For spiritual beings we do take with singular heartiness to the soil and spoils of this present world. The hope of immortality is more a fear than a hope with many of us. We do not like to see the open door of death that leads to it. So every good preacher is the shepherd of our misgivings, the leader of our forlornest hopes, the captain more particularly of men and women who are about to die, or who are seeking Heaven at last in a state of earthly disappointment and world exhaustion. I have rarely known a person in good health morally and physically, fortunately situated in life, who voluntarily sought the consolations of religion. I reckon the Lord knew what He was about when He turned His back and let Satan fill creation with snares and pitfalls and sorrows and temptations. If we did not fall into so many of them we should never get the proper contrite spirit to seek of our own will and accord after salvation. He would have been obliged to thrust it upon us and we might have been no better than the angels, without the great privilege of sinning our own sins or choosing our own virtues.
William was especially qualified for this business of leading hope after it had done with all earthly ties. He was intellectually opposed to what we know as reality. He entertained topographical convictions concerning the New Jerusalem, and he could give information about the Father's House as the old family homestead of the soul so definitely that one could see the angels on the gables and the Tree of Life shading the front yard. The simplest man in the congregation listened with enthusiasm and found himself recollecting it as if he were recalling scenes from his first life. But eternity is a danger none of us can avoid, and it never seemed spiritually intelligent to me for Christians to struggle so in that direction. Indeed, they do not, really. That Heaven-desiring enthusiasm is but the name of the pathetic courage with which they go to meet death because they have to go.
I recall the thanksgiving prayer of Brother Billy Fleming in this connection. In every experience meeting one part of his testimony was always in standing type—the ambition to be at home in glory, and particularly to rest in Abraham's bosom. But when a long fever brought him almost within kissing distance of Abraham's beard he made a mighty prayer that God would spare his weak and unprofitable life. Not only that, but William was called in to add his own petitions, which he did throughout the night of the crisis of the fever. I remained in the next room with Sister Fleming, a little silent saint who went about the world like a candle moving in a dark place, merely letting her light so shine. When the night deepened and we sat in it, clasped hand in hand, listening to the prayer concert in the sick man's room, I ventured to propound a question.
"Sister Fleming," I whispered, "I can understand why you want Brother Fleming to live, and why the rest of us do; but I can't understand why he has changed his mind so completely and wants so much to live himself. I have heard him say so often that he was not only ready and willing to go, but just longing to be with Abraham."
"Honey," she replied in the tone with which a mother speaks of the childishness of children, "them's one of the curiosities of the Christian religion, the things persons like Billy tells in experience meetings. I don't reckon the Lord takes the trouble to even forgive 'em, they air so foolish. I know Billy from A to Izzard, and, so far from layin' on Abraham's bosom, he couldn't git along with him till daybreak. He jest gits that talk out of his ambition and imagination, although, humanly speakin', Billy is a tolerably good man, and I don't reckon the Lord will have any cause to fling off on him when his time comes. But you can jest set this down, nobody in his right mind feels the way most folks say they feel in an experience meeting!"
As a matter of fact, Brother Fleming made a public thanksgiving prayer at the altar in Redwine Church as soon as he was able to get out.
This deliverance from a woman of such beautiful integrity was a comfort to me. For, while I endeavored to be a Christian along with William, I have never been religious. To feel consciously religious is, in my opinion, to become a sort of "bounder." And we all know how repulsive a "bounder" is in any circle of society. This is the objection to the "holiness people," they are presumptuous in professing a too intimate likeness and relation to God. I have never seen a sanctified man or woman yet whose putty-faced spirituality bore nearly so noble a resemblance to Him as the sad, thunder-smitten soul of some sinner who had had his vision of unattainable holiness. I am thankful that William was never guilty of the temptation to call himself "sanctified." Sanctification is a good thing to preach and a better thing to strive after, but the minute a man professes it he becomes less truthful and less intelligent spiritually, and he proceeds to develop along these lessening lines.
Still, while William did not outrage my reverence for him by a too high profession, I found him hard enough to follow. When during the first year, Sabbath after Sabbath, I saw him quicken the spirit of his congregation with hymns and prayers, and then, taking his text for a motto banner, start for the outskirts of eternity, I was probably the one person in his congregation who hung back for conscientious reasons. I looked at the weary people in the church, with such sad hunger in their faces, and then I looked through the open windows at the fair fields spread like love promises of peace to us in this life, and it seemed to me that possibly they had missed the cue somewhere and I declined to make even a spiritual investigation of that country beyond where the scenes of William's sermons were always laid. Very soon I experienced, also, a woman's fear that eventually I should lose some near and dear sense of my husband. There is, in fact, a highly-developed capacity for heavenly infidelity to earthly ties in most preachers, and the martyrdom of forsaking father and mother and even his wife in the spirit appealed to his spiritual aspirations. Many a woman has been deserted in this subtle manner by her minister husband. But I kept the fear of it to myself, never encouraging this attenuated form of piety in him by even opposing it. Meanwhile, I began to observe with very genuine admiration his heroism in leading forlorn hopes.
With Such Sad Hunger in Their Faces.With Such Sad Hunger in Their Faces.
With Such Sad Hunger in Their Faces.With Such Sad Hunger in Their Faces.
This brings me to one of the most important duties of a circuit rider, that of piloting the dying through the last shallows of the great sea. There is where hope is forlornest and where William was bravest. Pastors of fashionable churches rarely perform this office now. It seems that an up-to-date church member regards dying so private as to suggest the idea that some disgrace attaches to it. The minister calls, indeed, speaks cheerfully and conventionally of the Hereafter as of an opulent and famous city with a salubrious climate. He congratulates the candidate for immediate residence upon his new citizenship and takes his departure without the risk of disturbing his temperature with a hymn or a prayer. The proper time for both of these will be when he officiates later over the "remains."
I have sometimes wondered how a fashionable person feels who is obliged even to die by the doctor's orders and according to convention, repressing to the last those great emotions that have made us men instead of clods.
Far away in the country death brings more distinction. There, men and women have walked a lifetime in the fields, they have seen the sun rise and set, the stars shine, the rain fall, the corn grow—all by the will of God. And at the very last they are crowded by their great thoughts of Him, excited by the encroaching fact of His tremendous nearness. They need a priest, some one who has been "ordained" to lead them into the Presence. They have a sense of their ruggedness, their unkempt earthiness and their general unfitness for the great ceremony. The preacher must hold their hands until they cross the doorsill of the Audience Chamber.
Now, I will not say that William enjoyed officiating on these occasions, but they thrilled him, increased his faith. And it touched me to the very heaven of my heart when I discovered that if the dying man was unconverted, an "outbreaking" sinner, he was wont to omit the harder doctrines, and generously lift him to the Lord in prayer upon the easy pledge of faith. The Methodists are especially prepared by the very softness of their creed to afford quick relief to the dying—just repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved!
Looking back through the years, across many, many graves, it seems to me I can see the footprints of William shining yet in the dark of death nights as he journeyed forth to whisper hope into pale ears, and to offer his strange, unearthly consolation to those about to be left behind. Very soon after we were married there came a knock at the door one night and a voice crying:
"Come quick, Brother Thompson; old Davy Dyer is dyin'. Doctor says he can't last till daybreak, and he's hollerin' for a preacher same as if he hadn't been ag'in God all his life."
Davy Dyer was the blacksmith and the only infidel in the country, a grimy old Vulcan with white beard and the eagle's implacable eye. One of William's braveries was to go there to have his red-headed horse shod and to sit upon the edge of the anvil block while it was being done, and gently try to wheedle him toward Heaven. Now, however, at last he was to have the best of the argument. Davy was dying, about to be turned out of the house and home of his spirit, and he wanted the preacher to help him find another. He must have another. No matter how intelligent a man is, or how scientific his method is, there is something in him thathe can't think back to dust, an unknown formula that belongs to the unknown.
The time was very short and William hurried away as if he had doves on his feet and the words of eternal life on his lips.
He returned in the opal dawn of the summer morning whitened and weary, but in his high ceremonial mood.
"He died in the faith," he answered calmly.
I had my doubts, my sniffing Canterbury doubts, but the bland light upon his face, an incandescence that he managed from somewhere within, silenced me. I never meddled with the coals on William's altar. And not long after the shriving of the infidel I had an unexpected opportunity to observe how easy he made it for his people to "die in the faith."
We were living a perfectly human day among the roses and sagebushes and bumblebees in our little garden when word came that Mrs. Salter had been suddenly stricken and was about to die "without the witness of the Spirit." There was a row of dahlias behind the blue-belled sagebushes requiring attention, and we had been so normally earth-happy digging about their roots. William had been so like other young men in his digressions that I could not help being depressed at the interruption. It seemed that some shadow of the other world was forever falling between us.
We came up out of our garden; William harnessed his horse, put on his longest-tailed black coat, changed his expression, and we drove away on our sad mission. For custom required that the pastor's wife should accompany him upon such occasions. Her care was to look after the stricken surviving members of the family while he gave his attention more particularly to the passing one. She must be ready to do anything from cooking the next meal to shrouding the corpse. The latter is a particularly garrulous business, and I was horrified to discover that it was so gruesomely entertaining to the women of the church and neighbors who helped. My first corpse was the young wife of a farmer, who had died of "the fever," as usual. Sister Fleming and Sister Glory White had helped me "lay her out." And each vied with the other as to the number and condition of the bodies they had prepared for burial, incidentally comparing points between them and the present one. The grand dignity of the dead woman's face did not appall them, but it frightened me.
"O Sister White," I whispered, trembling and covering my eyes from the sight of them cackling about the awfully disheveled bed and its burden, "don't talk so before her. She looks so much above us!"
"Lor', child, you'll git used to it. They all have it, that grand look, when they air dead. It don't mean nothin'. Once I 'laid out' a bad woman; there wasn't another person in the settlement that would touch her, so I done it, and of all the corpses I ever put away she had the grandest look. It sorter staggered me till I thought at last it was maybe the rest that come to her after the pain of sinnin' had gone out of her body. But you'll not be so squeamish about the way folks look when they air dead after a while. We had one pastor's wife that helped lay out fourteen bodies. But that was the year of the epidemic," she concluded, leaning over to stretch the shroud sheet. Little did I think then that I was already upon the eve of an experience that would far eclipse the record of that other preacher's wife.
We found Sister Salter lying dim and white upon her bed, surrounded by her family and friends. And the supreme tragedy of the hour for them was not her approaching dissolution, but it was that one who had testified so often and so victoriously of her faith had lost it at the crucial moment.
What followed is impossible to describe. It was not the terrible silence in the crowded room, not the battling breath and the shriveling features of the woman in the bed, not by contrast the green and happy calm of the world outside, but it was the awful voice of authority with which William spoke of things that no man knows, that frightened and thrilled us. If he had called me so from a grave where I had lain a thousand years I should have had to put on my dust, rise and answer him. He sat beside the bed and looked as Peter must have looked at Dorcas as she lay dead in the upper chamber of her house at Joppa. It was not the text he quoted, nor the hymns he chanted, but it was the way he did it. Clearly he was adding his faith to her forlorn hope. We saw her face change as if she had risen and was treading the waters in her spirit to meet an invisible presence. The fading light of the summer day showed the same rapt look on it that was there when she shouted that first Sunday at Redwine, and she passed like a sudden gleam into the darkness of the coming night.
William's joy was beautiful to see, but I had a sense of intrusion as if I had parted the wings of some archangel and had seen more brightness than it was lawful for a mortal to behold. So long as we are on this earth it seems to me better to follow the example of Moses and turn our backs when the Lord passes by, so that we shall see only the glory of His hinder parts.
The death of Sister Salter marked the beginning of an epidemic, or rather the return of the same one they had had some years before. It swept through the community with such deadly results that not a family escaped. And I had another view of the ministerial character. William spent all his time in the stricken homes of his people. It was not a sense of duty or conscience or courage that caused him to face the deadly disease with such fortitude, but it was the instinct of the shepherd for his flock. And he readily permitted me to accompany him with the curious indifference to consequences shown by those who have had their heads grandly turned by Heavenly thoughts. Life meant little to him, immortality meant everything. He risked his own life and the life of his wife because it is the nature of the true priest to care more for his people than he does for himself or his wife, just as it is the nature of the good shepherd to lay down his life for his sheep.
At the end of three weeks we had buried half the membership of Redwine Church and had received the secrets of many passing souls. For a man cannot die with his secret in him. It belongs to history and will not be buried. One old woman, Sister Fanny Claris, who had been a faithful member of our church for years, confessed to William at the very last that she had always wanted to be a Baptist, but that her husband had been a Methodist and she had "gone with him."
"If I could have been put clean under the water when I j'ined and not had sech a little jest flung on my head, seems as if I'd feel safer now," she wailed. "And I've took the Lord's Supper with sinners and all kinds when it was in my conscience to be more particular and take it 'close communion' style like the Baptists. Besides, I have believed in the doctrine of election all my life, and I ain't noways sho' about mine now, although I've tried to do my duty." The fading eyes looked at us out of the old face sternly crimped with the wrinkles she had made working for God under an alien creed.
"My soul's never been satisfied, not for a single day, in your church with its easy ways and shiftless doctrines," she concluded faintly.
For once William was silenced. It was not an occasion upon which to vindicate Methodism in an argument. Neither did he have enough tautness of conviction concerning certain terrible doctrines to meet the emergency of her dogmatic needs. And so she passed unshriven to the mercies of a God who is doubtless sufficiently broad-minded to have such baptisms properly attended to somewhere in Heaven.
But the dying are not the only ones who suffer most from the sickness of their hopes. There are men with beautiful souls born with little devil seeds in them somewhere that grow like immoral perennials and poison the goodness in them. They are the people who backslide so often, who repent so thoroughly, and who flourish like green bay trees spiritually when they flourish at all. They are usually regarded as moral weaklings, and it is the fashion of saints to despise them. This is because some righteous people now, as in Christ's day, are the meanest, narrowest-minded moral snobs the world can produce. Many of them are too mean even to afford the extravagance of a transgression. And rarely, indeed, do you see one with courage enough to erect himself again, morally, once he has fallen or been discovered as fallen. But among the backsliders of the class I have mentioned you will find the bravest moral heroes of the spiritual world, men who have the courage to repent and try again with an enthusiasm that is sublime in the face of the lack of confidence expressed in them on all sides. They are a distinct class, and as we went on in the itinerancy I learned to call them God's annuals. And William never was more beautifully ordained or inspired than when he was engaged in transplanting one of those out of his sins again into the sweet soil of faith. He had a holy gardener's gift for it that was as naïve as it was industrious.
I recall one of these annuals on the Redwine Circuit. He was a slim, wild young fellow, with a kind of radiance about him; sometimes it was of angels and sometimes of the devil, but he always had it—an ineffable charm. He was brown and blue-eyed, with a level look that hero warriors have. And that was his trouble. He was made for emergencies, not for the long, daily siege of life. He was equally capable of killing an enemy or of dying for a friend, but he could not live for himself soberly and well for more than forty days at a time. Still, he had a soul. I never doubted it, though I have often doubted if some of the ablest members in our church had them, and if they were not wearing themselves out for a foolish anticipation if they expected eternal life.
It is possible for a man to behave himself all the days of his life without developing the spiritual sense. I do not say that such people have not got souls, but if they get to Heaven at all it will be in the form of granitoid nuts, and the angels will have to crack them with a Thor hammer before they can find the thing that they kept for a soul.
But Jack Stark, our Redwine annual, was too much the other way. His soul was not enough inside of him. It was the wind in his boughs that blows where it listeth. Periodically, he went on a "spree"; it was his effort to raise himself to the tenth power, because he had an instinct for raising himself one way and another. If, at the end of a week, he did not appear at the parsonage door, sober, dejected and in a proper mood for repentance, William went after him, plucked him up from somewhere out of the depths and proceeded at once to transplant him again in the right garden.
In all the years of his ministry I never knew him to lose hope in his annuals. He was always expecting them to become evergreens of glory. In dealing with them he had a patience a little like the patience of God, never reproaching them or threatening them with the time limits of salvation in this world; no man ever had a sublimer skill in dealing with the barren fig-tree elements in human nature.
Years after this time John Stark became Congressman from his district. And William died in the belief that he also became a "total abstainer." He probably was at the moment he told him so, but having studied the nature of spiritual annuals I may be pardoned my doubts. However, he will have his nursery place in Heaven, if for no other purpose than to furnish congenial employment to saints like William.
I have often wondered what would have happened if the prodigal son had been a daughter. Would the father have hurried out to meet her, put a ring on her finger and killed the fatted calf? I doubt it. I doubt if she would ever have come home at all, and if she had come the best he could have done would have been to say: "Go, and sin no more."
But "go," you understand. And all over the world you can see them, these frailer prodigals, hurrying away to the lost places.
In a rotting cabin, in an old field five miles from Redwine, lived one of them. Once a week she walked fourteen miles to the nearest large town to get plain sewing, and with this she supported herself and child. The field was her desert. For eight years no respectable woman had crossed it or spoken to her till the day William and I and the red-headed horse arrived at her door. She stood framed in it, a gaunt figure hardened and browned and roughened out of all resemblance to the softness of her sex; her clothes were rags, and her eyes like hot, dammed fires in her withered face. William sprang out of the buggy, raised his hat and extended his hand.
"My wife and I have come to take dinner with you," he said.
"Not with me! Oh, not with sech as me!" she murmured vaguely. Then, seeing me descend also, she ran forward to meet me, softly crying.
We stayed to dinner, a poor meal of corn hoecake, fried bacon and sorghum, spread upon a pine table without a cloth. But of all the food I ever tasted that seemed to me the most nearly sanctified. It was with difficulty that we persuaded the lost Mary to sit down and partake of it with us. She was for standing behind our chairs and serving us. After that she sat, a tragic figure, through every service at Redwine, even creeping forward humbly to the communion. She was not received, however, in any of the homes of the people. She might "go in peace"—whatever peace her loneliness afforded—that the Scriptures might be fulfilled, and that was all. They would have none of her. This was not so bad as it seemed. She was free, indeed. Having no reputation to win or lose she could set herself to the simple business of being good, and she did. The time came when the field changed into a garden and the cabin whitened and reddened beneath a mass of blooms.
But there was one man whom William could never lead when hope fell forlorn and the way seemed suddenly rough and dark. That was himself. This is why I cannot get over grieving about him wherever he is. Nothing that comes to him of light now can lighten those other days far down the years when he lost his way and had no one to preach to him nor lead him. For the one tragedy that marked the course of our lives in the itinerancy was not the poverty and hardships through which we passed, it was the periodic backsliding of William. This is a pathetic secret that I never mentioned during his lifetime. I did not even know for many years that all Methodist preachers who are not hypocrites have these recurrent down-sittings before the Lord when they become sorry penguin saints with nerves. It grows out of Nature's protest against the stretched spiritual perpendicularity with which they live, never relaxing their prayer tension on Heaven, rarely taking any normal diversion, losing their life purchase upon the objective through too much subjective thinking. Ministers of other denominations are probably not so often the victims of this reaction.
The symptoms of such attacks in William became as familiar to me as those of measles or whooping-cough. They were most apt to occur after what may be called long spiritual exposures—a series of "revivals," for example. He was taken with the first one, I remember, during a six weeks' protracted meeting at one of his churches on the first circuit. We were spending the night with a family in the usual one-room log cabin. We occupied the company bed while our host and hostess occupied one in the opposite corner. By this time I had become resigned to this close-communion hospitality and must have slept soundly. But some time after midnight I was awakened by the deep groans of my husband. Instantly I sat up in bed, and by the light of the moon through the window I saw his face white and ghastly and covered with sweat as if he were in mortal pain. His eyes were yawning at the dark with no real light in them. And his mouth was drawn down into Jeremiah lines of woe that are indescribable.
"William! William!" I cried aloud. "What is the matter?"
"Hush, Mary," in a tragic whisper, "don't awaken the Pratts. I have lost the witness of the Spirit. I must close the meeting tomorrow, just as the people are beginning to be interested. But it would be blasphemy to go on preaching, feeling as I do!"
"How do you feel?" I whispered, thoroughly terrified.
"As if God had forsaken me!"
I had been in it long enough to know that the "witness of the Spirit" is the hero of the Methodist itinerancy, that a preacher without it is as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal, that he is in a rôle of a great play which has been rejected by the "star." I wiped the mourning dew from William's brow, laid my face against his and wept in silent sympathy. I saw something worse than disgrace staring us in the face—William deprived of his definition, William just a man like other men. I had come of a worldly-minded family who supported the church and sustained a polite it somewhat distant relation to Heaven. Religion was our relief like the Sabbath day, but it was never our state of being. And I was blandly of the earth earthly, but I suddenly discovered that the chief fascination of William for me was that he was not of the earth earthly, that his dust was distressed and stirred by strange spiritual instincts very different from anything I had ever known. And probably nothing was further from the intention of Providence when I was created than that I should become such a man's wife. But I had one enlightening qualification for the position. I loved William. I was called to that as he had been called to the ministry. And now, as I laid my face against his as the rose lies above the coffin lid, I was concerned only for William's peace.
"William," I challenged, "have you been doing wrong? Something really and truly wicked?"
"I must have," he replied with egregious sincerity, "but I thought I had been observing all my obligations with particular care."
"Then it's all right," I said. "God would not trifle with you about the witness of His Spirit, especially at such a time as this!"
It was not often that I showed such boundless confidence in the Lord's ways, and I was indeed far from feeling as familiar with them as I pretended. But the affectation comforted him and certainly it was no injury to the Maker of the heavens and the earth. William fell asleep at once and awakened in the proper protracted-meeting frame of mind next morning.
Many times afterward he experienced the same catastrophe, and these have been the only occasions in my life when I have put on the whole armor of God so that I might go forth properly to battle with the powers and principalities of William's darkness.
I used to wonder a great deal in those days about "the witness of the Spirit." Before my marriage I had heard little of it. I wanted to know what it was, but I never prayed for it myself. The thought occurred to me that what William called the witness of the Spirit might be the shoulder tap of his own spirit approving him now and then. But then came the deeper question, How did William come by his own spirit, that part of him which was neither flesh, nor bone, nor blood, but which had the power to make him sit up in the middle of the night to pray, and to make him fast maybe all the next day? At last I reached a comforting conclusion. That is one peculiarity of the human, he never rests upon any other kind of conclusion. What he thinks may be so, but if it is not comforting he thinks further on into the daybreak of Eternity till he gets something better, more satisfactory for his needs. This is why we shall always keep on finding God. There is something lacking in us to which God only answers. The conclusion I came to was this, that we are not all called to do the same things, that William was called to preach and pray, and the witness of his Spirit approved when he did it right. And I was called to look after William, to see that he did not pray too much or preach too long. And I always had that sweet inward glow which he called his witness when I attended most carefully to his needs. It may be a narrow way to look at it, but you couldn't live with William in any peace of mind without this witness of the Spirit. It would have made him unhappy to live with a person who couldn't claim it, and I've had mine these thirty years without having to pray or to fast to get it—a tender eye in me that regarded him and a heart that prayed for him.
This is the wonderful thing about the pure in heart—they do see God. And that was William's distinction. In spite of his own faults and of ethical errors in some of his preaching, he outstripped all these and did actually see God; and it made him different from other men who, however wise, do not see God. On this account I have no doubt that he fumbled more souls into the Kingdom of Heaven than some of the most popular tabernacle preachers of modern times.
Nevertheless, William had his worldly mind. There was an ancient Antaeus in him whose heel occasionally touched the strengthening earth, and he was as unconscious of it as a baby is of its expression. But, once he entered his worldly mind, he became as naïvely unscrupulous as any other man of the world. Never, in all the years we lived together, did he repent of these particular deeds done in the body. He could be brought to the very sackcloth and ashes for a supposititious sin that he had not really committed; but no man could make him repent of a horse trade, and I never knew but one who had the best of him in one. In common with all circuit riders he had a passion for horses, and a knowledge of them that would have made his fortune on the race track. This brings me to relate an incident which will serve to indicate the shrewdness and unscrupulousness of William once he took the spiritual bit in his teeth.
We were on the Beaverdam Circuit, and he had bought a new horse—a horse gifted with ungodly speed in the legs and a mettlesome, race-track temperament. On a certain Saturday, after services at Beaverdam Church, we were returning home in a light buggy drawn by the big, rawboned bay. When we came to a long stretch of good road William tightened the reins, took on a scandalous expression of Coliseum delight and let the horse out. Instantly the thin flanks of the creature tautened, he laid his tail over the dashboard, stretched his neck, flattened his ears and settled himself close to the ground in action that showed sinful training. William's expression developed into one of ecstasy that was far from spiritual, and I had much ado to keep my hat on. Presently we heard the clatter of another horse's feet behind us, and the next moment the bay was neck and neck with Charlie Weaver's black mare. Charlie was one of the younger goats in the Beaverdam congregation, whose chief distinction was that he was an outbreaking sinner and owned the fastest horse in the county. Instantly William's whole nature changed; he was no more a minister than the florid young man in the buggy that was whirling giddily beside us. He tightened his reins and touched the bay with his whip. The effect was miraculous; the horse leaped forward in a splendid burst of speed, the mare showed signs of irritation and broke her gait, and the two jockeys exchanged challenging glances. At that moment we rounded a curve in the road, and in the hot dust ahead there came to view a heavy, old-fashioned rockaway drawn slowly by a pair of sunburned plow-horses.
"Oh, William," I gasped, "do stop! That is the Brock carriage and this is a horse race!"
Brother Brock was a rich Methodist steward who not only owned most of the property in Beaverdam neighborhood, but the church as well. He was a sharp-faced man who gave you the impression that his immortal soul had cat whiskers. He fattened his tyrannical faculties upon the meekness of the preacher and the helplessness of a congregation largely dependent upon him to pay the pastor's salary and the church assessments. Any preacher who offended him was destined to be deprived of his subscriptions. Knowing this I took an anxious, economical view of the old rockaway heaving forward in the road ahead and vainly implored William to slacken his speed to a moral, ministerial gait.
In another moment it was over. The mare crashed into the rockaway on one side and the bay shattered the swingletree on the other with the forewheel of our buggy. The old plow-horses plunged feebly, then lowered their heads in native dejection, while the Brocks shrieked, root and branch. Never have I seen such a look of feline ferocity upon the human countenance as when Brother Brock scrambled down from his seat into the road and, with his mouse-catching eyes, added William Asbury Thompson, preacher, to Charles Jason Weaver, loafer, drunkard and horse racer, and placed the sum of them on the blackboard of his outer darkness. I sat in the buggy, holding the reins over the trembling, wild-eyed bay, while William descended and, with great dignity, tied up the disabled swingletree. There was not the slightest evidence of moral repentance in his manner, although he expressed a polite, man-of-the-world regret at the accident.
When Brother Brock resumed his place on the driver's seat and Sister Brock had ascended to hers with the cacklings of a hen who had been rudely snatched from her nest, and all the medium-sized and little Brocks were safely bestowed beside her, we drove on at a funeral's pace behind them. The bay was grossly insulted, but it was the only mark of humility left within our reach.
Three days later the Presiding Elder appeared at the parsonage door. He was a big man, riding a handsome gray horse and wearing a look of executive severity. I trembled with apprehension, for we had heard, of course, that Brother Brock had written to him preferring charges against William for horse racing. But now I had an astonishing and unexpected view of William's character. His worldly mood was still upon him, his Antaeus heel still upon the earth. He hurried out to meet Doctor Betterled, the elder, and, having thrown the saddlebags of his guest across his shoulder, stood apparently transfixed with admiration before the gray horse.
"I'd almost be willing to swap my bay for him!" I heard him say.
"Let's see the bay," replied Doctor Betterled guardedly.
Five minutes later, peeping through the kitchen window, I saw the mettlesome bay standing beside the big-headed, thick-necked gray, and the two men, each with one foot planted far forward after the manner of traders, facing one another with concert eloquence concerning the respective merits of the two animals. Presently they entered the house together, Doctor Betterled evidently in a cheerful frame of mind and William wearing his chastened look.
Late in the afternoon, when our guest rode away, he was mounted on the bay; but he had not mentioned the horse race of the previous Saturday. William stood, the genial host, bareheaded at the gate till the rider's back was turned; then he came into the house, dropped into a chair at the open window and fixed his eyes, with a deep frown above them, upon the gray horse asleep in his dotage under the apple tree in the barnyard.
"That horse has three windgalls, he is swinneyed in both shoulders, and I think he has a gravel in one of his forefeet!" he remarked in a tone of deep dejection.
I laughed and felt more nearly kin to him morally than I had ever felt before. There was a squint-eyed shrewdness in the way he involved and disposed of the Presiding Elder that was wittily familiar to me, and all the more diverting because William never suspected the Machiavellian character of his conduct. He kept his eye on God, as usual, letting not his soul's right hand know what his left one was doing.
But, going back to Brother Brock and the subject of Methodist stewards in general. The preacher soon discovers that the rich ones are the most obstreperous. And besides the good ones, the rich, obstreperous ones are divided into two classes. The first class consists of those who threaten to resign if everything is not done according to their desires, which they hide and compel you to find out the best way you can. Occasionally a preacher gets into a community where everybody in the church—from the janitor to the steward and treasurer—has this mania for threatening to resign.
I shall never forget William's first experience with such a church. It was in a little village where human interest consisted in everybody hating, suspecting or despising everyone else. He went about like a damned soul, trying to restore peace and brotherly love. But they would have none of either. Each steward approached him privately and tendered his resignation, giving reasons that reflected upon the character of some other steward. Then the organist tendered her resignation because the Sunday-school superintendent had reflected upon her playing, and she retaliated by reflecting upon his unmarried morals. When the superintendent heard of her complaint and withdrawal he at once sent in his resignation, because he did not wish to cause contention in the church.
William afterward discovered that they treated every new preacher the same way, taking advantage of the opportunity to damage each other as much as possible and to try his faith to the limit. But the delightful thing about William was that where his patience and faith gave out his natural human blood began to boil, and when that started he could preach some of the finest, fiercest, most truthful Gospel I have ever heard from any preacher. So it happened in this church.
When he was in certain spiritual—or, to be more precise, unspiritual—moods he refused to shave, but wore the stubble on his chin, either by way of mourning or defiance, as the case might be. On this Sabbath he presented a ferocious chin to the congregation, after having waited patiently for all of the resigners to take their respective prominent places in it. He preached a short sermon with the air of a plagued, unkempt angel; then he took up the resignations and read them out exactly as he read the church letters of new members, accepting each one and giving the reasons why. It was the most sensational service ever held in that church. In the first place, to accept their resignations was an unprecedented proceeding and the last thing they had expected him to do. The custom had been for the preacher to persuade them to keep their offices, which they had done from year to year with an air of proud reluctance. But the sensation was when he stated, literally, what each had said of the other—calling no names, of course—and saying that he was glad that these sinners had had the humility to give up positions of trust and honor in the church which they were evidently unfit to fill. He hoped before the end of the year they would be restored spiritually and worthy to perform the services they had formerly performed. Meanwhile, there was nothing left for him to do but to appoint a committee of sinners to attend to the stewards' duties until these should be reclaimed from their backslidden state. He named half a dozen young men who roosted on the back benches after the manner of happy, young lost souls, and I do not know whether it was astonishment or mischief that led them to accept with such alacrity the obligations imposed upon them. But William has always claimed since that they were the most active and effective stewards he ever had, that it was the first year he had ever received his salary in full, and the congregation was thoroughly cured of the resignation habit.
The second class of obstreperous stewards is easier to manage. The quality of their perversity is exactly that of the mule's. William never had to move a church, get a new roof on one or an organ for it, or even a communion table, that some well-to-do steward did not lie back in the traces, back his official ears and begin to balk and kick mule fashion. Often they were good men in every other particular, but they were simply queer reversions to type—which indicates that at one time, not so far back in the history of evolution, all men were mules.
The only way to manage them is to wait till they change their minds, just as the driver must wait upon his stubborn donkey. For you can never move one by reason or by threats. He would die and go to the wrong place rather than give up his point. This is why you will see some churches going to rack, antiquated and out of touch with the life about them. Look inside and you will find some old mule steward stalled in the amen corner, with his ears laid back at the pulpit or at the other stewards.
I pass, without giving details, over several years; they were much like these first ones. I soon learned, however, that life in the Methodist Church was all uphill or downhill at a smart spiritual canter. In these days it is nearly as easy to be a Methodist as it is to be an Episcopalian.
One rarely sees now the hallelujah end of a human emotion in a Methodist church. Recently, when an old-fashioned saint gave way and scandalized the preacher by shouting in one of our fashionable city churches, the stewards took her out, put her in an ambulance and sent her to the hospital. And I am not saying that the dear old soul didn't need a few drops of aromatic spirits of ammonia; but if every man who shouts at a political rally were sent to the hospital for treatment the real sick would be obliged to move out to give them room. As for me, I contend that a little shouting is good for the soul; it is the human hysteria of a very high form of happiness, more edifying to unhappy sinners than the refrigerated manners of some modern saints.
Anyhow, I say there were no level grounds in Methodist experience in William's and my early days in the itinerancy. No matter how young or old or respectable they might be, those received into membership were expected to show signs of awful conviction for sin, to repent definitely—preferably in solemn abasement at the church altar—and to experience a sky-blue conversion. There were no such things as we see now—boys and girls simply graduating into church membership from the Sunday-school senior or junior class. I am not saying it is wrong, you understand; on the contrary, it would be much better for the church if it did more spiritual hospital work among the kind of people who are too bad even to go to Sunday-school. I think they all ought to be taken into the church and kept there till they get well spiritually and decent morally. Then they might be discharged as other cured people are, to go back into the world to do the world's work properly instead of improperly.
As it is, one trouble with all the churches is that they have too many incurable saints in them, men and women who pray too much and do too little, who cannot forget their own selfish salvation enough to look after other people's without feeling their own spiritual pulse all the time they are doing it. Of late I've sometimes suspected that it is nearly as debilitating to stay in the church all the time as it would be to stay in a hospital all the time.
But I am telling now how things were twenty-five and thirty years ago. After conversion an honest Methodist's life was divided into two parts—the seasons when he was "in grace" and the seasons when he was out of it. Naturally, the preacher had his hands full looking after such members instead of having his hands full, as he does now, attending committee meetings and mission classes and what not, for the ethical uplifting of the native poor and the foreign heathen. For, if old Brother Settles, of Raburn Gap Church, was up and coming, resisting temptation and growing like Jonah's gourd spiritually, apt as not young Brother Jimmy Trotter, of Bee Creek Church, had backslid and gone on a spree.
There was never a night when William's family-prayer instinct did not include both of them with equal anxiety, and often he would reach back into past circuits for some especially dear sinner and remind the Lord to have mercy on him also, while He was at His mercies. He could forget the saints he had known, easy enough, but he clung year after year to the sinners he had found, name by name.
If the redeemed really do wear crowns in Heaven, with jewels in them to represent the souls they have helped to save, I know William's will not look very handsome. There will be no flashing diamonds or emeralds in it, but he will have it set with very common stones to symbolize the kind of souls that were most dear to him. There will be a dull jade for the young country woman that he brought back home from the city and saved from a life of sin, and, maybe, a bit of red glass for Sammy Peters, the young man with whom he was wont to go through such orgies of repentance on account of Sammy's many scandalous transgressions. And he will have a piece of granite beaten down into fine gold for the old man who repented before it was too late. And I reckon he will be sitting somewhere upon the dimmer outskirts of Paradise most of the time, with grandly-folded wings, holding the thing in his hands instead of wearing it on his head; and he will be recalling those for whom the stones stand, with a tender homesickness for them. For even in Heaven he will be lonely without them, his dear, straying sheep.
Always the people we served were poor, and, of course, we were a trifle poorer. The circuit rider is not only a priest to his people, but he is a good deal of a mendicant besides. William rarely returned from an appointment or from visiting among his flock that he did not bring with him some largess of their kindness. This made pastoral visiting an amiable form of foraging and had its effect on character. We were continually struggling against the beggar instinct that is dormant in every hopelessly poor man. We were tempted within and without. Sometimes we could not live on the salary paid, neither could we refuse the gifts offered without giving offense. If it was winter he would come back with the pockets of his great-coat stuffed with sausage, or there would be a tray of backbone, souse and spareribs under the buggy seat. If it was summer the wide back would be filled with fruit. One old lady on the Raburn Gap Circuit, famous for her stinginess, never varied her gift with the seasons. It was always dried peaches with the skins on them. But, as a rule, we received the very best they had to give, and with a fragrant openheartedness that sweetens memory. This is the glory of the itinerancy: if the preacher sees the worst of the people, knows their faults and weaknesses better than any other man, he also knows their virtues better.
Once, when we were far up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the people had no money at all except that which they received for a few loads of tanbark and with which they paid their taxes, we came to desperate straits. Now, it so happened that year that the women in a rich city church sent out Christmas boxes containing clothing and other necessities. We were fortunate enough to receive one of these, and I flourished forth in singularly fashionable garments for a season, while William made a splendid appearance in the cast-off dinner suit of a certain rich but wicked Congressman. The swaggering cut of the coat, however, gave almost a sacrilegious grace to his gestures in the pulpit.