“But,” said his monitor, “What will you call yourself? The Methodists will not own you, and if you take that name you’ll be advertised in the public papers as an impostor.”
“I shall call myself a friend to mankind,” said Dow, expansively.
“Oh,” exclaimed the advocate of regularity, “for the Lord’s sake—_don’t_! You are not capable of that charge—who is!”
One would think so, for Dow was at this time only eighteen years old, and the callowest fledgeling in all green New England. It was no use. This young eccentric would not work to any line. He obeyed only dreams, impulses and “impressions,” which he accepted as divine guidings. At one time they thought they had laid out for him in Canada a field sufficiently large, wild, unorganized and forbidding to give him “ample scope and verge enough” wherein to wander, preach and organize churches. It did seem that almost the whole boundless continent was his. But a continent has limitations. That thought tormented him. He tramped till he got to the edge, and then was seized with “a call” to carry the gospel into Ireland! and despite all remonstrance, opposition and threats he sailed for Ireland without a government passport, without church credentials of any kind, minus an overcoat and change of linen. Three dollars, a bag of biscuits, and unlimited confidence in his ability to “get through some way,” constituted his missionary outfit. His real reason for going, however, was the hope that a sea-voyage would improve his health, as he admits in his “Journal.”
Thereafter, wherever Dow pushed his peculiar mission he found the reputation of a schismatic and rebel against church authority had preceded him, and turned the Methodist clergy and laity against him, and generally closed their homes and houses of worship to him. This coldness, and sometimes enmity, he had to overcome before he could begin his work in any place. Nevertheless, he prosecuted it vigorously for over forty years with few interruptions, diverting all the converts of his ministry into the Methodist church that he could, and giving not only his services, but much of the proceeds of the sale of his books to that body. To the last he declared, like Wesley, “my parish is the world!” and extended his circuits to all parts of the Union, to Balize, the West Indies, and the United Kingdom. He would lay out routes of three or four thousand miles, covering appointments months or years ahead, and he rarely failed to appear on time or to find an audience awaiting him.