Richard Treffry, Jr.

In times when gospel fires are burning low, one way to begin fanning the embers of spiritual desire into flames is to read the biographies of saints in ages past whose love for God was blazing hot. Such a one was John Smith, an itinerant Wesleyan Methodist preacher whose passion for God and for souls was equal to that of David Brainerd, Henry Martyn, Robert Murray McCheyne, and David Stoner. Like them, his light only blazed forth for a short time, being extinguished by his untimely death at the youthful age of 37. Smith was radically converted in his late teens, and from the very beginning of his Christian life he manifested a burning...