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

all the people to hear the preacher, and Lovick Pierce was deputed to hold a separate meeting on
adjacent ground. He stood upon a table and proclaimed the word with such power that a hearer, the
daughter of Captain Lucas, fell, smitten by it, in the outskirts of the throng. The whole multitude was
soon in commotion. A simultaneous movement was made toward the preacher. "The people fell upon
their knees, and groans and prayers and praise were mingled. This work continued during the
remainder of the day and the night. Over one hundred souls professed conversion around that
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table." Nolley, and a fellow-clerk in the store of Lucas, were among these converts.
He continued under the parental care of his friend Lucas a year longer, preparing himself for the
ministry by exhorting in the neighborhood, and in 1807 was received by the Conference, and sent
to Edisto Circuit, where he did good service among the slaves. In 1809 he was appointed to
Wilmington, N. C., where he rejoiced in a general revival. The next year he was in Charleston, S.
C., where he labored sturdily against no little persecution. Fire-crackers were often thrown upon him
in the pulpit, and while he was on his knees praying; but he would shut his eyes, that he might not
be distracted by menaces, and preach and pray on with overwhelming power, a habit which, it is said,
lasted through the remainder of his life. His voice was as a trumpet, and no man of the South
proclaimed the Gospel with greater energy than he. It was already manifest that his character was,
in the highest sense, heroic, and that the bravest work of the itinerancy befitted him. Accordingly in
1812 we find him wending his way, with three other preachers, toward the Mississippi. Remarkable
scenes and a martyr's death awaited him there. But we must part with him at present, to meet him
soon again in his new field.
Samuel Dunwody also began his itinerant life in South Carolina early in this period, (in 1808,)
though he was a native of Pennsylvania, born in Chester County in 1780. We have already seen him
struggling to found the first Methodist Church in Savannah, Ga., in 1807. For forty years he traveled
and preached like an apostle through much of Georgia and the Carolinas, greatly extending and
fortifying the denomination. In 1846 he was compelled to retire to the superannuated ranks; and "fell
asleep," in a most tranquil death, in 1854, a veteran of nearly seventy-four years. He was of Irish
blood and energy; rough in features, in voice, in manners; resolute to the uttermost, having a
"determined spirit, which would only require the influence of circumstances to render its actings
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truly heroic." Like many, if not most of his itinerant associates, he was given to humor, "having
a vein of keen irony;" but such was his piety that "he appeared dead to the world in a degree rarely
witnessed, and alive to everything that involved the salvation of men." "Praying seemed scarcely less
natural to his spiritual life than breath to his physical life," says an intelligent member of another
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denomination, under the roof of whose parsonage he often found shelter." All about him, "dress,
horse, saddlebags," were marked by poverty, by disregard of fashion, or even comfort; he seemed
totally absorbed in his spiritual life and work; and "his external life," it is said, "so manifestly drew
its powers from the spirit within, that there was dignity, it would hardly be too much to say
sublimity, in his roughness." It is added, by this personal witness, "that simplicity and plainness in
him were widely disconnected from rudeness and vulgarity; they were rather the honorable hardships
of the soldier's warfare." He attained commanding influence in his Conference as one of its principal,
though one of its least polished representatives, and was charged by Asbury, in 1811, as we have
noticed, with the leadership of the whole southwestern field of Methodism, as presiding elder of the
Mississippi District.
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