542 THE GRANITE MONTHLY.
and those guilty of other immoralities which he thought proper to notice.
He said of himself, in an article in the Boston Recorder, "I have labored in the same church thirty-six years. A large part of the time I have held three services on the Sabbath; visited annually one hundred and fifty fami- lies; have waded through all the trials of dissensions and secessions in a church of three hundred members, while new churches of different denominations were forming in the place. I have been through the exhausting labors of twelve revivals of religion, one continuing a year and another a year and a half. I have been through the trials of watching with the sick, and the sorrow from the death of a wife and five children." Yet he could add, at the age of 68: "I am in health, and have not lost a Sabbath for twenty years. I have been accustomed to rise in the morning between four and five o'clock; have been kept from the use of intoxicating drinks, from tobacco, and from the use of tea and coffee, and have generally eaten brown bread." A lady of his church remarked that she heard him state that on rising in the morning he invariably visited his closet before the thoughts of the world occupied his mind. Here we discover the secret of his success in the ministry. It was in the wisdom and strength derived from on high.
After the years of labor for the benefit of that people and their enlargement and prosperity, the suggestion reached the ears of Mr. Little that some of the younger portion of the people would be pleased with a younger man as a minister. He was at once ready for a change. He resigned his charge, removed from the place, and became the acting pastor of the church in Warsaw, Indiana, in 1864. After two years it appears that he resigned his charge and took up his abode at Wabash until he died, in 1876, aged 81.
Isaac Willey, from Campton, after labor upon the farm up to the day he was 21, and after teaching one year in different parts of the country, entered the school at Meriden in the spring of 1816, at the age of 22 1-2 years. With limited means, which made it needful for him to teach in winter, he made his preparation and entered Dartmouth College in 1818. After his graduation, in 1822, he joined the class in theology under the instruction of President Tyler and Professors Shurtleff and Haddock, and commenced preaching as a missionary in 1829. In the fall of that year he became connected with the seminary at Andover as a resident licentiate. In Sept., 1825. he commenced preaching at Rochester, where he was ordained as pastor of the church in the following January. He closed his labors there in 1835 to become the secretary and agent of the New Hampshire Missionary Society. In 1837 he became pastor of the church in Goffstown for sixteen years. In 1853 he assumed the responsibilities of an agent of the American Bible Society. At the same time he became secretary of the New Hampshire Bible Society. Under the instruction of Rev. Dr. Brigham, the old secretary of the American Bible Society, he labored more or less in the state of Maine and the state of Vermont. He also undertook the work of organizing county and local Bible societies. By the encouragement of a valuable portion of the people, the whole state was spread over by these societies. Thus were his services called for in sustaining the interests of these societies, and through their agency the state has been canvassed for the supply of the Bible and for the collection of funds once in three or four years for the past twenty years. In this way the odium of an agent was in part done away, and he was generally made welcome. He retains, in his advanced age, vivid recollections of the hospitalities which he enjoyed in his labors in almost every town in the state, and has a strong desire that these societies may live and do their work in generations yet to come.
The publications of Mr. Willey are —
