commissioner of child welfare. I am to ask you to think of him as he threaded the forests, forded the streams, and found passes over the mountains, "searching out the lost sheep of the house of Israel," as the first highway commissioner, marking out by the feet of his patient, hardridden palfry the thoroughfares of a coming empire.
The Circuit Riders of the nation have done this on every frontier. They have been men divinely fitted for their tasks. In the earliest days of every section of America they have been men of modest and sterling characters who have felt they were under marching orders, and rejoiced to see the banners beckon, and hear the bugles calling the order to advance. It has been they who have fathered cities, sired empires and molded states, —Cartwright in Illinois, Whitman in Washington and Jason Lee in Oregon, whose voices rang like bugles in an untrodden canyon.
Roosevelt, who wrote "The Winning of the West," said of such men: "I have made quite a study of American history, and have always been greatly interested in the thrust of our people westward across the continent; that movement which began during Revolutionary days, and which from its very beginning included as the spiritual leaders of the pioneers an extraordinary proportion of preachers. It was the preacher who gave to the backwoodsmen, as they lived in their stockaded villages among the dotted clearings, the spiritual life that prevented them from going down in the hard materialism of their surroundings." That is good testimony from Roosevelt, himself a Rider. He himself had heard the axeman's blade echo in the lonely forests, had forded numberless streams, followed the trails of the Red Man, made his breakfast out of the trout that at sunrise leaped in the cool waters, and at evening kindled a campfire which reflected in the dark, surrounding pines, the eyes of prowling beasts.
But I am here to speak not only of pioneers, but also of the larger work of the prophet and minister of the Gospel.
