In Philadelphia, in addition to being the founder of the first
Institutional church in America, of a college practically free for
busy men and women, and a hospital for the sick poor, he has organized
twenty or more societies for religions and benevolent purposes
including the Philadelphia Orphan's Home Society.

His pioneer work is not all. As a lecturer Dr. Conwell is known from
the Atlantic to the Pacific, having been on the lecture platform
for forty-three years, speaking from one hundred to two hundred and
twenty-five nights each year.

As an author he has written books that have run into editions of
hundreds of thousands, his "Life of Spurgeon" selling one hundred and
twenty-five thousand copies in four months. He has been around the
globe many times, counted among his intimate friends Garibaldi, Bayard
Taylor, Stanley, Longfellow, Blaine, Henry Ward Beecher, John G.
Whittier, President Garfield, Horace Greeley, Alexander Stevens, John
Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John B. Gough and General Sherman.

He fought in the war of the Rebellion, was left for dead on the
battlefield of Kenesaw mountain--in fact, he has had a career as
picturesque and thrilling as a Scott or Dumas could picture.

Yet the man whose energy has reared enduring monuments of stone, and
more lasting ones in the hearts of thousands whose lives he has made
happier and brighter, fought his way upward alone and single-handed
from a childhood of poverty. He rose by his own efforts, in the face
of great and seemingly insurmountable obstacles and discouragements.
The path he took from that little humble farmhouse to the big church,