I have known Thomas Welch the greater part of his life. In fact, I met him shortly after the amazing miracle in which he was brought back to life after being dead nearly an hour. To some people Tom's testimony will seem incredible, but the documentation of it is absolute.

 

After the engineer who was operating the yard engine had witnessed Tom's 55-foot fall, he at once sounded the alarm. The large mill was immediately shut down and perhaps 75 men participated in the attempt to locate the body, which was lying somewhere in the murky waters of the pond. Nearly an hour passed before they located the body and pulled it out and laid it lifeless in the mill office. They witnessed Mrs. Brocke's compassionate prayer and cry to God for Him to bring Tom back to life, and following the prayer, saw the flickering of his eyelids. Still more astonished were the men at the mill when they saw him back on the job Saturday, just six days later. Then on the following Sunday night they heard him relate his fantastic story in the little schoolhouse (where I, too, later preached). Not less amazing was the instantaneous miracle in the hospital on Friday when each broken bone instantly came into place.

 

As Tom testifies, he had become an infidel early in his life from reading books in his uncle's library, which included the works of Voltaire, Thomas Paine and Robert G. Ingersoll.  His experience in the nether world instantly showed him the falsity of the philosophies of these notorious advocates of agnosticism and infidelity. In the brief time Tom spent there, he saw that the spirit of man exists after death of the body and he that rejects Christ must spend eternity elsewhere than with Him

 

Not long after this experience I was converted in the same church, one pastored by Dr. John G. Lake, in Portland Tom kept his promise that he made to the Lord and on the hospital bed when he was miraculously healed. A year later he and I and L. D. Hall left Portland to begin preaching the gospel.