County, Pennsylvania. I was supported
by Mr. Amos Clark Junion of Elizabeth, N. J., and preached on Sundays
in the Siloam Presbyterian church. Here I made the acquaintance of a
local preacher, Rev. David Croshon, of the A. M. E. Church and Brother
Scisco from whom I learned a great deal about church work. Being wholly
inexperienced and poorly educated, I felt the curse of the regime of
slavery, although I had never been a slave. I longed for the equipment
that comes from a thorough education and realized that if in some way
I did not educate myself, I could never amount to much. So it is hard
for me at my time of life although a closer student than ever, to
understand or to be in sympathy with any preacher who in his ignorance,
is satisfied to remain so. There is something sadly lacking in such a
man and I greatly fear those qualities without which no man is either
acceptable to God or to the church, as a minister of the Gospel.
[Illustration: BISHOP WILLIAM PAUL QUINN