Rev. L. M. Luke.

It is always pleasant as well as profitable to read the life of a faithful and consecrated servant of God. Rev. L. M. Luke was born in Caddo Parish, La., July 12, 1857. His mother Wets blind, she never saw her son. She was the mother of five children, three sons and two daughters. His father was considered a great preacher in his time. He labored in the ministry thirty-five years and died beloved by his people. The year of emancipation his father died, and left his blind wife and one daughter to be supported by young Luke, then only eight years old. To gain support for them, the boy was hired to his former master. He was greatly devoted to his mother and tenderly cared for her during her life. She died when he was eighteen years old. These early cares prevented him from receiving any early training, although he had great eagerness to learn. After the death of his former master, he with ten others undertook to buy his plantation, in which they failed after paying $5,000 upon it.

From boyhood he was very precocious in all kinds of mechanical work and could handle tools with skill at a very early age. Under the pious influence of his mother and father he became a Christian at the age of ten. At nineteen he was licensed to preach. That he became a preacher seems natural; when six years old it is said he used to gather the plantation around him and go through the form of preaching. So amused was his master that he promised him the use of a mule as soon as he became old enough to preach. People were surprised that a boy so young should become so active in church work and take so firm a stand for Christ. So small was he at the time of his conversion that he was put upon a table while he related his experience. His youthfulness and lack of education forestalled his early anxiety to preach. The advantage of a night school upon the place where he lived afforded an opportunity for considerable improvement, which opportunity was eagerly seized by him. Young Luke was an active Sunday-school worker, making it a point to commit and recite every Sunday one hundred verses from the scriptures. That exercise has proved a great blessing to him, as he can now quote and apply with great facility passages of scriptures to suit the occasion in hand.

Upon the plantation where he lived he was regarded as an encyclopedia of Biblical knowledge.

At the age of eighteen he was holding revival meetings and was known as the " boy preacher"; he was ordained at twenty ; at twenty-one he was called to preach to the Galilee Baptist Church, at Shreveport, La., his old home. When he took the church there were eight members and no house of worship; he remained with them two years and resigned leaving two hundred and twenty members and a house of worship worth $1,300. While at Shreveport he studied under Rev. J. A. Lockell, pastor of the white Baptist church of that city. Rev. Luke has always been an effectual gospel preacher. In 1880 he married Miss Annie Stephens, an orphan girl of limited education. But she has been to him a devoted Christian wife, and even an indispensable helpmeet. She has spent three years in college since their marriage. In 1880 he was called to the Bethesda Baptist Church, at Marshall, Texas. That pastorate afforded him much opportunity for growth, He remained with them seven years and added three hundred and twenty members to the church. In 1887 he resigned to become pastor of the St. Paul Church at Paris, Texas, which charge he resigned one year after to accept an appointment from the American Baptist Home Mission Society as general educational agent of Texas, which position he still holds. While at Marshall he attended a high school taught by Prof. D. Abner, Jr., now Bishop College. He received instruction at the hands of Dr. S. W. Culver, for ten years the eminent president of Bishop College, to whom he claims is due his success as a preacher and instructor of the Bible.