Mr. Joshua Rylands had, according to the vocabulary of his class, "found
grace" at the age of sixteen, while still in the spiritual state of
"original sin" and the political one of Missouri. He had not indeed
found it by persistent youthful seeking or spiritual insight, but
somewhat violently and turbulently at a camp-meeting. A village boy,
naturally gentle and impressible, with an original character,--limited,
however, in education and experience,--he had, after his first rustic
debauch with some vulgar companions, fallen upon the camp-meeting in
reckless audacity; and instead of being handed over to the district
constable, was taken in and placed upon "the anxious bench," "rastled
with," and exhorted by a strong revivalist preacher, "convicted of sin,"
and--converted! It is doubtful if the shame of a public arrest and legal
punishment would have impressed his youthful spirit as much as did this
spiritual examination and trial, in which he himself became accuser.
Howbeit, its effect, though punitive, was also exemplary. He at once
cast off his evil companions; remaining faithful to his conversion, in
spite of their later "backslidings." When, after the Western fashion,
the time came for him to forsake his father's farm and seek a new
"quarter section" on some more remote frontier, he carried into that
secluded, lonely, half-monkish celibacy of pioneer life--which has been
the foundation of so much strong Western character--more than the usual
religious feeling. At once industrious and adventurous, he lived by "the
Word," as he called it, and Nature as he knew it,--tempted by none of
the vices or sentiments of civilization. When he finally joined the
Californian emigration, it was not as a gold-seeker, but as a discoverer
of new agricultural fields; if the hardship was as great and the rewards
fewer, he nevertheless knew that he retained his safer isolation and
independence of spirit. Vice and civilization were to him synonymous