Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 January 1886 — Peter Cartwright. [ARTICLE]

Peter Cartwright.

No member of the United States Senate in the habit of visiting Chicago has a wider circle of friends to welcome him than has Senator Spooner, of Wisconsin, when he reaches the Grand Pacific, and none enjoys stories of human oddities more than he. During the Senator's last visit here a little group gathered around him, and began telling tales of revival times. “I remember hearing my father tell of hearing Cartwright once,” he said. “ The services were in the woods, and people came from counties around to see and hear the great exhorter. After the singing, which seemed to shake the verv oaks, was over, Cartwright began: ‘I iiear that there is a new religion started down in Boston, and its bellevers are called Universalists. They think that everybody, good or bad, is going straight to heaven, whatever he may have done on ea>rth. All I’m going to say. about them is to tell a story. * You have all heard about good old Noah—how the world became so Wicked that the Lord had to drown. the people. Noah was a good man, and the Lord had him build an ark. All the living things of the earth were placed in that ark, and then Noah and liis family got on board as the floods came. For forty days they floated about until the waters subsided, and then they landed on Mount Ararat. Noah was a good man. He lived so many hundred yeirs in trial and trouble. His life was full of afflictions, and when he died he went to heaven. As he stepped inside the pearly gates the fellows who had been drowned many hundred years before because they were so wicked gathered arctund to look at the old man, who had been passing his life in tribulations, w r hile they were enjoying the bliss of heaven. Finally one who had never liked Noah on earth because he was always preaching goodness said to him: “Well, old man, you’ve got along at last, have you ?” ’ “That story was a ‘clincher’ among the backwoodsmen,” the Senator concluded. “it was worth more among his hearers than all the arguments the revivalist could have produced.”—Chicago Tribune.