WILLIAM AS A LEADER OF FORLORN HOPE
For spiritual beings we do take with singular heartiness to the soil
and spoils of this present world. The hope of immortality is more a
fear than a hope with many of us. We do not like to see the open door
of death that leads to it. So every good preacher is the shepherd of
our misgivings, the leader of our forlornest hopes, the captain more
particularly of men and women who are about to die, or who are seeking
Heaven at last in a state of earthly disappointment and world
exhaustion. I have rarely known a person in good health morally and
physically, fortunately situated in life, who voluntarily sought the
consolations of religion. I reckon the Lord knew what He was about
when He turned His back and let Satan fill creation with snares and
pitfalls and sorrows and temptations. If we did not fall into so many
of them we should never get the proper contrite spirit to seek of our
own will and accord after salvation. He would have been obliged to
thrust it upon us and we might have been no better than the angels,
without the great privilege of sinning our own sins or choosing our own
virtues.
William was especially qualified for this business of leading hope
after it had done with all earthly ties. He was intellectually opposed
to what we know as reality. He entertained topographical convictions
concerning the New Jerusalem, and he could give information about the
Father's House as the old family homestead of the soul so definitely
that one could see the angels on the gables and the Tree of Life
shading the front yard. The simplest man in the congregation listened
with enthusiasm and found himself recollecting it as if he were
recalling scenes from his first life. But eternity is a danger none of
us can avoid, and it never seemed spiritually intelligent to me for
Christians to struggle so in that direction. Indeed, they do not,
really. That Heaven-desiring enthusiasm is but the name of the
pathetic courage with which they go to meet death because they have to
go.
I recall the thanksgiving prayer of Brother Billy Fleming in this
connection. In every experience meeting one part of his testimony was
always in standing type--the ambition to be at home in glory, and
particularly to rest in Abraham's bosom. But when a long fever brought
him almost within kissing distance of Abraham's beard he made a mighty
prayer that God would spare his weak and unprofitable life. Not only
that, but William was called in to add his own petitions, which he did
throughout the night of the crisis of the fever. I remained in the
next room with Sister Fleming, a little silent saint who went about the
world like a candle moving in a dark place, merely letting her light so
shine. When the night deepened and we sat in it, clasped hand in hand,
listening to the prayer concert in the sick man's room, I ventured to
propound a question.
"Sister Fleming," I whispered, "I can understand why you want Brother
Fleming to live, and why the rest of us do; but I can't understand why
he has changed his mind so completely and wants so much to live
himself. I have heard him say so often that he was not only ready and
willing to go, but just longing to be with Abraham."
"Honey," she replied in the tone with which a mother speaks of the
childishness of children, "them's one of the curiosities of the
Christian religion, the things persons like Billy tells in experience
meetings. I don't reckon the Lord takes the trouble to even forgive
'em, they air so foolish. I know Billy from A to Izzard, and, so far
from layin' on Abraham's bosom, he couldn't git along with him till
daybreak. He jest gits that talk out of his ambition and imagination,
although, humanly speakin', Billy is a tolerably good man, and I don't
reckon the Lord will have any cause to fling off on him when his time
comes. But you can jest set this down, nobody in his right mind feels
the way most folks say they feel in an experience meeting!"
As a matter of fact, Brother Fleming made a public thanksgiving prayer
at the altar in Redwine Church as soon as he was able to get out.
This deliverance from a woman of such beautiful integrity was a comfort
to me. For, while I endeavored to be a Christian along with William, I
have never been religious. To feel consciously religious is, in my
opinion, to become a sort of "bounder." And we all know how repulsive
a "bounder" is in any circle of society. This is the objection to the
"holiness people," they are presumptuous in professing a too intimate
likeness and relation to God. I have never seen a sanctified man or
woman yet whose putty-faced spirituality bore nearly so noble a
resemblance to Him as the sad, thunder-smitten soul of some sinner who
had had his vision of unattainable holiness. I am thankful that
William was never guilty of the temptation to call himself
"sanctified." Sanctification is a good thing to preach and a better
thing to strive after, but the minute a man professes it he becomes
less truthful and less intelligent spiritually, and he proceeds to
develop along these lessening lines.
Still, while William did not outrage my reverence for him by a too high
profession, I found him hard enough to follow. When during the first
year, Sabbath after Sabbath, I saw him quicken the spirit of his
congregation with hymns and prayers, and then, taking his text for a
motto banner, start for the outskirts of eternity, I was probably the
one person in his congregation who hung back for conscientious reasons.
I looked at the weary people in the church, with such sad hunger in
their faces, and then I looked through the open windows at the fair
fields spread like love promises of peace to us in this life, and it
seemed to me that possibly they had missed the cue somewhere and I
declined to make even a spiritual investigation of that country beyond
where the scenes of William's sermons were always laid. Very soon I
experienced, also, a woman's fear that eventually I should lose some
near and dear sense of my husband. There is, in fact, a
highly-developed capacity for heavenly infidelity to earthly ties in
most preachers, and the martyrdom of forsaking father and mother and
even his wife in the spirit appealed to his spiritual aspirations.
Many a woman has been deserted in this subtle manner by her minister
husband. But I kept the fear of it to myself, never encouraging this
attenuated form of piety in him by even opposing it. Meanwhile, I
began to observe with very genuine admiration his heroism in leading
forlorn hopes.
[Illustration: With Such Sad Hunger in Their Faces.]
This brings me to one of the most important duties of a circuit rider,
that of piloting the dying through the last shallows of the great sea.
There is where hope is forlornest and where William was bravest.
Pastors of fashionable churches rarely perform this office now. It
seems that an up-to-date church member regards dying so private as to
suggest the idea that some disgrace attaches to it. The minister
calls, indeed, speaks cheerfully and conventionally of the Hereafter as
of an opulent and famous city with a salubrious climate. He
congratulates the candidate for immediate residence upon his new
citizenship and takes his departure without the risk of disturbing his
temperature with a hymn or a prayer. The proper time for both of these
will be when he officiates later over the "remains."
I have sometimes wondered how a fashionable person feels who is obliged
even to die by the doctor's orders and according to convention,
repressing to the last those great emotions that have made us men
instead of clods.
Far away in the country death brings more distinction. There, men and
women have walked a lifetime in the fields, they have seen the sun rise
and set, the stars shine, the rain fall, the corn grow--all by the will
of God. And at the very last they are crowded by their great thoughts
of Him, excited by the encroaching fact of His tremendous nearness.
They need a priest, some one who has been "ordained" to lead them into
the Presence. They have a sense of their ruggedness, their unkempt
earthiness and their general unfitness for the great ceremony. The
preacher must hold their hands until they cross the doorsill of the
Audience Chamber.
Now, I will not say that William enjoyed officiating on these
occasions, but they thrilled him, increased his faith. And it touched
me to the very heaven of my heart when I discovered that if the dying
man was unconverted, an "outbreaking" sinner, he was wont to omit the
harder doctrines, and generously lift him to the Lord in prayer upon
the easy pledge of faith. The Methodists are especially prepared by
the very softness of their creed to afford quick relief to the
dying--just repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved!
Looking back through the years, across many, many graves, it seems to
me I can see the footprints of William shining yet in the dark of death
nights as he journeyed forth to whisper hope into pale ears, and to
offer his strange, unearthly consolation to those about to be left
behind. Very soon after we were married there came a knock at the door
one night and a voice crying:
"Come quick, Brother Thompson; old Davy Dyer is dyin'. Doctor says he
can't last till daybreak, and he's hollerin' for a preacher same as if
he hadn't been ag'in God all his life."
Davy Dyer was the blacksmith and the only infidel in the country, a
grimy old Vulcan with white beard and the eagle's implacable eye. One
of William's braveries was to go there to have his red-headed horse
shod and to sit upon the edge of the anvil block while it was being
done, and gently try to wheedle him toward Heaven. Now, however, at
last he was to have the best of the argument. Davy was dying, about to
be turned out of the house and home of his spirit, and he wanted the
preacher to help him find another. He must have another. No matter
how intelligent a man is, or how scientific his method is, there is
something in him that _he can't think back to dust_, an unknown formula
that belongs to the unknown.
The time was very short and William hurried away as if he had doves on
his feet and the words of eternal life on his lips.
He returned in the opal dawn of the summer morning whitened and weary,
but in his high ceremonial mood.
"He died in the faith," he answered calmly.
I had my doubts, my sniffing Canterbury doubts, but the bland light
upon his face, an incandescence that he managed from somewhere within,
silenced me. I never meddled with the coals on William's altar. And
not long after the shriving of the infidel I had an unexpected
opportunity to observe how easy he made it for his people to "die in
the faith."
We were living a perfectly human day among the roses and sagebushes and
bumblebees in our little garden when word came that Mrs. Salter had
been suddenly stricken and was about to die "without the witness of the
Spirit." There was a row of dahlias behind the blue-belled sagebushes
requiring attention, and we had been so normally earth-happy digging
about their roots. William had been so like other young men in his
digressions that I could not help being depressed at the interruption.
It seemed that some shadow of the other world was forever falling
between us.
We came up out of our garden; William harnessed his horse, put on his
longest-tailed black coat, changed his expression, and we drove away on
our sad mission. For custom required that the pastor's wife should
accompany him upon such occasions. Her care was to look after the
stricken surviving members of the family while he gave his attention
more particularly to the passing one. She must be ready to do anything
from cooking the next meal to shrouding the corpse. The latter is a
particularly garrulous business, and I was horrified to discover that
it was so gruesomely entertaining to the women of the church and
neighbors who helped. My first corpse was the young wife of a farmer,
who had died of "the fever," as usual. Sister Fleming and Sister Glory
White had helped me "lay her out." And each vied with the other as to
the number and condition of the bodies they had prepared for burial,
incidentally comparing points between them and the present one. The
grand dignity of the dead woman's face did not appall them, but it
frightened me.
"O Sister White," I whispered, trembling and covering my eyes from the
sight of them cackling about the awfully disheveled bed and its burden,
"don't talk so before her. She looks so much above us!"
"Lor', child, you'll git used to it. They all have it, that grand
look, when they air dead. It don't mean nothin'. Once I 'laid out' a
bad woman; there wasn't another person in the settlement that would
touch her, so I done it, and of all the corpses I ever put away she had
the grandest look. It sorter staggered me till I thought at last it
was maybe the rest that come to her after the pain of sinnin' had gone
out of her body. But you'll not be so squeamish about the way folks
look when they air dead after a while. We had one pastor's wife that
helped lay out fourteen bodies. But that was the year of the
epidemic," she concluded, leaning over to stretch the shroud sheet.
Little did I think then that I was already upon the eve of an
experience that would far eclipse the record of that other preacher's
wife.
We found Sister Salter lying dim and white upon her bed, surrounded by
her family and friends. And the supreme tragedy of the hour for them
was not her approaching dissolution, but it was that one who had
testified so often and so victoriously of her faith had lost it at the
crucial moment.
What followed is impossible to describe. It was not the terrible
silence in the crowded room, not the battling breath and the shriveling
features of the woman in the bed, not by contrast the green and happy
calm of the world outside, but it was the awful voice of authority with
which William spoke of things that no man knows, that frightened and
thrilled us. If he had called me so from a grave where I had lain a
thousand years I should have had to put on my dust, rise and answer
him. He sat beside the bed and looked as Peter must have looked at
Dorcas as she lay dead in the upper chamber of her house at Joppa. It
was not the text he quoted, nor the hymns he chanted, but it was the
way he did it. Clearly he was adding his faith to her forlorn hope.
We saw her face change as if she had risen and was treading the waters
in her spirit to meet an invisible presence. The fading light of the
summer day showed the same rapt look on it that was there when she
shouted that first Sunday at Redwine, and she passed like a sudden
gleam into the darkness of the coming night.
William's joy was beautiful to see, but I had a sense of intrusion as
if I had parted the wings of some archangel and had seen more
brightness than it was lawful for a mortal to behold. So long as we
are on this earth it seems to me better to follow the example of Moses
and turn our backs when the Lord passes by, so that we shall see only
the glory of His hinder parts.
The death of Sister Salter marked the beginning of an epidemic, or
rather the return of the same one they had had some years before. It
swept through the community with such deadly results that not a family
escaped. And I had another view of the ministerial character. William
spent all his time in the stricken homes of his people. It was not a
sense of duty or conscience or courage that caused him to face the
deadly disease with such fortitude, but it was the instinct of the
shepherd for his flock. And he readily permitted me to accompany him
with the curious indifference to consequences shown by those who have
had their heads grandly turned by Heavenly thoughts. Life meant little
to him, immortality meant everything. He risked his own life and the
life of his wife because it is the nature of the true priest to care
more for his people than he does for himself or his wife, just as it is
the nature of the good shepherd to lay down his life for his sheep.
At the end of three weeks we had buried half the membership of Redwine
Church and had received the secrets of many passing souls. For a man
cannot die with his secret in him. It belongs to history and will not
be buried. One old woman, Sister Fanny Claris, who had been a faithful
member of our church for years, confessed to William at the very last
that she had always wanted to be a Baptist, but that her husband had
been a Methodist and she had "gone with him."
"If I could have been put clean under the water when I j'ined and not
had sech a little jest flung on my head, seems as if I'd feel safer
now," she wailed. "And I've took the Lord's Supper with sinners and
all kinds when it was in my conscience to be more particular and take
it 'close communion' style like the Baptists. Besides, I have believed
in the doctrine of election all my life, and I ain't noways sho' about
mine now, although I've tried to do my duty." The fading eyes looked
at us out of the old face sternly crimped with the wrinkles she had
made working for God under an alien creed.
"My soul's never been satisfied, not for a single day, in your church
with its easy ways and shiftless doctrines," she concluded faintly.
For once William was silenced. It was not an occasion upon which to
vindicate Methodism in an argument. Neither did he have enough
tautness of conviction concerning certain terrible doctrines to meet
the emergency of her dogmatic needs. And so she passed unshriven to
the mercies of a God who is doubtless sufficiently broad-minded to have
such baptisms properly attended to somewhere in Heaven.