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then, anybody who wants to go to Heaven when you die, arise in your seats. Get up, folks! Get up! Everybody that wants to go to Heaven when you die. Say, friends, what's the matter with you? Well, won't you bow your head where you sit in your seats and by that act say, 'I want to go to Heaven when I die'? Brothers! Sisters, what is the matter? Has the devil got you-all in his clutches?"

The real trouble was that the congregation had been over-preached. These village folk had been kept awake for five nights until twelve or one o'clock, and they were accustomed to going to bed at eight. They were exhausted. Now an emotional backwash had set in, but it seemed to the Reverend Blackman that his hearers had decided deliberately to go to hell.

The preacher was as nerve-worn as any in his audience and now he stood in the pulpit in his shirt sleeves, wet with sweat.

"Brothers! Sisters!" he shouted. "Isn't there a single person here who wants to keep out of the fiery torments of the damned!"

The audience blinked in silence. The Reverend Blackman had a feeling that all these immortal souls were somehow plunged into a trance by the power of Satan, and there they sat, the only sign of life their blinking eyes.

A sort of agony went over the preacher; a kind of professional agony, good for one sermon only, which would disappear on the following morning, but which was, nevertheless, a bona-fide agony.

"Brothers! Sisters!" he yelled, flinging out his arms. "For God's sake break the spell of the devil! Kain't you hear his deceitful voice whispering in your hearts, 'Set still, you'll have time enough yet! Go up another time!' Oh, my friends, how do you know there is goin' to be another time?" The minister sobbed. "I know some soul is receiving his last invitation now! I know somebody in this congregation will never have another chance to accept Christ. God pity him! God pity him! Somebody is frittering away