WILLIAM AND THE FEMININE SOUL
I do not know if I make you understand that all this time the years
were passing--five, ten, fifteen, twenty--and in them we went together
up and down and around our little world, William offering his Lord's
salvation without any wisdom of words worth mentioning, yet with a
wisdom as sweet, as redolent of goodness as the carnations in Heaven
are of Paradise. And I followed after him, holding up his hands, often
with my own eyes blindfolded to the spiritual necessities of the
situation, praying when he prayed, though many a time I could have
trusted our Father to do the square thing without so much knee-anguish
of the soul; and this is how at the end of so many years in the
itinerancy I began to take on the look of it--that is to say, I had
faded; and although I still wore little decorative fragments of my
wedding finery, my clothes in general had the peculiar prayer-meeting
set that is observable in the garments of every Methodist preacher's
wife at this stage of her fidelity to the cause. There is something
solemn and uncompromising in her waist-line, something mournfully
beseeching in the down-drooping folds of her skirt, and I do not know
anything in Nature more pathetically honest than the way her neck comes
up out of the collar and says: "Search me!"
All this is most noticeable when the circuit rider has brought her up
from his country circuit to the town parsonage and the town church,
where there is such a thing as "style" in sleeves and headgear. I
should say in this connection that William did at last "rise" that much
in the church: he occasionally became the pastor in a village with a
salary of at most five hundred dollars. The wife at this time always
looks like a poor little lady Rip Van Winkle in the congregation. And
her husband invariably makes the better impression, because all those
years while she was wearying and fading he was consciously or
unconsciously cultivating his powers of personality, his black-coated
ministerial presence, and even the full, rich tones of his preaching
voice.
But I will say for William that he was as innocent as a lamb of any
carnal intentions in these improvements. He was wedded to his white
cravats as the angels are to their wings, and he was by nature so
fastidiously neat that if he had been a cat instead of a man he would
have spent much of his time licking his paws and washing his face.
Besides, like all preachers' wives, I was anxious that he should look
well in the pulpit, and therefore ready to sacrifice my own needs that
he might buy new clothes, because he must appear so publicly every
Sunday; especially as by this time I had the feeling of not appearing
even when I was present. One of the peculiar experiences of a
preacher's wife is to stand in the background at the end of every
Sunday morning service and see her husband lionized by the congregation.
Another thing happened as we went on, far more important than the
casting of me out of the fashion of the times. This was the change in
the quality of spirituality with which William had to deal in his more
cultivated congregations.
I cannot tell exactly where we made the transit, but somewhere in the
latter years of his ministry he stepped out of one generation into
another where the ideals of the Christian life were more intelligent,
but less Heavenly. The things that preachers had told about God to
scare the people forty years before had come up and flowered into
heresies and unbelief in their children. William actually had to quit
preaching about Jonah and the whale. He had an excellent sermon on the
crucial moment of Jonah's repentance, with which in the early part of
his ministry he often awakened the Nineveh consciences of his people;
but when he preached the same sermon twenty years later in a suburban
town the young people laughed.
For the first time he came in contact with that element in the modern
church that is afflicted with spiritual invalidism. It is composed of
women for the most part, who hunger and thirst after a kind of gruel
gospel, and who are forever wanting to consult the pastor between times
about their spiritual symptoms. They are almost without exception the
victims of the same epidemic of moral inertia and emotional heavings.
They do not rise to the dignity of being sinners, and personally I
would not believe they had souls at all if I had not seen them develop
the diabolical soul to such amazing degrees of perversity. But of all
people I have the least hope of their redemption, because they are too
smart to be convicted of their real sins.
Back upon the old, weatherbeaten circuits we met no such examples of
mock spirituality. The men and women there had too little sense and
too much virtue to go through such complicated intellectual processes
to deceive themselves and others; they took narrow, almost persecuting
views of right and wrong. But these teething saints in the town
churches had a too broadminded way of speculating upon their very
narrow moral margins and too few steadfast convictions of any sort.
The women were the worst, as I have already intimated. Many of them
were in a fluid state, dissolved by their own minds; others sustained
the same relation to their souls that young and playful kittens do to
their tails. They were always chasing them and never really finding
them. But the most dangerous of them all is the one who refuses to
take up her bed and walk spiritually and who wants the preacher to
assist her at every step. There is something infernal about a woman
who cannot distinguish between her sentimental emotions and a spiritual
ambition.
This is why, when we hear of a minister who has disgraced himself with
some female member of his flock, my sympathies are all with the
preacher. I know exactly what has happened. Some sad, Trilby-faced
lady who has been "awakened" from a silent, cold, backslidden state by
his sermons goes to see him in his church study. (They who build
studies for their preachers in the back part of the church surround him
with the four walls of moral destruction and invite it for him. The
place for a minister's study is in his own home, with his wife passing
in and out, if he has female spiritual invalids calling on him.) She is
perfectly innocent in that she has not considered her moral
responsibility to the preacher she is about to victimize. She is very
modest, really and truly modest. He is a little on his guard till he
discovers this. First, she tells him that she is "unhappy at home,"
has a sacrilegious husband most likely. I have never known one who
spoke well of her husband. She has been perishing spiritually for
years in this "brutal" atmosphere, and she dwells upon it till the
preacher's heart is wrung with compassion for what this delicate nature
has suffered in the unhallowed surroundings of her home.
But now, she goes on, with a sweet light in her eyes, his sermons have
aroused in her a desire to overcome such difficulties and to live on a
higher plane. Could he give her some advice? He can. He is so full
of real, honest, truthful kindness he almost wants to hold her hands
while he bestows it. Nothing is further from his mind than evil. The
preacher, in particular, must think no evil. This places him within
easy reach of the morbid woman, who can do a good deal of evil before
she thinks it.
After a few visits she professes a very real "growth" spiritually,
but--she hesitates, lowers her gentle head and, finally, confesses that
she is troubled with "temptations." She shows her angelic confidence
in him by telling them, and he is deeply moved at the almost childish
innocency of what she calls her temptations. No honest woman could
possibly regard them as such, if he only knew it. But he doesn't know
it. He sees her reduced to tears over her would-be transgressions, and
before he considers what he is about he has kissed the "dear child."
That is the way it happens nine times out of ten, a good man damned and
lost by some frail angel of his church.
A minister is always justified in suspecting the worst of a pretty
woman who wants to consult him privately about her soul, whether she
has sense enough to suspect herself or not.
After observing William very carefully for thirty years I reached the
conclusion that the wisest preacher knows nothing about the purely
feminine soul, and the less he has to do with it the better. The
thing, whatever it is, is so intimately connected with her nervous
system that only her Heavenly Father can locate it from day to day.
And I have observed that the really good women are never guilty of the
sacrilege of showing their immortality to preachers. I lived with
William for thirty years, and had more than my share of spiritual
difficulties. But I would have as soon asked him how to cut out my
dress as what to do with my soul. No man's preaching benefited me
more, but in so far as my soul was feminine and peculiar to me I took
it as an indication that Providence meant it to remain so, and I never
betrayed it, not even to him.
But I could not keep other women from doing so. There was a beautiful
lady in the church at Orionville who gave "Bible readings" as if they
were soprano solos. She was always beautifully gowned for the
occasion, and had an expression of pretty, pink piety that was
irresistible. She was "not happy at home" and candidly confessed it.
The lack of congeniality grew out of the fact that her husband was a
straightforward business man who took no interest in her Bible
readings. But he was about the only man in the church who did not.
And it is only a question of time when she would have betrayed William
in the Second Book of Samuel if I had not intervened.
She had been coming to the parsonage regularly for a month, consulting
him about her "interpretation" of these Scriptures. She asked for him
at the door as simply as if I had been his office-boy. And William was
always cheered and invigorated by her visits. He would come out of his
study to tea after her departure, rubbing his hands and praising the
beautiful, spiritual clearness of her mind, which he considered very
remarkable in a woman.
Poor William! I never destroyed his illusions, for they were always
founded upon the goodness and simplicity of his own nature. But when
Mrs. Billywith began to spend three afternoons of the week with him in
his study, with nobody but the dead-and-gone Second Samuel to chaperon
them, and when William began to neglect his pastoral visiting on this
account, I couldn't have felt the call to put an end to the
"interpretations" stronger than I did if I had been his guardian angel.
The next time she came he was out visiting the sick.
"Come right in, Mrs. Billywith," I said, leading her into the study and
seating myself opposite her when she had chosen her chair. "William is
out this afternoon, but possibly I can help you with the kind of
interpretation you ought to do now, better than he can." She stared at
me with a look of proud surprise.
"You and William have spent a very profitable month, I reckon, on
Second Samuel; but I've been thinking that maybe you ought to have a
change now and stay at home some and try to interpret your own Samuel.
Your husband's given name is Sam, isn't it? He seems to me a neglected
prophet, Mrs. Billywith, and needs his spiritual faculties exercised
and strengthened more than William does. Besides----"
I never finished the sentence. Mrs. Billywith rose with the look of an
angel who has been outraged, floated through the open door and
disappeared down the shady street. William never knew, or even
suspected, why she discontinued so interesting a study, nor why he
could never again induce her to give one of her beautiful "Bible
readings" on prayer-meeting nights.
You will say, of course, that I was jealous of my husband. But I was
not jealous for him only as a husband, I was even more jealous for him
as the simplest, best, most saintly man I had ever known. And the
preacher's wife who does not cultivate the wisdom of a serpent and as
much harmlessness of the dove as will not interfere with her duty to
him in protecting him from such women--whose souls are merely mortal
and who are to be found in so many congregations--may have a damaged
priest on her hands before she knows it. And there is not a more
difficult soul to restore in this world except a woman's. Ever after
it sits uneasy in him. It aches and cries out in darkness even at
noonday, and you have to go and do it all over again--the restoring.
Some one who understands real moral values ought to make a new set of
civil laws that would apply to the worst class of criminals in society:
not the poor hungry, simple-minded rogues, the primitive murderers, but
the real rotters of honor and destroyers of salvation. Then we should
have a very different class of people in the penitentiaries, and not
the least numerous among them would be the women who make a religion of
sneaking up on the blind male side of good men, without a thought of
the consequences.