History of the M.E. Church, Vol. IV - Media Sabda Org

Russell, fallen as he was from the strength of his manhood, made an impression upon me such as has
seldom been produced by another. Perhaps he had lost something from the vigor of his action, and
the pathos of his exhortation. The vividness and the luxuriance of his imagination might have been
withered in the furnace of suffering; but the strong distinguishing features of his original mind, his
shrewdness of perception, his urgency of argument, his inimitable aptness of illustration, his powers
of rapid and novel combination, were unimpaired. He abounded in metaphors, and no man made a
better use of them. Nothing could exceed the efficiency or the simplicity of his rhetorical machinery.
The aptness and force of his metaphors always atoned for their occasional meanness. Their effect
upon the congregation was often like that of successive shocks of electricity. If he was powerful as
a preacher he was mighty as an intercessor. Indeed it was in the closet that the holy flame of his
devotion was kindled. The trophies of pardoning love were multiplied around him. God gave to his
prayers and his preaching a degree of success seldom witnessed since the time of the apostles.
Several thousand souls were given to him, within the South Carolina Conference, as the seals of his
ministry, and the crown of his eternal rejoicing."
Lovick Pierce and his brother, Reddick Pierce, entered the itinerancy in the same year with
Russell and Kennedy. The former still lives a representative of Southern Methodism after more than
sixty years of labors and sufferings for it; a man of the soundest faculties, of unflagging energy, wise
in counsel, powerful in the pulpit, and of hardly paralleled public services, which, however, have yet
had no such record as would admit of their just historic appreciation. In 1799 Methodist preachers
on the old Edisto Circuit extended their travels to the obscure locality (on Tinker's Creek) in South
Carolina, where the two brothers were growing up with hardly any opportunities of religious
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improvement. Their father "despised the Methodists with bitterness," but the itinerants were
welcomed by some of his neighbors. The two youths obtained his permission to attend one of their
meetings, at which James Jenkins preached. "This," Lovick Pierce writes, was the first time we ever
heard the gospel preached with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven, and that day we both
resolved to lead a new life; then and there we commenced our life of prayer." In 1801 they joined
the Church, and within three weeks all the family, who were old enough, were enrolled in it. The
next year a Methodist chapel was erected near their house; both brothers began to exhort, and in
December of 1804 both were received into the Conference at Charleston. Reddick Pierce was one
of the purest of men, and his word was in prevailing power. "In those days, writes his brother, "in
all that country around us in which my brother had done all his frolicking, I never knew him to make
an ineffectual effort. I myself saw on one occasion, under one of his exhortations, eleven sinners fall
from their seat -- from one seat -- to the ground, crying for mercy. And this was but a remarkable
instance of a common occurrence, especially under his overwhelming appeals." Reddick Pierce died
in 1860, after faithful services, which contributed greatly to the outspread of Methodism in South
Carolina.
Lovick Pierce as pastor, presiding elder, a leader in his Annual Conference, a representative in
the General Conference, has hardly been surpassed in the South. He has led many a young hero into
the ministerial ranks, and his early labors were honored by the conversion of one of the noblest
martyrs of the itinerancy. Richmond Nolley was, by birth, a Virginian, but his parents removed with
him early to Georgia, where he was soon left a poor and orphan boy. Captain Lucas, a Methodist of
Sparta, Ga., gave him a home and employment. A camp-meeting, still famous in Georgia Methodist
traditions, was held, near Sparta, in 1806, and attended by an immense crowd. It was impossible for