I Heard Him in His Study Singing.I Heard Him in His Study Singing.
I Heard Him in His Study Singing.I Heard Him in His Study Singing.
Later on, at bed-time, he chose a cheerful psalm to read and I heard the happy rustling of his wings in the prayer he made.
The next evening had been chosen for the initial service of the protracted meeting and I remember his text:
"I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but refuse that I may win Christ and be found in Him."
I remember it because I remember William so well that evening. He fitted into it as if it was his home. The great words seemed to belong to him. They were his experience literally. They had the authority of another simple, faithful, brave life behind them besides that of St. Paul. And the people who listened knew it. If William had made a great name and fame for himself out of preaching, if he had earned fancy salaries as the pastor in rich churches it would have been different. I don't know, of course, but it seems to me in that case they might have clanged a little like sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.
He stood in the little dim pulpit, the summer evening was fading, the lamps in the church had not been lighted, and the faces of the village folk were softened, sweetened in the gentle Sabbath gloom. He drew a picture of Paul in prison at Rome, old and in anticipation of his end. William never knew how to use words fancifully, therefore they used to gather together truthfully in his sermons, as if he had wove them in. And so now we had not an elegantly-painted portrait of St. Paul, but we saw him really, the man who actually had counted all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus—so out of his bonds in the spirit. It takes a rare preacher to portray one "found in Christ." He cannot do it with the best theological vocabulary, nor the finest scientific terms. But William, I cannot tell how he did it—all I know is that every time he put his sentences together, they cast again the image of the Saviour upon every heart before him. He stood like a man who has his hand upon the latch-string of the door of his Father's house, counting over one by one the things to be lost and gained there. Nothing remained but a few simple things like loving one another. He removed the world and the cares of it and set our feet in the way of life like a wise man guiding little children.
If Horace Pendleton had put all he knew into one discourse, garnished it with a thousand terms taken from the "new theology," he could not have approached the awful simplicity and the high sweetness of that sermon.
But one thing I must remember to tell; as long as he lived William loved and honored this man with perfect devotion. That is the wonderful thing about being good. You see it always, your eyes are happily holden to evil. On the other hand, I had occasion to learn after William's death that Pendleton regarded him with good-natured derision. He thought him a stupid man bound down to the earth by a meager theology. He even wrote an obituary notice of William that must have made his guardian angel long to kick him—all a grand toot to show the contrast between a preacher like himself and a foolish old stutterer like William.
It is curious what things are revealed to us as we go along. I used to wonder, because William wondered, where, in what year, Paul did this or that which is recorded in Acts. I remember how William used to get down his commentaries and squint everywhere along margins for dates to discover exactly where he was in the spring, say, of 54 A. D. At the time it was passing strange to me that no exact record of dates was taken concerning the doings of a man who occasionally turned the world upside down as he went through it. But now it is perfectly clear. Those who wrote never specified whether it was the first or second Sunday that Paul said thus and so at Antioch. The record was merely of the timeless truth he uttered, because Paul and the rest of them engaged in this Scripture-making and doing back there were already out of time in their consciousness. They were figures in Eternity making the great journey by another calendar than ours.
Since I have been writing this poor record of William, it is not time that matters to me. I forget to tell of his years in each chapter, or to describe the changes in his appearance. The things he did, the prayers he prayed, the faith he exercised, these crowd the memory—all so much alike, as one day resembles another day, and as one prayer resembles another prayer. But the dates have long since faded from my mind. I cannot recall, for example, when his shoulders first began to stoop, nor when he ceased to go clean-shaven, nor the year it was that his hair and beard whitened, nor when the hollows deepened to stay beneath his eyes. All I remember for certain was the changeless spirit of him, and the unconquerable courage he showed about getting ready to put off his mortality and the definite curious vividness with which he anticipated immortality.
And in other ways I have unusual difficulty in telling here what he said and did. The activities of a minister's life differ so widely from the activities of any other life that even to set them down requires a peculiar vocabulary. One cannot find the right kind even in church reports and statistics, but they must bear some great likeness to the words used in the Acts of the Apostles. I do not know how to describe them, but every man knows them when he hears them, for the language of Christianity is the one language that never changes. It gets a new translation now and then, but it is always informed with the same spirit, the same lofty pilgrim-phrases and prayer-sounding verbs. And the minister learns them because he needs them in the world where he moves.
I make an exception here of those preachers who develop a gift for church enterprise, for getting up funds for "improvements" of one sort and another. The account they give of their stewardship is not very different from that of any other business man. And they are needed. They do the greater part towards keeping the church housed, conspicuously steepled and visible to the world that passes by. They are the preachers in every Conference who are sent to "works" where a new church or a new parsonage is needed. And some of them have heroic records in collecting for these purposes. I would not take a single dollar from the sum of their renown. But this is a memorial to William, and he was not one of these. He was really an excellent preacher, a devoted pastor, but he had more spiritual intuitions than common sense about managing the practical details of the pastorate. I recognized this deficiency in him as we went along together in the itinerancy, and feeling that it was important for the Presiding Elder to have a good opinion of him in every way, I must have perjured myself to every one of them year by year, singing William's praises as a business man when I knew he was as innocent of business as the angels in Heaven. If he had been the kind of man I represented him to be, he would have been a sort of hallelujah cross and crisscross between Daniel Webster, John D. Rockefeller and St. Paul. And I remember the genial patience with which the gray-headed elders used to listen to my Williamanic paeans. But they could not have believed me, for he was never sent to a place where visible mortar and stone work had to be accomplished for the advancement of the church. And now, when it is all over, when the violets are blooming so much at home above his dear dust, I feel at last that I can afford to confess his beautiful limitations.
After you are dead it doesn't matter if you were not successful in a business way. No one has yet had the courage to memorialize his wealth on his tombstone. A dollar mark would not look well there. The best epitaph proclaims simple old Scripture virtues, like honesty and diligence and patience. And you will observe that when the meanest skinflint or the most disgracefully avaricious millionaire dies, his tombstone never refers to his most notorious characteristics. His friends speak not of his scandalous speculations, but of his benevolences. Thus some of the most conscienceless rogues in a generation go down to posterity with expurgated tablets to their memory, which of course is best for posterity.
So I do not mind now admitting that William was a poor money-getter, but he actually did have the virtues that look well recorded on his tombstone. I can even recall, with a sort of tearful humor, some of his efforts at practical church thinking. He entertained with naïve enthusiasm, for example, a certain proposition for regulating the support of the ministry, and would have sent it as a memorial to the General Conference, but for my interference. He had elaborated a plan by which every Methodist preacher should receive his salary on the pro rata basis as the superannuates do, according to the funds in hand, and according to their needs. It would be taken like any other Conference collection, turned in like any other to the treasury for this purpose. But the preacher on a mountain circuit with a wife and eight children would receive twenty-five hundred dollars, and the one with only a wife, even though he might be the pastor of a rich city church, would receive only a thousand dollars.
Such a distribution of income would have placed a premium upon ministerial posterity and would have been as fatal as socialism to competition for the best pulpits in the Church connection. But I did not use this argument to William. He could not appreciate it. He was even capable of claiming that it proved the virtue of his proposition.
"William," I exclaimed, when he confided in me, "promise me that you will never mention this dreadful plan, not even to a steward or to the Presiding Elder. It tends to Socialism, Communism and to Church volcanics generally. Your reputation would be ruined if you were suspected of entertaining such incendiary ideas!"
He was aghast, having always regarded the very terms I used to describe his plan with righteous horror. And that was the last I ever heard of his pro rata salary system.
Still, if all the preachers in the Church were as literally in earnest about living just to preach the gospel as William was, it would have been a good one. The fact is they are not. The very gifted, highly educated pastor of a rich city church feels it down to his spiritual bones that his gospel is worth more than that of the simple-minded itinerant on a country circuit. And most of them would have to experience something more illuminating and stringent even than the "second blessing" before they could be made to see the matter differently. And I do not blame them. We just can't get over being human and greedy and covetous anywhere, it seems, especially in a rich pulpit. William stood a better chance for developing the right heavenly mind in his part of the vineyard. And I ought to have been satisfied to see the way he grew in grace, and in that finer, sweeter knowledge of the Lord and his ways, but I never was.
I used to think, too, that his gospel was worth more than some other preacher's who received a better salary. But it comforts me now to know that he never thought it. If William was covetous about anything it was salvation. He was never satisfied with being as good as he was. He was always longing and praying and going about in the effort just to be a better man, more worthy of the message he had to deliver. These were the kind of seraphic pleasures he took in living. And there was no mortal power, no poverty or hardship that could do him out of them. He would come back from feeding some vicious sinner with his gospel substances exhilarated. It seemed to strengthen his spirit to drive five miles through freezing winter weather to some country church to preach to half a dozen men and women who may have only come on such a bad day with the hope of finding that the preacher failed to come, a shepherd unfaithful to his flock in a trying season. And of course, if you are called to preach, this is the way to be, but if you are called to be just the wife of a preacher, it is different. I do not say it ought to be, but it is. I used to get tired of being poor in spirit. There came days when I wanted to inherit the earth, the real earth, you understand. The figure of speech might have been better for my soul, but what I hankered after was something opulent and comfortable for just the human me. And this brings to mind an incident that happened when I was in one of these moods.
We were stationed that year at Celestial Bells, a place where, as I have already intimated, the people had some kind of happy beam in their eye. They were not only willing to be Christians, they were determined to be. But they were equally determined to enjoy every other good thing they saw in sight. This led to many social occasions, afternoon teas, receptions, innocent entertainments, to no end of visiting and to a fashionableness in everybody's appearance that was scandalously fascinating to me.
Now and then I have heard some stupid stranger refer to Celestial Bells as an ugly little town, but in my memory it is spread forever in the sun, sweetly shining like a flower-garden wing of Paradise. It was there after so many years that I came in contact again with simple human gayety, with women prettily gowned, with the charming clatter of light conversation and within the sound of music that was not always hymnal. I do not say, mind you, that I did not listen always reverently and gratefully to William's higher talk, nor that I have ever ceased to enjoy good church music, but I am confessing that, in spite of long training in experience-meeting monologues and organ tunes, I was still ecstatically capable of this other kind of delight.
As the Minister's Wife I was asked everywhere. In all well-bred communities the preacher's wife is given the free moral agent's opportunity to draw her own line between the world and the church. If she refuses a series of invitations to teas and clubs and receptions, it is understood that she is not of the world, will have none of it, and she is left to pursue her pious way to just the church services and missionary meetings. But I refused to draw the spiritual line between tea parties and the bible-class study evening. I accepted every invitation with alacrity. There was nothing radically wrong, I believe, with my heavenly mind, it simply extended further down and around about than that of some others in my position.
One circumstance only interfered with my pleasures. This was the curious sag and limpness, and color and style of my clothes. It is no mystery to me why dress fashions for women connected with the itinerancy tend to mourning shades. When you put the world out of your life, you put the sweet vanity of color out. You eschew red and pink and tender sky-blues and present your bodies living sacrifices in black materials. I do not believe that God requires it. The Maker of the heavens and the earth, of the green boughs and of the myriad-faced flowers must be a lover of colors. But I cannot recall ever having seen a Circuit Rider's Wife in my life whose few garments were not pathetically dashed with this gloom of mourning darkness.
So, when we came to Celestial Bells, I say, I had a black sateen waist and a gray cheviot skirt still worthy to be worn to church and prayer meeting services, and a sadder blacker gown that had done service for four years upon funeral occasions and others equally as solemn, like weddings. These were all, except the calicos I wore at home. The result was that I must have looked like some sort of sacrilegious crow at every social function in Celestial Bells during the first few months. But as the Spring advanced, I took my courage in my hands and resolved to have a blue foulard silk. It was frightfully expensive, seventy-five cents a yard, in fact, to say nothing of a white lace yoke and a black panne velvet belt. But no bride ever contemplated her "going away" gown with more satisfaction. I pictured myself in it before I even purchased it attending Sister Z's tea party,looking like other women! I do not recommend this as high ambition, but those preachers' wives in the remote places who have worn drab and sorrowfully cut clothes for years will know how I felt. I think there is something pitiful in women just here. No matter how old and consecrated they get, they do in their secret hearts often long to be pretty, to look well dressed and—yes, light-hearted. The latter is so becoming to them.
But it is in the itinerancy as it is in other walks of life. Just as you think you are about to get your natural heart's desire somebody slams the Bible down on it, or gets an answer to prayer that spoils your pleasure in it. So it was in my case.
It was the first foreign missionary meeting of the new fiscal year, one day in March. We met at Sister MacL's house. The jonquils were in bloom, the world was fair, and out in the orchards we could see the peach trees one mass of pink blossoms. I never felt more religious or thankful in my life, there in the little green parlor listening to the opening hymn. The roll was called, showing that we had an unusually full meeting. The minutes were read, then came a discussion concerning dues for the coming year. All this time Sister Shaller had been presiding with her usual dignity. She was a beautiful woman, childless, and much praised for her interest in church works. She was rich and enjoyed the peculiar distinction of wearing very fashionable gowns even to church. Upon this occasion something reserved, potential and authoritative in her manner made me nervous. I had a premonition that she was after somebody's dearest idol. And I was not left long in suspense as to whose it was.
Fixing her wide brown eyes upon us with hypnotic intensity she said she had felt moved, unaccountably moved, to tell the Auxiliary that we must support a foreign female missionary this coming year. The silence that met this announcement was sad and submissive. We were already paying all the dues we could afford, this meant fifty dollars extra, and not a single one of us wanted to send the missionary except Sister Shaller.
She went on to say, in her deep mezzo soprano voice, that she knew it meant sacrifice for us, but that it was by just such sacrifices that we grew in grace, and she desired to suggest the nature of the sacrifice, one that we would probably feel the most, and would therefore be the most beneficial.
"Suppose each of us resolves to do without our Spring gown for Easter. Oh, my sisters! we could probably send two instead of one missionary then. And we will have at the same time curbed the weakness and vanity of our female natures!"
The rich plumes in her hat trembled with the depth of her emotions, her pretty silk skirts rustled softly. But the silence continued. If she had asked for the sacrifice of any but our Easter things, I reckon we could have borne it better, but probably there was not a woman in the room whose imagination had not already been cavorting under her prospective Easter bonnet. As for me, I never felt so circumvented and outraged in the whole course of my life as a preacher's wife. I had the samples in my bag at that moment, and was only waiting for the adjournment of the meeting to go to the store on my way home to purchase my foulard.
There is one thing we have all noticed about a silence, especially in a company of friends, if it lasts too long it gets sullen, and pregnant with the animosity of unspoken thoughts. When the silence was approaching this stage, Sister MacL, who had a sort of cradle heart for soothing everyone, murmured in her crooning voice:
"Let us take it to the Lord in prayer!"
And we were about to rise and kneel like a set of angry children before our smiling Heavenly Father, when something either moral or immoral stiffened in me, and I startled even myself with these words, that seemed to come of their own accord out of my mouth:
"I'll do nothing of the kind!"
I was oblivious to the horrified gaze of my companions. I felt some spirit strengthen me and give me courage. I had a quick tear-blinded vision of the years behind me, and of the figure I made walking always down the aisle of some church by William in my dismal black dress, or sitting at a funeral or even at a feast, always in that ugly black garment.
"Sister Shaller," I said, looking steadily at her as a child looks at another child who is trying to take some cherished plaything from it, "you can do as you please about sending that missionary. You are perfectly able to do without new Easter clothes. As for me, I have promised the Lord to dress better, more like a human being and less like a woman-raven, and I intend to do it. I am tired of sitting in retired corners at parties and receptions because I look as if I belonged to a funeral. It is a matter of conscience with me, just as the missionary is with you."
I never told William what I had done. It was one of those good works that he could not have measured or appreciated. And I never knew whether Sister Shaller sent her missionary or not. She was a good woman and perfectly capable of doing it. But the other women were as grateful as if I had rescued their Easter things from a highwayman.
This was the only place William ever served where the people of the world flocked in and filled his church. I used to think maybe it was a way they had of returning my social friendliness to them. I accepted all of their invitations I dared to accept, and they accepted all of William's. They not only crowded in to hear him preach, they were singularly amiable about coming up to the altar if he extended an invitation to penitents who were sorry for their sins. The trouble with those people was the exceedingly small number of things they would admit were sins. But it made no difference in William's exhortations as sometimes he bent above the gayly flowered heads in his altar. It was always
"Give up every thing and follow Christ."
And if he did them no good certainly he did them no harm.
The fact that I had a worldly mind was in some ways very fortunate for William. For, when all is said, this is the world we live in, not the Kingdom of Heaven. And while I never knew any man who understood the archangelic politics of the latter place better than he did, there were constantly occurring occasions down here on the earth, between his pulpit and the Post Office, when this same New Jerusalem statescraft rendered him one of the most obtuse and stubborn men in creation. It was then that I used to feel like one of those cheerful, clever little dogs we sometimes see leading a blind man through a dangerously crowded thoroughfare. It was then only that I ever had the delightful sensation of filling the star rôle in the really great drama of life we were acting together. And it was usually a deliciously double rôle, for William never knew that he was led by anything but the voice of God and the peculiar Scripture wisdom of the prophets, and the man of the world in the situation who had to be corraled and brought back into the fold rarely suspected, either, what was happening to him.
In regard to the latter I will say I think some very good people will be obliged to wait until they actually get in the Kingdom of Heaven before they experience the shine and illumination of a spiritual nature. I have seen many a one of this class on William's Circuits, and they are about the most difficult saints of all to manage, because they could do what they conceived to be their duty and listen a lifetime to the gospel without ever catching the least hint of its real significance. The strongest sermon William could preach on "Sell all your goods and follow me" never induced a single rich man to do it. He was fortunate if such a man gave five dollars extra to foreign missions on the strength of the appeal.
The wonderful thing about William was that these facts never clouded his convictions or discouraged him. He had a faith over and above the vain pomps and show of this world. He wore clothes so old they glistened along every seam, and little thin white ties, and darned shirts, and was forever stinting himself further for the sake of some collection to which he wanted to contribute. And all these made him an embarrassingly impressive figure when he looked out over the gew-gaws of his Sunday congregation, calling upon them to sell all their goods to feed the poor, or to lay down their life for Him, or to put on the whole armor of God and present their bodies a living sacrifice, which was their reasonable service. Maybe if he had especial "liberty" in his delivery there would be a lively response of "Amens" from the brethren. Maybe some old black bonneted sister would slap her hands and shout a little on the side, but nobody ever really did the things he told them to do. If they had, William alone could have revolutionized human society in the course of his ministry. But he was never aware of his failure. He was like a man holden in a heavenly vision, a man supping in one long dream upon the milk and honey of far off Canaan.
For this reason, as I have said, he sometimes blundered in the world about him and I had to come to the rescue.
We were stationed at Arkville, a small village with two country churches attached to make up the Circuit, when this incident happened which will serve to illustrate what I mean. The congregation was composed for the most part of men and women who worked in a cotton factory, and of one rich man who owned it. He was that most ferocious thing in human shape, a just man, with a thimble-headed soul, a narrow mind and a talent for making money. He had built the church at Arkville and he paid nearly all the assessments. He was a despot, with a reputation among his employees of having mercy upon whom he would have mercy. William never understood him. He regarded Brother Sears as a being remarkably generous, and capable of growing in grace. Sears accordingly flattered and honored the church with his presence every Sunday during the first six months of his ministry.
But there came a dreadful Sabbath when William read for his New Testament lesson the story of Dives's extraordinary prosperity in this world, dwelt with significant and sympathetic inflection upon the needy condition of Lazarus lying neglected outside his gate, afflicted with sores. Then he capped the climax, after the singing of the second hymn, by reading out in a deep, sonorous, judgment-trumpet voice:
"And Dives being in torment lifted up his eyes to Abraham in heaven and begged for a drop of water to cool his parched tongue."
It was a tropical text and William preached a burning sermon from it. As he grew older the vision of hell seemed to fade and he laid the scenes of his discourses nearer and nearer the fragrant outskirts of Heaven, but he was now in his hardy old age, and occasionally took a severely good man's obtuse pleasure in picturing the penitentiary pangs of sinners.
I shall always retain a vivid memory of that service—William standing in the little yellow pine-box pulpit with his long gray beard spread over his breast, and his blue eyes shadowed with his dark thoughts of Dives's torment. I can still see, distinctly enough to count them, the rows of sallow-faced men and women with their hacking concert cough, casting looks of livid venom at Sears sitting by the open window on the front bench, a great red-jowled man who was regarding the figure in the pulpit with such a blaze of fury one might have inferred that he had already swallowed a shovelful of live coals. Nevertheless William went on like an inspired conflagration. There proceeded from his lips a sulphurous smoke of damaging words with Dives's face appearing and reappearing in the haze in a manner that was frightfully realistic. I longed to leap to my feet and exclaim:
"William, stop! You are hurting Brother Sears's feelings and appealing to the worst passions in the rest of your congregation!"
But it was too late. Suddenly Sears arose and strode out of the house. Five minutes later William closed with a few leaping flame sentences and sat down, so much carried away with the sincerity of his own performance that he had not even noticed Sears's departure.
When he discovered the sensation he had created and the enormity of his chief steward's indignation, he was far from repentant. He simply withdrew and devoted an extra hour a day to special prayer for Brother Sears. It was no use to advise him that he might as well cut off the electric current and then try to turn on the light as to pray for a man like Sears. He had a faith in prayer that no mere reasoning could obstruct or circumvent. And the nearer I come to the great answer to all prayers, the more I am convinced that he was right. But in those days I almost suspected William of cheating in the claims he made for the efficacy of prayer. Thus, in the case of Brother Sears, to all appearances it was I who brought about a reconciliation by readjusting one of the little short circuits of his perverse nature.
Brothers Sears was a man who loved to excel his fellow-man even in the smallest things. He not only felt a first-place prominence in the little society of the village, he strove to surpass the least person in it if there was any point of competition between them. It would have been a source of mortification to him if the shoemaker had grown a larger turnip than he had grown.
William and I were walking by his garden one day, after he had sulked for a month, and saw him standing in the midst of it with a lordly air. William would have passed him by with a sorrowful bow, but I hailed him:
"Good afternoon, Brother Sears! You have a beautiful garden, but I believe our pole beans are two inches taller than yours on the cornstalk."
He was all competitive animation at once, measured the curling height of his tallest bean vine, and insisted upon coming home with us to measure ours, which, thank heavens, were four inches shorter.
He was so elated over this victory that he apparently forgave William on the spot for his Dives sermon, and handed him ten dollars on quarterage to indicate the return of his good will.
"Mary," said William, staring down happily at the crisp bill in his hand as Sears disappeared, "never say again that the Lord does not answer prayer!"
For a moment I felt a flash of resentment. Who was it that had had the courage to beard Sears in his own garden? Who had tolled him all the way across town into our garden to measure our bean stalk? Who was it that had thought up this method of natural reconciliation, anyhow? Not William, walking beside us in sad New Testament silence. Then, suddenly, my crest fell. After all, I was merely the instrument chosen by which William's prayers for Sears had been answered. To his faith we owed this reaction of grace, not to me, who had not uttered a single petition for the old goat.
From time to time William had queer experiences with the political element in his churches. This is composed usually, not of bad men, but of men who have Democratic or Republican immortalities. Apt as not the leading steward would be the manager of the political machine in that particular community. There was Brother Miller, for example, at Hartsville, a splendid square-looking man, with a strong face, a still eye, and an impeccable testimony at "experience" meetings. He held up William's hands for two years without blinking, and professed the greatest benefits from his sermons. No man could pray a more open-faced, self-respecting prayer, and not one was more conscientious in the discharge of his duties to the church and the pastor. It never seemed to disturb him that the portion of the community which was opposed to the "machine" that elected everything from the village coroner to the representative, regarded him as the most debauched and unscrupulous politician in that part of the State. He simply accepted this as one of his crosses, bore it bravely, and went on perfecting his remarkably perfect methods for excluding all voters who did not vote for his candidate. He would confide in William sundry temptations he had, enlisted his sympathy and admiration because of the struggle he professed to have in regard to strong drink, although he never actually touched intoxicants, but never once did he mention or admit his real besetting sin. He was willing to repent of everything else, but not of his politics. And St. Paul himself could not have dragged him across the Democratic party line in that county, not even if he had showed him the open doors of Heaven.
I do not know what is to become of such Christians. The country is full of them, and if they cause as many panics and slumps and anxieties in the next world as they do in this one we shall have a lot more trouble there than we have been led to believe from reading Revelations.
I have had little to say about the joy of William, although he was one of the most joyful men I have ever known. The reason is I never understood it. His joy was not natural like mine (in so far as I had any)—it was supernatural, and not at all dependent upon the actual visible circumstance about him. It used to frighten me sometimes to face the last month before quarterly conference with only two dollars, half a sack of flour and the hock end of a ham. But then it was that William rose to the heights of a strange and almost exasperating cheerfulness. He could see where he was going plainer. Our extremity gave him an opportunity to trust more in the miracles of providence, and that afforded him the greatest pleasure. He was never weary of putting his faith to the test. He was like a strong wrestling Jacob, going about looking for new angels to conquer. And I am bound to confess that his Lord never really failed him, although he sometimes came within five minutes of doing so.
One Sabbath, I remember, he had an appointment at a church ten miles distant where he was to begin a protracted meeting. At the last moment his horse went lame. It so happened that some weeks previous William had overreached himself in a horse trade. He had swapped an irritable crop-eared mare for a very handsome animal who proved to have a gravel in one of his fore feet. This horse would lay his tail over the dashboard and travel like inspiration for days at a time up and down the long country roads; then, suddenly, if there was a hurried message to go somewhere to comfort a dying man or preach his funeral, the creature would begin to limp as if he never expected to use but three legs again. I believe William suspected the devil had something to do with this diabolical gravel, for he never gave way to impatience as a natural man would have done in such a predicament. Upon the occasion I have mentioned, he helped the old hypocrite back into the stable with a mildness that exasperated me as I watched with my hat on from the window, for it was already past the time when we should have started.
"Silas is too lame to travel to-day," said he a moment later as he entered the kitchen.
"But what will you do, William?" I exclaimed, provoked in spite of myself at his serenity. "It will be dreadful if you miss your appointment at the beginning of the meeting."
"I can do nothing but pray. Mine is the Lord's work. Doubtless he will provide a way for me to get to it," he answered, withdrawing into the parlor and closing the door after him.
I knew that meant wrestling with one of the traveling angels, and held my tongue, but the natural temper in my blood was not so easily controlled. I flopped down in the chair, laid my head upon the window sill and yielded to tears. I was far along in my middle years then, but never to the end did I get accustomed to the stubbornness of William's faith. I always wanted to do something literal and effective myself in the emergency. I seemed to be made so that I couldn't look to God for help until I had worn myself out.
While I sat there, in a sort of tearful rage with William and the horse, there was a sound of wheels at the front gate. I arose, hastily wiping my eyes, and was just in time to face William's smiling countenance in the parlor doorway.
"Mary, Sister Spindle is not well, and Brother Spindle has driven by to offer us seats in his carriage."
Brother Spindle was the only man in the community who owned a carriage and horses. I flung my arms around William's neck and whispered:
"Forgive me, William, I never can get used to it that the Lord is illogically and incredibly good to you. But I am glad to tag along after you in His mercies."
He had a gentle way of enjoying these triumphs over me. He would cast the blue beam of his eye humorously over me, and then kiss me as if I was still young and beautiful.
Never in all our married life did he get the best of me in an argument. His arguing faculty was not highly developed. It was easier to silence him than to stir him into opposing speech. But whenever he entered the sacred parsonage parlor and closed the door after him, I always knew he would have the best of me one way or another when he came out.
But it was not this faith in prayer that confused me most, it was the answers that William, and others like him, received to their prayers. We never went to any church where there was not at least one man or woman who knew, actually knew, how to reach his or her empty hands up to God and get them filled. And they were always people of rare dignity in the community, although some of them bordered on the simplicity of childhood mentally.
I recall in this connection Sister Carleton. She was a very old woman who seemed to have settled down to be mostly below her waist. Her shoulders were thin, her bosom flat, but she widened out in the hips amazingly. Her face was the most beautifully wrinkled countenance I ever beheld. Every line seemed to enhance some celestial quality in her expression. And she had the dim look of the very old after they begin to recede spiritually from the ruthlessness of mere realities. She had palsy and used to sit in the Amen Corner of the church at Eureka, gently, incessantly wagging her lovely old head beneath a little black horseshoe bonnet that was tied under her chin with long black ribbons. Sabbath after Sabbath, year after year she was always to be seen there, sweetly abstracted like an old saint in a dream. She had one thought, one purpose left in life. This was to live to see all of her "boys saved." These were three middle-aged men, all of whom had been wild in their youth. Her one connection now with the church was expressed, not by any personal interest in the preacher or his sermons, but in this thought for her children. Some time during every experience meeting we always knew that Sister Carleton would rise trembling to her feet, steady herself with both hands on the bench in front of her, look about her vaguely and ask the prayers of "all Christian people" that her boys might repent and be saved from their sins. They were already excellent and prosperous citizens and remarkable for their devotion to her, but she was not the woman to mince matters. They had not been converted, therefore she prayed for them as if they were still dead in their trespasses and sins.
The first year of William's ministry in this place the two younger sons were converted and joined the church, but the oldest still "held out," as the saying was. In fact, he stayed out of the church literally, never coming to any service.
The next year Sister Carleton had grown very feeble, but at a consecration meeting held one afternoon before the regular revival service at night, she appeared as usual. Before the closing hymn she arose, clasped her old hands over the back of the bench in front of her and made her last petition for the "prayers of all Christian people."
"Brother Thompson," she concluded in the deep raucous voice of extreme age, "I have prayed for my youngest boy fifty years, and for my second boy fifty-two years, and for my oldest son nearly sixty years. The two youngest air saved now, but t'other is still out of the fold. I ain't losin' faith, but I'm gittin' tired. Seems as if I couldn't hold out much longer. But I can't go till Jimmy is saved. I ain't got nothin' else keepin' me but that." She paused, looked about her as if she felt a memory brush past. "When he was jest a little one, no higher 'an that, he was afeerd of the dark. I always had to set by him till he was asleep. And now, seems as if I couldn't leave him for good out in the dark. I want to ast you to pray, not that he may be converted, but that he may be converted this very night. I ain't got time to wait no longer—seems as if I'm jest obliged to git still and rest soon."
She sank back upon the bench, and I wondered what William would do. I never was prepared for the audacity of his faith. But that was one kind of dare he never took.
"Sister Carleton," he replied, "I feel that your prayer will be answered. I've got the faith to believe your son will come here tonight and be saved from his sins."
I wished that he had not been so definite. I felt that it would have been wiser to give some general expression of hope. I feared the effects upon the rest of the congregation and upon William, when we returned for the night service and James Carleton should not be there even, and I was sure he would not be. I reckon first and last I must have halved the strength of William's faith by my lack of faith.
The truth is so bold, so absurd from the present worldly point of view that I almost hesitate to write it here. James Carleton was present at the evening service. He was the first man to reach the altar when the invitation to penitents was given. He was soundly converted, and lived a changed life from that hour.
The next night Sister Carleton was not in her accustomed place for the first time in nearly forty years. A month later she passed away, having already received the joy of her reward in the salvation of her children.
I have noticed that rich people do not have this kind of faith in prayer. They want, as a rule, only those things that can be bought with money, and they buy them. I have never seen a rich father nearly so anxious for the salvation of his children as he was for their success in the world. And the same thing has been my observation in regard to rich mothers. Sometimes they pray for their sons and daughters, but they do not often mean what they pray, and God knows it, for he never horrifies one of them by granting their prayer.
Still, there is a kind of sacrilegious confidence in prayer that always offended some delicacy in me, and William felt it too, only he never learned how to condemn it. His sense of reverence was not sufficiently discriminating. And there was an occasion where I had to rid him and his congregation of this sublimated form of spiritual indecency.
As I have said, we were sent now to small stations, village churches, or mission churches in the factory edges of the big cities. But William's years, the hardships and anxieties, both earthly and unearthly, to which he had been exposed began to tell on his strength. And the year we were at Springdale as the summer came on he felt unequal to conducting the usual six weeks' protracted meeting without help. And while six weeks may seem a long time to hold such services, it is really a very short time for people to get revived and heaven-minded in when all the rest of the year they have been otherwise minded. The wonder to me was that men who had driven hard bargains and hated some one or more neighbors for ten months; that women who had given themselves over to the littleness and lightness of a small fashionable life in a small town, or to gossip about those who did, could so quickly recover their moral and spiritual standards in a revival.
I remember that it was William's custom, as soon as there was the least interest manifested, to have a very searching service for his church members in which he called upon all those who were at enmity with one another to rectify whatever wrong they had committed and to be reconciled. Nearly always some stiff-necked steward had had a row with somebody else, apt as not a sinner. He would be expected to go out and find the man, whoever it was, and patch up the difficulty, and to report at the next service. I can see now the old spiritual hard-heads in William's congregations with whom, year in and year out, he had the greatest trouble. They always managed to "fall out with somebody" between revivals. But nothing in or out of the Kingdom of Heaven would make one of them admit he was in the wrong or induce him to go to the other person and attempt a reconciliation. The most you could get out of any one of them would be that if his enemy came to him and asked his pardon, he was willing to "forgive him!" If the said enemy was a good natured fellow, William usually managed to get him to make this concession, otherwise the old hard-head remained cold and aggrieved through out the revival, maybe casting a damper over the whole meeting: a figure in the Amen corner at which the young unregenerated sinners would point the finger of scorn and accusation when they were implored to repent and believe and behave themselves.
No one who has not been through it can understand how heartbreaking all this is to the preacher and how wearing on his human nerves. There have been times when I should have been almost willing to see William lose patience and expend about two pages of fierce Plutonian vocabulary on some old stumbling-block in the church. But he never did. And it will serve them right if the ten thousand prayers he made, asking God to soften their obdurate hearts, are registered against them somewhere in the debit column of the Book of Life.
Thus, I say, it came to pass that William was wearing out and no longer able to get through a protracted meeting alone. So at Springdale, he engaged Brother Dunn to come and help him.
Brother Dunn was what may be called a professional evangelist. We had never seen him, but he had a reputation for being "wonderfully successful" with sinners. And if sinners made a ripe harvest Springdale was as much in need of reapers as any place we had ever been. You might have inferred that the original forbidden fruit-tree flourished in the midst of it, the people were so given to frank, straightforward sinning of the most naïvely primitive character.
I never knew how William felt, but I was not favorably impressed with Brother Dunn when he arrived on the late evening train, a frisky, dapper young man, who looked in the face as if his light was turned too high. That night as he preceded us up the aisle of the church, which was crowded to hear him, he showed to my mind a sort of irreverent confidence in the grace of God.
The service that followed was indescribable in any religious language, or even in any secular language. Brother Dunn brought his own hymn-books with him and distributed them in the congregation with an activity and conversational freedom that made him acquainted at once. The hymns proved to be nursery rhymes of salvation set to what may be described as lightly spinning dicky-bird music. Anybody could sing them, and everybody did, and the more they sang the more cheerful they looked, but not repentant. The service was composed mostly of these songs interspersed now and then with wildly excruciating exhortations from Brother Dunn to repent and believe. He explained, with an occasional "ha! ha!" how easy it was to do, and there is no denying that the altar was filled with confused young people who knelt and hid their eyes and behaved with singular reverence under the circumstances.
The cheating began when Brother Dunn attempted to make them "claim the blessing." He induced half a dozen young girls and two or three youths to "stand up and testify" that their sins had been forgiven, simple young creatures who had no more sense of the nature of sin or the depth of genuine repentance than field larks.
Later he frisked home with us, praising God in little foolish words, and rejoicing over the success of the service. Shortly after he retired to his room we heard a great commotion punctuated with staccato shouts. William hurried to the door to inquire what the trouble was. He discovered Brother Dunn hopping about the room in his night-shirt, slapping his palms together in a religious frenzy. He declared that as he prayed by his bed a light had appeared beside him.
William tried to look cheerful and blessed, but there is one thing I can always say for him, he was an honest man in dealing with the most illusive and deceptive things men have ever dealt in, that is, spiritual values, and the more he observed Brother Dunn, the more his misgivings increased.
The next morning I met the evangelist in the hall.
"Hallelujah!" he exclaimed.
"What for?" I demanded coldly.
He gave some stammering reply. But that was the beginning of the end of his spiritual peace in our house. After that I consistently punctured his ecstasies, quoting some of the sternest Scriptures I could remember to confound him.
William remonstrated with me. He said Dunn said my lack of spirituality "depressed him."
"And, William, his lack of reverence incenses me. If you don't get rid of that cotton haloed evangelist everybody in this town will claim a 'blessing' without repenting or being converted," I replied.
Fortunately Dunn dismissed himself. He said that it was impossible to have a revival in such an atmosphere. He implied as plainly as he could that he was sorry for William, accepted the sum of ten dollars which had been promised him for his services and left.
I have never known what to think of such preachers. No one who ever knew one can doubt his sincerity. But they cultivate a kind of spiritual idiocy and frenzy that is more damaging to souls than any amount of hypocrisy.
I have always been thankful that the joy of William in the religious life was a stern and great thing, no more resembling this lightness, this flippancy than integrity resembles folly.