The Disciples are just as evidently an offshoot from the Baptists, as
children are an offshoot from the parental stock.
Twenty years after the writer had begun his work in Kansas, he was
able to count among fifty churches which had been organized within his
knowledge, twenty-five that were dead; and there were six
meeting-houses that were left unoccupied or sold for debt. And the
church members would say to me: "We can neither preach, nor pray, nor
read the Scriptures, nor break the loaf to edification, and we are too
poor to hire a preacher. What shall we do?" They had no training,
save that training they had obtained in the old Baptist churches, or
one similar in our own, and now that they were scattered over the
great West, and were poor in this world's goods, they were indeed in a
pitiably helpless condition.
I sometimes said, "Get up a Sunday-school." But the old heads would
get together and begin to debate where Cain got his wife, or who was
the father of Melchisedec, or what was the thorn in the flesh that
afflicted Paul; or they would dispute over the mode of baptism, or the
operation of the Holy Spirit, and the boys, verifying the old adage
that the devil always finds work for idle hands to do, and not
appreciating this sort of thing, would shoot paper balls at each other
and at the old folks, and the girls would do naughty things and grieve
their mothers, and the whole thing would go up in smoke.
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