A Circuit Rider's Wife Part 9

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 G.o.d 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 hards.h.i.+ps 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.s 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 navely 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 G.o.d.

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 d.i.c.ky-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 circ.u.mstances.

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 G.o.d 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-s.h.i.+rt, 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.

CHAPTER XIV

CURIOUS FACTS ABOUT THE NATURE OF A PRIEST

What we call history is a sorry part of literature, confined to a few great wars and movements in national life and to the important events in the lives of a few important people. The common man has never starred his role in it. Therefore, it has never been written according to the scientific method. It is simply the spray--the big splash--humanity throws up as it goes down in the sea forever. It is what most of us do and what we think perishes with us, leaving not a record behind of the little daily deeds and wingflappings of our spirits that really make us what we are. This is why we make so little progress. The history of the great majority is never compiled for reference. We are always bunched in a paragraph, while the rest of the chapter is given to his Excellency the President, or some other momentary figure of the times.

n.o.body knows exactly how the planters of Thomas Jefferson's day lived.

We must depend upon fiction to give a sort of romantic impression of it. And fifty years from now no one will know how the farmers and brickmasons, grocers and merchants, managed their affairs in our own times. We shall be obliged to accept the sensational accounts left by a few wild-eyed, virus-brained socialists.

I do not know that I ought to pretend to rescue the cla.s.s to which William belonged from the same kind of oblivion. But by keeping memories of the little daily things in life a preacher's wife learns some curious facts about the nature of a priest--facts that should enable the reader to make profitable comparisons between those of the old and those of the new order, and to determine which is the real minister and which is not.

One thing I discovered was that you cannot domesticate a preacher like William on this earth in this life. A woman might get married to him and hang like a kissing millstone about his neck; she might sew on his b.u.t.tons, bear children for him, teach him to eat rolled oats, surround him with every evidence, privilege and obligation of strong earthly ties and a home; but he will not live there in his spirit. He belongs neither to his wife, nor to his children, nor to the civilization of his times. He belongs to G.o.d, and not to a G.o.d tamed and diminished by modern thought, but to The G.o.d, the one who divided the light from darkness, who actually did create Adam and Eve and blow His breath into them, who accepted burnt offerings sometimes, and who caused flowers to bloom upon the same altars between times.

So William never really belonged in his own house with his own body, his own wife and his breakfast, though he often rested there and seemed to enjoy the latter. He was more at home in the Psalms. I will not say he went so far as Jehovah, but when he was in a Leviticus frame of mind very few of the minor prophets satisfied his cravings for the awful. The gentle springtime of his heart was when he took up with Saint John in the New Testament. He never professed the intimate fellow-feeling I have heard some conceited preachers express for Saint Paul. He was not a great man; he was just a good one and too much of a gentleman to thrust himself upon a big saint like Paul, even in his imagination.

And I do not know which has been the greatest influence in making me what I am: the sense of reverence I had for him and his high Bible company, or the sense of bereavement I had when, having fed him and warmed him, he was still "not at home" with me, but following some pillar of cloud in his thoughts toward his great G.o.d's far eternity. A woman is a very poor creature. I think she hankers more for just love than she does for Heaven. I don't know how she will get on in a place where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. It's bound to be hard on her if the Lord does not give her something more than a harp and a golden crown with which to fill the aching void she is sure to have somewhere under her breast feathers.

But no one can say that I did not stand by William through the entire widowhood of my marriage. I was the world compa.s.s of his life, always sitting in his amen corner with my attention fixed anxiously upon the spiritual pulse of the congregation, always giving him the most nouris.h.i.+ng food our limited means afforded, always standing between him and sordid d.i.c.kering with the butcher and candlestick maker, always making myself a Chinese wall to separate him on sermon-making days from the church public.

Many a time I have taken my hands out of the biscuit dough to meet a steward who was determined to see him about the increased foreign mission a.s.sessment, or it might be the Sunday-school superintendent come to discuss the May picnic. I could usually pacify the steward and put off the superintendent, but if it was a messenger from some remote neighborhood on the circuit come to say that Brother Beatem was dead and the family wanted Brother Thompson to conduct the funeral services next morning at the nearest Methodist church I would be obliged to give in, even if William was in the very heat of spiritual constructions.

For a funeral is a thing that cannot be put off. The corpse will not endure it, nor the family, either, for that matter. They want the preacher to be on hand promptly with all the laurels of language to bestow upon their dead in the funeral wreath discourse.

And this brings me to mention a peculiarity of "surviving relatives" as a cla.s.s. They demand that the pastor of the dead man or woman shall furnish him his t.i.tles to mansions in the sky, whether he deserves them or not. Even if Brother Beatem was a mean man who neglected his wife and children, cheated his neighbors, abused his horse and failed to support the church, he must have a funeral that praised him for a saint. And if the pastor failed to do this the surviving relatives whom the dead man had victimized every day he lived would be the first to resent it.

I never knew but one pastor who told the truth in a funeral sermon, and he had to be "moved" immediately by his presiding elder. The whole community regarded it as one of the most brutal outrages that had ever been perpetrated in their midst. As for William, there was something sublime in the way he permitted his mind to skip the facts and stir his imagination when he preached a funeral. The curious part of it was, he believed what he said, and generally by the time he had finished nearly everyone else believed it. There were occasions, of course, when he was disgracefully duped by the "surviving relatives." However, I pa.s.s over a thousand little epitaphs of memory and come to our last years in the itinerancy. And it is curious how life winds itself into a circle, like the trail a lost man makes in the desert. After a few years as pastor of village churches, William was sent back to the country circuits. He was failing some, and, of course, younger and more progressive men were needed in the villages--preachers who could keep up with the committee-meeting times in modern church life. And I am obliged to admit William was a poor church committeeman. Occasionally he would go off to see an old sick woman or some barren fig-tree man who was not even a member of the church, and forget all about an important committee meeting on the brotherhood of man. This would give offense to some of the people in the church, who, in turn, would complain that he was not sufficiently interested in spreading the gospel.

As I have said before, William was a good man, but he was neither brilliant nor enterprising, as we understand these terms nowadays. He never did get it into his head that salvation could be furnished a dying world through a thorough organization of it into committees that furnished not only the salvation, but also the goat districts which had to receive this salvation as fast as it was offered. It was as simple as commerce and as nave as a rich man's charity, but William couldn't see it. Somehow, he was secretly opposed to it. He was for catching every goat separately and feeding him on truth and tenderness till he turned into a lamb. It was no use to argue that this required too much time and would take an eternity to get the world ready for Heaven. He refused to think of immortal souls as if they were bunches of heathen cattle, or slum cattle, that must be got into the salvation market on the hoof as soon as possible.

As he grew older, more set in his ways, he became a trifle contrary about it, like a th.o.r.n.y old priest who has received private orders from his G.o.d to go on seeking his lost lambs one at a time. Once he insulted a man who came to him about the Laymen's Movement which is organized to convert the world to Christianity in this generation and probably before Christmas.

"We can do it if we have faith enough!" said he.

"No, you can't!" retorted William. "Not unless the heathens get faith enough to believe, and faith is a thing you cannot send out through the mails as if it was sample packages of patent medicine!"

Such talk as that sent him back to the circuits, where there were the same old fas.h.i.+ons in sleeves and headgear for women, and where he could take his text from Jonah's gourd if he chose, without exciting the higher critical faculties of his congregation.

It was harder on us in some ways. I never could understand why the old preachers who have got rheumatism in their knees, and maybe lumbago besides, should be sent back to the exposure of all weathers on the circuits, while the young ones with plenty of oil in their joints fatten in the more comfortable charges. And I am not the one to say with resignation that it is "all right." Still, the good G.o.d evens things up in wonderful ways.

William got so stiff in his legs toward the last that he had to stand up to pray; but we had come back to the region of simplicities, where there were just three elements to consider and put together in his sermons--Man, his field and his G.o.d, and they were only separated by a little gra.s.s, a few stars and the creation light and darkness of days and nights. When a man gets as near home as that he does not mind the pains in his mere body. At least William never complained.

Looking back, I think he was at his best about the time he went back to the real circuit itinerancy. He had the glory of presence. Faith, I think, gave him a halo. You could not see it, but you could feel it, and in this connection I recall an ill.u.s.tration of the difference between such a halo and the "aura" we hear so much about these days from people who think they are interested in psychic phenomena, but who are really psychic epileptics.

We were on a circuit which included a summer resort, and the varieties of diseases among patients in a sanitarium are as nothing compared to the mental, moral, spiritual and physical disorders to be found among the cla.s.s who frequent "springs." To this place came a "New Thoughter"

who was always in a spiritual sweat about her "astral shape." She manifested a condescending interest in the Sunday services at our church, which finally led her to call on William one afternoon at the parsonage. She was a dingy little blonde, with a tight forehead and a thin nose. William was sitting alone in the peace of his spirit behind the morning-glory vines on the front porch. Providence had wisely removed me to the sewing-machine inside the adjoining room.

The sense of humor in me has never been converted, and there were occasions when it was best for me not to be too literally present when William was examining the spiritual condition of some puzzled soul. He had risen and provided her with a chair and sat down opposite, regarding her with a hospitable blue beam in his eyes. She had the fatal facility for innocuous expression common to her cla.s.s. All the time I knew William was waiting like an experienced fisherman for a chance to swing his net on her side of the boat. The poor man did not dream that she was one of those unfortunate persons who has swapped her real soul for a Hindu vagary. But presently she let it out.

"Mr. Thompson," she continued, without a rhetorical pause to indicate the decimal points between her thoughts, "I was interested in what you said about immortality last Sunday. Now, I wonder if you know it is an actual fact that by breathing rhythmically thirty times, counting three while you inhale, three while you exhale and three while you hold your breath, you can actually get into touch at once with your astral shape?"

William fumbled in his pocket for his gla.s.ses, deliberately put them on and then regarded her over the steel rims. I could see the Jehovah crest of his spirit erect itself as he replied with divine dignity: