The Journals & Notebook of
 Nathan Bangs 1805-1806, 1817

 

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Carroll on Bangs's conversion and early ministry in Upper Canada
Carroll Case and His Cotemporaries 27-28

Nathan Bangs was born in the Eastern States in 1779, where he received a good New England common-school education, although his father failed in his project of giving him a classical one. Subsequently that father, who was self-instructed, taught him the art of surveying. At the age of thirteen his father and family removed to what was then a wilderness part of New York, somewhere on the East Branch of the Delaware. While there, the family were in great distress for a time on account of his mother and little sister who were lost, and spent a night in the woods. During their residence in that place, Nathan sometimes heard the Methodist preachers, who had followed up the settlers to their wilderness homes, and by whom all the family, except the father, were ultimately brought into the Methodist Church. Three of his brothers, as well as himself, became preachers in the issue. For the present, Nathan repelled conviction, and provided a salvo for his conscience by finding subjects of sarcasm in the humble servants of God. Impelled by the pioneer spirit of the age, on the 9th of May, 1799, he started for the still further wilds of Canada. He took his surveying instruments with a view to his exercising his profession in a country which promised to furnish ample opportunities for its employment. He was accompanied by a devoted sister and her husband. Their way lay through the forest, and the only conveyance for the lady and their few effects was an ox-sled. They passed by the spot where Buffalo now stands, where they found only two or three log huts. They crossed Niagara at Fort Erie, and coasted downwards to the neighborhood of the great cataract [Niagara Falls]. The poetry of his nature was fed by its ceaseless roar—the dark woods stretching away on every hand—and by the reading of Milton's Poems, Bunyan's Progress, and Hervey's Meditations, which he found in a small but well-assorted private library. How sweet is communion with books in the solitude of a new settlement, as some of us can well attest; still he was unhappy, for he had not found the peace of God. But through his pious sister's exhortations, and the salutary influence of the Rev. James Coleman's goodly character and conversation, whom he found laboring in the settlement, he was prepared for the more mature counsels of the Rev. Joseph Sawyer, who succeeded him, and through whose instrumentality he was converted and joined the Church. Soon after, by the instrumentality of Christian Warner, a pious class leader, he entered into the possession of "perfect love," a state of salvation of which he never lost sight for the rest of his life. This occurred in [6 February] 1801.[*] And in the latter part of that Conference year, (1801-2), after some humbling failures in the outset, he began to travel the Circuit he lived in, as an assistant to Mr. Sawyer. After a little experience in that way, he was sent by the Presiding Elder, Jewell, to develop the Long Point extremity of their field of labour into a separate Circuit, to embrace much new ground. He went there in December 1801, where fortunately he was soon hemmed in by the uncrossable state of the Grand River, else he had surely fled under the impulses of some of his early discouragements. But soon instructive dreams, marked conversions, and an extensive revival, encouraged him to hold on to the end of the year, by which time, he had no misgivings about allowing himself to be proposed to the Conference to be received on trial. There was an increase on the whole ground covered by the two branches of the Circuit, Niagara and Long Point, of three hundred souls.

* See Stevens's biography 58ff.

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Edited by Scott McLaren
Book History Practicum
University of Toronto