Читать книгу A Half Century Among the Siamese and the Lāo: An Autobiography онлайн

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Meanwhile the Rev. Andrew B. Morse had been appointed a missionary to Siam, and the immediate urgency of the case was thus lightened. Shortly before the close of my Seminary course, in 1856, there came to me a call to the pastorate of two contiguous churches, those of Carthage and of Union, in my native county in North Carolina. The call seemed a providential one, and I accepted it for one year only. My classmate, Wilson, soon after accepted a call to work among the Indians in Spencer Academy.

My parish was an admirable one for the training of a young man. The church at Union was one of the oldest in the state. The church at Carthage, five miles away, was a colony from Union. No distinct geographical line separated the two. Many of the people regularly attended both. That, of course, made the work harder for a young pastor. The extreme limits of the two parishes were fifteen miles apart. But these were church-going folk, mostly of Scottish descent—not “dry-weather Christians.” The pastorate had been vacant a whole year.