The experiences of 1894, '5 and '6 gave me a distaste—really a disgust—with public life I felt that I would never enter a large city again. I sought retirement in a country parish; this was secured for me by my friend, the president of Tabor College, the Rev. Richard Cecil Hughes.
It was in a small town in Iowa—Avoca in Pottawattomie County; I stayed there a year.
In 1897 I was in Cleveland, Ohio, in charge of an institution called The Friendly Inn; a very good name if the place had been an inn or friendly. My inability to make it either forced me to leave it before I had been there many months. It was in Cleveland that I first joined a labour union. I was a member of what was called a Federal Labour Union and was elected its representative to the central body of the union movement.
Early in 1898 I was in Springfield, Mass., delivering a series of addresses to a Bible school there. My funds ran out and not being in receipt of any remuneration and, not caring to make my condition known, I was forced for the first time in my life tobecome a candidate for a church. There were two vacant pulpits and I went after both of them. Meantime I boarded with a few students who, like their ancestors, had "plenty of nothing but gospel."
They lived on seventy-five cents a week. Living was largely a matter of scripture texts, hope and imagination. I used to breakfast through my eyes at the beautiful lotus pond in the park. We lunched usually on soup that was a constant reminder of the soul of Tomlinson of Berkeley Square. Quantitively speaking, supper was the biggest meal of the day—it was a respite also for our imaginations.
The day of my candidacy arrived. I was prepared to play that most despicable of all ecclesiastical tricks—making an impression. I almost memorized the Scripture reading and prepared my favourite sermon; my personal appearance never had been so well attended to. The hour arrived. The little souls sat back in their seats to take my measure.
It was their innings. I had been duly looked up in the year-book and my calibre gauged by the amount of money paid me in previous pastorates.
The "service" began. My address to the Almighty was prepared and part of the game is to make believe that it is purely extemporaneous. Every move, intonation and gesture is noted and has its bearing on the final result. I was saying to the ecclesiastical jury: "Look here, you dumb-heads, wake up; I'm the thing you need here!" Sermontime came and with it a wave of disgust that swept over my soul.
"Good friends," I began; "I am not a candidate for the pastorate here. I was a few minutes ago; but not now. Instead of doing the work of an infinite God and letting Him take care of the result I have been trying to pleaseyou. If the Almighty will forgive me for such unfaith—such meanness—I swear that I will never do it again."
Then I preached. This brutal plainness created a sensation and several tried to dissuade me, but I had made up my mind.
It was while I was enjoying the "blessings" of poverty in Springfield that I was called to New Haven to confer with the directors of the Young Men's Christian Association about their department of religious work. I had been in New Haven before. In 1892 I addressed the students of Yale University on the subject of city mission work and, as a result of that address, had been invited to make some investigations and outline a plan for city mission work for the students. I spent ten days in the slum region there, making a report and recommendations. On these the students began the work anew. I was asked at that time to attach myself to the university as leader and instructor in city missions, but work in New York seemed more important to me.
I rode my bicycle from Springfield to New Haven for that interview. When it was over I found myselfon the street with a wheel and sixty cents. I bought a "hot dog"—a sausage in a bread roll—ate it on the street and then looked around for a lodging.
"Is it possible," I asked a policeman, "to get a clean bed for a night in this town for fifty cents?"
"Anything's possible," he answered, "but——"
He directed me to the Gem Hotel, where I was shown to a 12 × 6 box, the walls of which spoke of the battles of the weary travellers who had preceded me. I protected myself as best I could until the dawn, when I started for Springfield, a disciple for a day of the no-breakfast fad.
Things were arranged differently at the next interview. I was the guest of the leaders in that work and was engaged as "Religious Work Director" for one year. I think I was the first man in the United States to be known officially by that title.
The Board of Directors was composed of men efficient to an extraordinary degree. The General Secretary was a worker of great energy and business capacity and as high a moral type as the highest. He was orthodox in theology and the directors were orthodox in sociology. It was a period when I was moving away from both standpoints.
To express a very modern opinion in theology would disturb the churches—the moral backers of the institution; to express an advanced idea in sociology would alienate the rich men—the financialbackers. A month after I began my work I "supplied" the pulpit of a church in the New Haven suburbs called the Second Congregational Church of Fair Haven. The chairman of the pulpit supply committee was a member of the Board of Directors of the Y.M.C.A.
Gradually I drifted away from the Association toward the church. The former was building a new home and many people were glad of an excuse not to give anything toward its erection. So any utterance of mine that seemed out of the common was held up to the solicitor. An address on War kept the telephone ringing for days. It was as if Christianity had never been heard of in New Haven. Labour men asked that the address be printed and subscribed money that it might be done, but an appeal to the teachings of Jesus on the question of war was lauded by the sinners and frowned upon by the saints.
With the General Secretary I never had an unkind word. Though a man of boundless energy he was a man in supreme command of himself. We knew in a way that we were drifting apart and acted as Christians toward each other. What more can men do?
Mr. Barnes, the director, who was chairman of the pulpit supply committee of the church, kept urging me to give my whole time to the church. Every day for weeks he drove his old white horse to my door and talked it over. I refused the call to thepastorate but divided my time between them. For the Y.M.C.A. my duties were:
To conduct mass meetings for men in a theatre.To organize the Bible departments and teach one of the classes.Care and visiting of converts.Daily office hour.Literary work as associate editor of the weekly paper.Writing of pamphlets.To conduct boys' meetings.
For the church:
To conduct regular Sunday services.Friday night prayer meetings.Men's Bible class.Visitation of sick and burial of the dead.Class for young converts.Children's meetings.
At the same time I entered the Divinity School of Yale University, taking studies in Hebrew, New Testament Greek and Archæology. A little experience in the church taught me that intellectually I was leaving the ordinary type of church at a much quicker pace than I was leaving the Y.M.C.A.
Dr. Edward Everett Hale told a friend once that he preached to the South Church on Sunday morning so that he might preach to the world the rest of the week. I told the officers of the church frankly thatI was not the kind of man needed for their parish; but they insisted that I was, so I preached for them on Sunday that I might preach to a larger parish during the week.
Two things I tried to do well for the church—conduct an evening meeting for the unchurched—which simply means the folk unable to dress well and pay pew rents—and conduct a meeting for children. I organized a committee to help me at the evening meeting. The only qualification for membership on the committee was utter ignorance of church work. The very good people of the community called this meeting "a show." Well, it was. I asked the regular members to stay away for I needed their space and their corner lots with cushioned knee stools. I made a study of the possibilities of the stereopticon. Mr. Barnes gave me a fine outfit. I got the choicest slides and subjects published. Prayers, hymns, scripture readings and illuminated bits of choice literature were projected on a screen. I trained young men to put up and take down the screen noiselessly, artistically, and with the utmost neatness and dispatch. I discovered that many men who either lacked ambition or ability to wear collars came to that meeting, and they sang, too, when the lights were low. When in full view of each other they were as close-mouthed as clams. The singing became a special feature. My brethren in other churches considered this a terrible"come-down" at first, but changed their minds later and copied the thing, borrowing the best of my good slides and not a few of the unique ideas accompanying the scheme.
A Methodist brother across the river said confidentially to a friend that he was going to launch on the community "a legitimate sensation"—a boys' choir. My plans for getting the poor people to church succeeded. Such a thing as fraternizing the steady goers—goers by habit and heredity—and the unsteady goers—goers by the need of the soul—was impossible. The most surprising thing in these evening meetings to the men who financed the church was the fact that these poor people paid for their own extras. That goes a long way in church affairs.
The weekly children's meeting I called "The Pleasant Hour." Believing that the most important work of the Church is the teaching of the children, it was my custom for many years in many churches to personally conduct a Sunday School on a week day so that the best I had to give would be given to the children. In my larger work for the city two ideas governed my action. One was to get the church people interested in civic problems and the other was to solve civic problems or to attempt a solution whether church people were interested in them or not.
I organized a flower mission for the summer months. We called it a Flower House. An abandoned hotel was cleaned up. A few loads of sanddumped in the back yard as a sort of extemporized seashore where little children might play. Flowers were solicited and distributed to the folks who had neither taste nor room for flowers. We did some teaching, too, and gave entertainments. A barrel-organ played on certain days by the sand pile; and that music of the proletariat never fails to attract a crowd.
The flower mission developed into a social settlement. We called it Lowell House. At first the church financed it, then it got tired of that, and when I incorporated the settlement work in my church reports in order to stimulate support, the settlement workers—directors rather—got tired of the church and went into a spasm over it. Lowell House is accounted a successful institution of the city now. It is doing a successful church work among the poor—church work with this exception, that its head worker—its educated, sympathetic priestess—lives there and shares her little artistic centre with the crowd who live in places not good enough for domestic animals.
In 1898 New Haven's public baths consisted of a tub in the basement of a public school. I photographed the tub and projected the picture on a screen in the Grand Opera House for the consideration of the citizens. That was the beginning of an agitation for a public bath house—an agitation that was pushed until the dream became a brick structure.
I was not particularly interested in the bathper se. It was an opportunity to get people to work for something this side of heaven, to emphasize the thought that men were as much worth taking care of as horses—an idea that has not yet a firm grip on the mind of the bourgeoisie.
The bath-house bill passed the Aldermanic and Councilmanic chambers, was signed by the mayor and the matter of building put into the hands of the Board of Health. The Board forgot all about it and some time later the agitation began again and persisted until another city government and another mayor had made a second law and carried it into effect.
There was no ecclesiastical objection to my participation in this movement. It was a small thing and cost little.
My Father had been begging me for years to come home and say good-bye to him; so, in 1901, I made the journey.
I hadn't been in the old home long before the alley was filled with neighbours, curious to have a look at "ould Jamie's son who was a clargymaan." I went to the door and shook hands with everybody in the hope that after a while they would go away and leave me with my own. But nobody moved. They stood and stared for several hours. "'Deed I mind ye fine when ye weren't th' height av a creepie!" said one woman, who was astounded that I couldn't call her by name.
"Aye," said another, "'deed ye were i' fond o' th' Bible, an' no wundther yer a clargymaan!"
A dozen old women "minded" as many different things of my childhood. I finally dismissed them with this phrase, as I dropped easily enough into the vernacular, "Shure, we'd invite ye all t' tay but there's only three cups in the house!"
My sister Mary and her four children lived with my father. We shutand barredthe door when theneighbours left and sat down to "tay," which consisted of potatoes and buttermilk. Mary had been trying to improve on the old days but I interposed, and together, we went through the old régime. Father took the pot of potatoes to the old tub in which he used to steep the leather. There he drained them—then put them on the fire for a minute to allow the steam to escape.
"I'm going to 'kep' them," I said, and they both laughed.
"Oh, heavens, don't," he said; "shure they don't 'kep' pirtas in America!"
"I'm not in America now," I answered, as I circled as much of the little bare table as I could with my arms to keep the potatoes from rolling off. He dumped them in a heap in the centre; they rolled up against my arms and breast and I pushed them back. Mary cleared a space for a small pile of salt and the buttermilk bowls.
"We'll haave a blessin' by a rale ministher th' night," Mary said.
"Oh, yis, that's thrue enough," my father said, "but Alec minds th' time whin it was blessin' enough to hev th' murphies—don't ye, boy?"
After "tay" I tacked a newspaper over the lower part of the window—my father lit the candle and Mary put a few turfs on the fire and we sat as we used to sit so many years ago. My father was so deaf that I had to shout to make him hear andnearly everything I said could be heard by the neighbours in the alley, many of whom sat around the door to hear whatever they could of the story they supposed I would tell of the magic land beyond the sea.
I unbarred the door in answer to a loud knock; it was a most polite note from a Roman Catholic schoolmaster inviting me to occupy a spare room in his house. Half an hour later we were again interrupted by another visitor, an old friend who also invited me to occupy his spare bed. It was evidently disturbing the town to know where I was to sleep. I politely refused all invitations. Each invitation was explained to my father.
"Shure that's what's cracking m' own skull," he said; "where th' divil will ye sleep, anyway, at all, at all?"
Then they listened and I talked—talked of what the years had meant to me.
The old man sighed often and occasionally there were tears in Mary's eyes; and there were times when the past surged through my mind with such vividness that I could only look vacantly into the white flame of the peat fire. Once after a long silence my father spoke—his voice trembled, "Oh," he said, "if she cud just have weathered through till this day!"
"Aye," Mary said, "but how do ye know she isn't jist around here somewhere, anyway?"
"Aye," the old man said as he nodded his head, "deed that's thrue for you, Mary, she may!" He took his black cutty pipe out of his mouth and gazed at me for a moment.
"What d'ye mind best about her?"
"I mind a saying she had that has gone through life with me."
"'Ivery day makes its own throuble?'"
"No, not that; something better. She used to say so often, 'It's nice to be nice.'"
"Aye, I mind that," he said.
"Then," I continued, "on Sundays when she was dressed and her nice tallied cap on her head, I thought she was the purtiest woman I ever saw!"
"'Deed, maan, she was that!"
When bed time came I took a small lap-robe from my suit case, spread it on the hard mud floor, rolled some other clothes as a pillow and lay down to rest. Sleep came slowly but as I lay I was not alone, for around me were the forms and faces of other days.
Next day I visited the scene of my boyhood's vision—I went through the woods where I had my first full meal. I visited the old church; but the good Rector was gathered to his fathers. It was all a day-dream; it was like going back to a former incarnation. Along the road on my way home I discovered the most intimate friend of my boyhood—the boy with whom I had gathered faggots, played "shinney"and gone bird-nesting. He was "nappin'" stones. He did not recognize my voice but his curiosity was large enough to make him throw down his hammer, take off the glasses that protected his eyes and stare at me.
"Maan, yer changed," he said, "aren't you?"
"And you?"
"Och, shure, I'm th' same ould sixpence!"
"Except that you're older!" There was a look of disappointment on his face.
"Maan," he said, "ye talk like quality—d'ye live among thim?"
I explained something of my changed life; I told of my work and what I had tried to do and I closed with an account of the vision in the fields not far from where we sat.
"Aye," he would say occasionally, "aye, 'deed it's quare how things turn out."
When I ended the story of the vision he said: "Ye haaven't forgot how t' tell a feery story—ye wor i' good at that!"
"Bob" hadn't read a book, or a newspaper in all those years. He got his news from the men who stopped at his stone pile to light their pipes—what he didn't get there he got at the cobbler's while his brogues were being patched or at the barber's when he went for his weekly shave. We talked each other out in half an hour. A wide gulf was between us: it was a gulf in the realm of mind.
As I moved away toward the town, I wondered why I was not breaking stones on the roadside, and I muttered Bob's well-worn phrase: "How quare!"
It became so difficult to talk to my father without gathering a crowd at the door that I shortened my stay and took him to Belfast where we could spend a few days together and alone. We had our meals at first in a quiet little restaurant on a side street. He had never been in a restaurant. As the waiter went around the table, the old man watched him with curious eyes. I have explained that my father never swore. He was mightily unfortunate in his selection of phrases and when irritated by the attention of the waiter to the point of explosion he said, in what he supposed was a whisper: "What th' hell is he dancin' around us like an Indian fur?" I explained. Everybody in the place heard the explanation; they also heard his reply: "Send him t' blazes—he takes m' appetite away!"
We moved into the house of a friend after that.
One afternoon I took him for a walk in the suburbs of the city.
He rested on a rustic bench on the lawn of a beautiful villa while I made a call.
"Twenty-five years ago," I said to the gentleman of the house, "I had a great inspiration from the life of a young lady who lived in this house, and I just called to say 'thank you.'"
"Her father is dead," he said. "I am her uncle."
Then he told me of the career of the city girl I had met on the farm and whom I had watched entering the church on Sundays.
"About the time you missed her at church," he said, "she was married to a rich young man. He spent his fortune in liquor and finally ended his life. She began to drink, after his death, but was persuaded to leave the country. She went to America. We haven't heard from her for a long time."
The following Sunday I told my father we were going to church.
"Not me!" he said.
"Oh, yes," I coaxed; "just this once with me."
"What th' divil's the use whin I haave a praycher t' m'silf."
"I am to be the preacher at the church."
"Och, but that's a horse ov another colour, bedad. Shure thin I'll go."
When my father saw me in a Geneva gown, his eyes were filled with tears.
The old white-haired lady who found the place in the book for him was the young lady's mother. Her uncle had ushered him into her pew, but they had never met each other nor did the old lady know until after church that he was my father.
He never heard a word of the sermon, but as we emerged from the church into the street he put his arms around my neck and kissing me said,"Och, boy, if God wud only take me now I'd be happy!"
He had been listening with his eyes and what he saw so filled him with joy that he was more willing to leave life than to have the emotion leave him.
Though he was very feeble, I took him to Scotland with me to visit my brothers and sisters; and there I left him. As the hour of farewell drew near he wanted to have me alone—all to himself.
"Ye couldn't stay at home awhile? Shure I'll be goin' in a month or two."
"Ah, that's impossible, father." He hung his head.
"D'ye believe I'll know her whin I go? God wudn't shut me out from her for th' things I've done—"
"Of course he won't."
"He wudn't be so d——d niggardly, wud He?"
"Never!"
He fondled my hands as if I were a child. The hour drew nigher. He had so many questions to ask, but the inevitableness of the situation struck him dumb. We were on the platform; the train was about to move out. I made a motion; he gripped me tightly, whispering in my ear:
"Ask God onct in a while to let me be with yer mother—will ye, boy?"
I kissed him farewell and saw him no more.
I went on to France.
My objective point in France was the study of Millet and his work. I wanted to interpret him to working people in New Haven.
So to Greville on La Hague I went with a camera.
Greville consists of a church and a dozen houses. Gruchy is half a mile beyond, on the edge of the sea.
In Gruchy Millet was born; in Greville he first came into contact with incentive—I photographed both places and spent a night and a day with M. Polidor, the old inn-keeper who was the painter's friend.
Surely, never was so large a statue erected in so small a village. The peasant artist sits there on a bank of mosses, looking over at the old church that squats on the hillside. In Cherbourg I found more traces of his art and some stories of his life there that would be out of place here.
I found four portraits painted while he was paying court to his first wife. I found them in a little shoe shop in a by-street, in possession of a distant relative of his first wife.
From Cherbourg I went to Barbizon, where Millet spent the latter part of his life. I was very graciously received and entertained by his son François and his American wife.
To browse among the master's relics, to handle the old books of his small library, to hold, as one would a babe of tender years, his palette, were small things, judged by the values of the average life:to me it was one of the most inspiring hours of my career.
Paris was to me an art centre—little more. I followed the footsteps of Millet from one place to another. I sat before his paintings in the Louvre—I met some of his old friends and gathered material for a lecture on his work.
From Paris I went to London. The British capital was more than an art centre to me. It was a centre, literary, sociological and religious. I was the guest of Sir George Williams one afternoon at one of his parties and met Lord Radstock whom I had heard preach on a street corner in Whitechapel twenty years before.
Besides visiting and photographing the literary haunts of the great masters, I made the acquaintance of the leaders of the Socialist movement. I went to St. Albans to attend the first convention of the Ruskin societies. The convention was composed of men who in literature and life were translating into terms of life and labour the teachings of John Ruskin.
From London I went to Oxford and spent a few weeks browsing around the most fascinating city in the world, to me. My visit was in anticipation of the British convention of the Young Men's Christian Association to which I was a fraternal delegate from the Young Men's Association of Yale University.
I was invited to a garden party at Blenheim Palace while at Oxford. I arrived early and presented my card. Without waiting I went into the grounds and proceeded to enjoy the beautiful walks. Before I had gone far, I met a young man who seemed familiar with the place. I told him that I had once taken the Duchess through part of the slum region of New York, and expressed a hope that she was at home.
"No," he said, "she is conducting a fair in London for soldiers' wives." My next remark was in the realm of ethics. I had heard that the father of the present Duke was a good deal of a rake and asked the young man whether that was true or not. He said he thought it was like the obituary notice of Mark Twain—very much exaggerated.
"I have been a flunky to some of these high fliers," I said, "and I know how hard it is to get at the facts and also how easy it is to form a mistaken judgment."
"Yes," he said, "that's true, but men of that type, while they are often worse than they are painted are more often much better than the best the public think of them! I am the successor of the late Duke, and speak with authority on at least one case."
He took me through the palace, not only the parts usually open to the public but the private apartments also, and later in the afternoon he took me oversome of the property at Woodstock, stopping for a few minutes at the house of Geoffrey Chaucer.
The Rector of Exeter College had invited a group of the leaders of the convention to a luncheon in Exeter and, because I was the only American, I was asked to be present and deliver a short address.
The grounds of Exeter show the good results of the four or five hundred years' care bestowed upon them. In my brief sojourn in Oxford as a student I had been chased out of the grounds of Exeter by the caretaker, under the suspicion that I was a burglar, taking the measure of the walks, windows, doors, etc.
I told this story to a man with whom I later exchanged cards; he was an old man and his card, read "W. Creese, Y.M.C.A. secretary, June 6, 1844."
"You were in early, brother," I said. "Yes," he said modestly, "I was infirst." He helped George Williams to organize the first branch of the Y.M.C.A. My story went the rounds of those invited to luncheon and prepared the way for the address I delivered.
The first thing I did on my return from Europe was to visit the last known address of the girl friend of my youth. It was in a Negro quarter of the city.
"Does Mrs. G—— live here?" I asked the coloured woman who opened the door.
"She did, mistah—but she done gone left, dis mawnin'."
"Do you know where she has gone?"
"Yes'r, she done squeezed in wif ol' Mammy Jackson," and she pointed out the tenement.
As I passed down the steps I noticed a small pile of furniture on the sidewalk. Something impelled me to ask about it.
"Yes'r," the negress said, "dem's her house traps; d' landlord done gone frow'd dem out."
I found her sitting with an old negress by the stove in a second-floor back tenement.
"I bring you a message of love from your mother," I said, without making myself known. We talked for a few minutes. I saw nothing whatever of the girl of long ago. There was a little of the voice—the fine musical voice—but nothing of form, nothing of feature. Deep lines of care and suffering marred her face and labour had calloused her hands. She was poorly dressed—had been ill and out of work, and behind in her rent. Too proud to beg, she was starving with her neighbours, the black people. I excused myself, found the landlord, and rearranged the home she had so heroically struggled to hold intact.
"Do you remember the farm at Moylena?" I asked.
"Yes, of course."
"And a farm boy——"
"Yes, yes," she said, adding: "those few days on that farm were the only happy days of my life!"
"I am that boy and I have come to thank you for the inspiration you were to me so long ago." She looked at me intently, perhaps searching for the boy as I had been searching for the girl.
"There was a wide gulf between us then," she said. "In these long years you have crossed to where I was and I—I have crossed to where you were, and the gulf remains."
In December, 1901, the New Haven Water Company applied for a renewal of its charter. The city had been getting nothing for this valuable franchise, and there was considerable protest against a renewal on the same terms. The Trades Council asked the ministers of the churches to make a deliverance on the question, but there was no answer. I was directly challenged to say something on the subject. I attended a hearing in the city hall. It was the annual meeting night of our church, and I closed the church meeting in the usual manner.
As quickly as possible I made my way to the public hearing. The committee room was crowded; on one side were the labouring men and on the other the stockholders and officers of the company. Several prominent members of my church, whom I had missed at the annual meeting, were in the committee room.
When called upon to speak, I asked the committee to hold the balance level. "We tax a banana vendor a few dollars a year for the use of thestreets," I said, "then why should a rich corporation be given an infinitely larger use of them for nothing?"
This provoked the rich men of the church, for most of them were stockholders in the company, and two of them were officers.
The thing was talked over afterward in the back end of a small store where all the church policies were formulated. One of the members was sent to the parsonage to question and warn me. My visitor spoke of former pastors who had been "called of God" elsewhere for much less than I had done. Another man came later, and asked for a promise that I would keep out of such affairs in the future.
This was the first fly in the ointment, the first break in the most cordial of relationships between me and the church.
The church had been organized fifty years when this incident occurred. We were preparing to celebrate the golden jubilee.
I gathered the officers together, and we went over the articles one by one. Not a man in the church believed in "everlasting damnation," but they voted unanimously to leave the hell-fire article just as they had found it. They had all subscribed to it, and it "hadn't hurt them."
"Do you mean to tell me," I asked, "that none of you believe in eternal punishment, and yet youare going to force every man, woman, and child who joins your church to solemnly swear before God that they do believe in it?" There was a great silence. "Yes, that's exactly what's what," one man said.
This incident illustrates the seared, calloused, surfeited condition of the average mind in the churches. It is glutted with sham, and atrophied by the reiteration of high-sounding but meaningless, pious phrases.
I managed to persuade them to so amend their by-laws that children baptized into the church became by that act church members. They did not know that by that amendment they were setting aside two-thirds of their creed, because they didn't know the creed.
One of my sermons at the Jubilee attracted the attention of Philo S. Bennett, a New York tea merchant, who made his home in New Haven. We became very close friends. One day Mr. Bennett and Mr. W.J. Bryan called at the parsonage. I happened to be out at the time, but dined with them that evening. Next morning a church member, who was a sort of cat's-paw for the rich men, called at the parsonage and informed me of the "disgust" of the leading members. "They won't stand for it!" he said vehemently.
When I spoke at the city hall they catalogued me as a Socialist, and when Mr. Bryan called,they moved me into the "free and unlimited coinage of silver" column. By "they," I mean four or five men—men of means, who absolutely ruled the church. The deacons had nothing to say, the church had as little. "The Society" was the thing. The "Society" in a Congregational church is a sort of secular adjunct charged with the duty of providing the material essentials. Their word is law, the only law. In their estimation business and religion could not be mixed, nor could things of the church be permitted to interfere in politics. The purchase of an alderman was to them as legitimate as the purchase of a cow. Some of them laughed as they told me of buying an election in the borough. It was a great joke to them. They were patriotic, very loudly patriotic, and their special hobby was "the majesty of the law."
I was to be punished for that water company affair, and a man was selected to administer the punishment. I had brought this man into the church; I had created a church office for him, and pushed him forward before the men. He was supposed to be my closest friend. He came to the parsonage one morning, to talk over casually the question of salary.
"Now," he said, "you don't care how we raise your salary, do you?"
"Of course not."
"Well, the Society's hard up this year and canonly raise $1,600; but the church will raise the other $400, and I have one of them already promised."
This seemed a most unusual proceeding, but I was unsuspecting. A few months afterward this man, with tears in his eyes, said:
"Mr. Irvine, whatever happens you will be my friend—won't you?"
He was doing their work, and wincing under the load of it.
"Brother," I said, "when I know whether you are playing the rôle of Judas or John, I will be better able to answer you."
At the end of the year it all came out. I was literally fined $400 for attending that meeting.
As my term of service drew to a close, the workingmen who had joined the church during my incumbency got together. They were in a majority. A church meeting was called, and a motion passed to call a council of the other churches. The purpose of the call was to advise the church how to proceed to force its own Society to pay the pastor's salary. A leading minister drew up the call. All ministers knew the record of the church: only one minister in its history had left of his own accord. The council met. It was composed of ministers and laymen of other churches. Among the laymen was the president of the telephone company. I had publicly criticized the company for disfiguring the streets with ugly cross-bars that looked likegibbets. The president's opposition to me was well known.
The council, under such influence, struck several technical snags, and adjourned. The president of the council wrote me later that the president of the telephone company had advised him not to recall the council, and he had come to that decision.
Concerning the defrauding me of my salary, the best people in that church to this day, when speaking of it, say: "Well, we didn't owe it to him,legally." The Society spent the money in fitting up the parsonage for my successor.