GOD'S ANNUALS
But the dying are not the only ones who suffer most from the sickness
of their hopes. There are men with beautiful souls born with little
devil seeds in them somewhere that grow like immoral perennials and
poison the goodness in them. They are the people who backslide so
often, who repent so thoroughly, and who flourish like green bay trees
spiritually when they flourish at all. They are usually regarded as
moral weaklings, and it is the fashion of saints to despise them. This
is because some righteous people now, as in Christ's day, are the
meanest, narrowest-minded moral snobs the world can produce. Many of
them are too mean even to afford the extravagance of a transgression.
And rarely, indeed, do you see one with courage enough to erect himself
again, morally, once he has fallen or been discovered as fallen. But
among the backsliders of the class I have mentioned you will find the
bravest moral heroes of the spiritual world, men who have the courage
to repent and try again with an enthusiasm that is sublime in the face
of the lack of confidence expressed in them on all sides. They are a
distinct class, and as we went on in the itinerancy I learned to call
them God's annuals. And William never was more beautifully ordained or
inspired than when he was engaged in transplanting one of those out of
his sins again into the sweet soil of faith. He had a holy gardener's
gift for it that was as naïve as it was industrious.
I recall one of these annuals on the Redwine Circuit. He was a slim,
wild young fellow, with a kind of radiance about him; sometimes it was
of angels and sometimes of the devil, but he always had it--an
ineffable charm. He was brown and blue-eyed, with a level look that
hero warriors have. And that was his trouble. He was made for
emergencies, not for the long, daily siege of life. He was equally
capable of killing an enemy or of dying for a friend, but he could not
live for himself soberly and well for more than forty days at a time.
Still, he had a soul. I never doubted it, though I have often doubted
if some of the ablest members in our church had them, and if they were
not wearing themselves out for a foolish anticipation if they expected
eternal life.
It is possible for a man to behave himself all the days of his life
without developing the spiritual sense. I do not say that such people
have not got souls, but if they get to Heaven at all it will be in the
form of granitoid nuts, and the angels will have to crack them with a
Thor hammer before they can find the thing that they kept for a soul.
But Jack Stark, our Redwine annual, was too much the other way. His
soul was not enough inside of him. It was the wind in his boughs that
blows where it listeth. Periodically, he went on a "spree"; it was his
effort to raise himself to the tenth power, because he had an instinct
for raising himself one way and another. If, at the end of a week, he
did not appear at the parsonage door, sober, dejected and in a proper
mood for repentance, William went after him, plucked him up from
somewhere out of the depths and proceeded at once to transplant him
again in the right garden.
In all the years of his ministry I never knew him to lose hope in his
annuals. He was always expecting them to become evergreens of glory.
In dealing with them he had a patience a little like the patience of
God, never reproaching them or threatening them with the time limits of
salvation in this world; no man ever had a sublimer skill in dealing
with the barren fig-tree elements in human nature.
Years after this time John Stark became Congressman from his district.
And William died in the belief that he also became a "total abstainer."
He probably was at the moment he told him so, but having studied the
nature of spiritual annuals I may be pardoned my doubts. However, he
will have his nursery place in Heaven, if for no other purpose than to
furnish congenial employment to saints like William.
I have often wondered what would have happened if the prodigal son had
been a daughter. Would the father have hurried out to meet her, put a
ring on her finger and killed the fatted calf? I doubt it. I doubt if
she would ever have come home at all, and if she had come the best he
could have done would have been to say: "Go, and sin no more."
But "go," you understand. And all over the world you can see them,
these frailer prodigals, hurrying away to the lost places.
In a rotting cabin, in an old field five miles from Redwine, lived one
of them. Once a week she walked fourteen miles to the nearest large
town to get plain sewing, and with this she supported herself and
child. The field was her desert. For eight years no respectable woman
had crossed it or spoken to her till the day William and I and the
red-headed horse arrived at her door. She stood framed in it, a gaunt
figure hardened and browned and roughened out of all resemblance to the
softness of her sex; her clothes were rags, and her eyes like hot,
dammed fires in her withered face. William sprang out of the buggy,
raised his hat and extended his hand.
"My wife and I have come to take dinner with you," he said.
"Not with me! Oh, not with sech as me!" she murmured vaguely. Then,
seeing me descend also, she ran forward to meet me, softly crying.
We stayed to dinner, a poor meal of corn hoecake, fried bacon and
sorghum, spread upon a pine table without a cloth. But of all the food
I ever tasted that seemed to me the most nearly sanctified. It was
with difficulty that we persuaded the lost Mary to sit down and partake
of it with us. She was for standing behind our chairs and serving us.
After that she sat, a tragic figure, through every service at Redwine,
even creeping forward humbly to the communion. She was not received,
however, in any of the homes of the people. She might "go in
peace"--whatever peace her loneliness afforded--that the Scriptures
might be fulfilled, and that was all. They would have none of her.
This was not so bad as it seemed. She was free, indeed. Having no
reputation to win or lose she could set herself to the simple business
of being good, and she did. The time came when the field changed into
a garden and the cabin whitened and reddened beneath a mass of blooms.
But there was one man whom William could never lead when hope fell
forlorn and the way seemed suddenly rough and dark. That was himself.
This is why I cannot get over grieving about him wherever he is.
Nothing that comes to him of light now can lighten those other days far
down the years when he lost his way and had no one to preach to him nor
lead him. For the one tragedy that marked the course of our lives in
the itinerancy was not the poverty and hardships through which we
passed, it was the periodic backsliding of William. This is a pathetic
secret that I never mentioned during his lifetime. I did not even know
for many years that all Methodist preachers who are not hypocrites have
these recurrent down-sittings before the Lord when they become sorry
penguin saints with nerves. It grows out of Nature's protest against
the stretched spiritual perpendicularity with which they live, never
relaxing their prayer tension on Heaven, rarely taking any normal
diversion, losing their life purchase upon the objective through too
much subjective thinking. Ministers of other denominations are
probably not so often the victims of this reaction.
The symptoms of such attacks in William became as familiar to me as
those of measles or whooping-cough. They were most apt to occur after
what may be called long spiritual exposures--a series of "revivals,"
for example. He was taken with the first one, I remember, during a six
weeks' protracted meeting at one of his churches on the first circuit.
We were spending the night with a family in the usual one-room log
cabin. We occupied the company bed while our host and hostess occupied
one in the opposite corner. By this time I had become resigned to this
close-communion hospitality and must have slept soundly. But some time
after midnight I was awakened by the deep groans of my husband.
Instantly I sat up in bed, and by the light of the moon through the
window I saw his face white and ghastly and covered with sweat as if he
were in mortal pain. His eyes were yawning at the dark with no real
light in them. And his mouth was drawn down into Jeremiah lines of woe
that are indescribable.
"William! William!" I cried aloud. "What is the matter?"
"Hush, Mary," in a tragic whisper, "don't awaken the Pratts. I have
lost the witness of the Spirit. I must close the meeting tomorrow,
just as the people are beginning to be interested. But it would be
blasphemy to go on preaching, feeling as I do!"
"How do you feel?" I whispered, thoroughly terrified.
"As if God had forsaken me!"
I had been in it long enough to know that the "witness of the Spirit"
is the hero of the Methodist itinerancy, that a preacher without it is
as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal, that he is in a rôle of a
great play which has been rejected by the "star." I wiped the mourning
dew from William's brow, laid my face against his and wept in silent
sympathy. I saw something worse than disgrace staring us in the
face--William deprived of his definition, William just a man like other
men. I had come of a worldly-minded family who supported the church
and sustained a polite it somewhat distant relation to Heaven.
Religion was our relief like the Sabbath day, but it was never our
state of being. And I was blandly of the earth earthly, but I suddenly
discovered that the chief fascination of William for me was that he was
not of the earth earthly, that his dust was distressed and stirred by
strange spiritual instincts very different from anything I had ever
known. And probably nothing was further from the intention of
Providence when I was created than that I should become such a man's
wife. But I had one enlightening qualification for the position. I
loved William. I was called to that as he had been called to the
ministry. And now, as I laid my face against his as the rose lies
above the coffin lid, I was concerned only for William's peace.
"William," I challenged, "have you been doing wrong? Something really
and truly wicked?"
"I must have," he replied with egregious sincerity, "but I thought I
had been observing all my obligations with particular care."
"Then it's all right," I said. "God would not trifle with you about
the witness of His Spirit, especially at such a time as this!"
It was not often that I showed such boundless confidence in the Lord's
ways, and I was indeed far from feeling as familiar with them as I
pretended. But the affectation comforted him and certainly it was no
injury to the Maker of the heavens and the earth. William fell asleep
at once and awakened in the proper protracted-meeting frame of mind
next morning.
Many times afterward he experienced the same catastrophe, and these
have been the only occasions in my life when I have put on the whole
armor of God so that I might go forth properly to battle with the
powers and principalities of William's darkness.
I used to wonder a great deal in those days about "the witness of the
Spirit." Before my marriage I had heard little of it. I wanted to
know what it was, but I never prayed for it myself. The thought
occurred to me that what William called the witness of the Spirit might
be the shoulder tap of his own spirit approving him now and then. But
then came the deeper question, How did William come by his own spirit,
that part of him which was neither flesh, nor bone, nor blood, but
which had the power to make him sit up in the middle of the night to
pray, and to make him fast maybe all the next day? At last I reached a
comforting conclusion. That is one peculiarity of the human, he never
rests upon any other kind of conclusion. What he thinks may be so, but
if it is not comforting he thinks further on into the daybreak of
Eternity till he gets something better, more satisfactory for his
needs. This is why we shall always keep on finding God. There is
something lacking in us to which God only answers. The conclusion I
came to was this, that we are not all called to do the same things,
that William was called to preach and pray, and the witness of his
Spirit approved when he did it right. And I was called to look after
William, to see that he did not pray too much or preach too long. And
I always had that sweet inward glow which he called his witness when I
attended most carefully to his needs. It may be a narrow way to look
at it, but you couldn't live with William in any peace of mind without
this witness of the Spirit. It would have made him unhappy to live
with a person who couldn't claim it, and I've had mine these thirty
years without having to pray or to fast to get it--a tender eye in me
that regarded him and a heart that prayed for him.