WILLIAM BECOMES A PRODIGAL
William never made but two long journeys away from home. One was to
visit a brother minister; the other was a sort of involuntary excursion
he made away from God in his own mind. And as the first trip led to
the second I will begin with that.
There was a young man in William's class at college named Horace
Pendleton, who entered the ministry with him, and joined the North
Georgia Conference at the same time. William had that devotion for him
one often sees in a good man for just a smart one. He placed an
extravagant value upon his gifts, and he was one of the heroes of our
younger married years, about whom he talked with affectionate blindness.
And there is no doubt that Horace Pendleton had a gift, the gift of
rising. You might have thought he was in the world instead of the
church, he went up so fast. He had been ordained scarcely long enough
to become a deacon before he was well enough known to be preaching
commencement sermons at young ladies' seminaries and delivering
lectures everywhere. He had that naïve bravery of intelligence which
enabled him to accept with dignity an invitation to lecture on any
subject from "Sunshine" to the "Psychology of St. Paul."
I remember him very well in those days, a thin, long, young man with a
face so narrow and tight and bright that when he talked in his high
metallic voice one received the impression of light streaming in up his
higher nature through a keyhole. I specify higher nature, because
Pendleton never addressed himself to any other part of the spiritual
anatomy. I always had the feeling when I heard him that he inflated
each word, so that some of the weightiest and most ancient verbs in the
Scriptures floated from his lips as lightly as if they had been the
cast-off theological tail-feathers of a growing angel. His grandest
thoughts (and he was as full of them as an egg is of meat) seemed to
cut monkeyshines and to make faces back at him the moment he uttered
them. Personally, I never liked him. He talked too much about
sacrifice and was entirely too fortunate himself. Maybe I was jealous
of him.
The contrast between his career in the ministry and that of William was
certainly striking. He had been made a Doctor of Divinity and was
filling the best churches in his Conference, while William and I were
still serving mountain circuits. And it was not long before none of
the churches in our Conference were good enough for him, so he had to
be transferred to get one commensurate with his ability. Even then he
had enough surplus energy to run a sideline in literature. I have
always thought that if he had been a land agent, instead of a preacher,
he could have sold the whole of Alaska and the adjacent icebergs in one
quadrennium.
And I reckon I may as well admit that there was an invincible streak of
meanness in me which prevented my admiring him, for, from start to
finish, he was a man of impeccable reputation, and undoubtedly
irreproachable character, as we use those words, and I could have
admired him as anything else but a preacher. It was his shockingly
developed talent for worldly success that revolted me. To this day,
the gospel, the real "lose-your-life-for-my-sake" gospel sounds better,
more like gospel to me if it is preached by a man who is literally
poor. Maybe it is because I learned to revere this trait in William.
But in every way, always William could surpass me in the dignity of
love. So he went on loving Horace Pendleton. He believed that the
Lord was lavish in favors to him because of his superior worth, and
this accounted for his good fortune, and I never interfered with any of
William's idolatries; they were all creditable to him.
At last the time came when he received an invitation from Pendleton
(who was now pastor of the leading Methodist Church in a flourishing
city in another state) to visit him. They had always kept up a sort of
desultory correspondence, and I am sure Pendleton never received finer
laurels of praise than William sent him in his letters.
We were in a small town that year in the malarial district and
William's health was not good. It was early spring, before the revival
season opened, and it so happened that there was some kind of political
convention on hand, which enabled him to secure special rates on the
railroad. So one morning in April, I plumed and preened him in his
best clothes and sent him on his happy journey. When he returned a
week later William was a changed man. He talked with a breadth and
intelligence upon many old and new subjects, that I had never observed
in him before. Yet it seemed to me that something great in him had
faded. He was stuffed to the neck with ethics as loose fitting morally
as the sack coat of worldly-mindedness, and he did not suspect it. His
very expression had changed. He looked, well, to put it as mildly as I
can, William looked sophisticated, and it is as belittling a look as a
good man can wear. There is a Moses simplicity about goodness that has
never been improved upon by the wisest ape-expression of the smartest
man that ever lived, and William's simplicity had been blurred.
"Mary," he said to me, as we sat at our evening meal the day after his
return, "I must read and study more. This visit has been an eye-opener
to me. I am sadly behind the times."
"Yes, William," I replied shrewdly, for I had never heard him talk so
"fresh" before, "you must read and study more, for a preacher has
something bigger than 'the times' on his conscience."
"What do you mean?"
"That the times are so transient, that a preacher is called to deliver
a message about what is far more permanent."
"I think, Mary," he went on, assuming the reasoning air that a man
always takes when he thinks he is trying to make a woman think, but
when he is only trying to make her agree with what he thinks, "I think
one reason why Pendleton has gotten on in the Church and been of so
much more service there than I have is because he has kept up with his
times. He is a very learned man, and he preaches right up to the
present moment. I'd scarcely have recognized some of the Scriptures as
he interpreted them in the light of modern criticism and conditions."
"You are right, William, there is no doubt that Horace Pendleton has
risen in the Church and been of more service to the Church than you
have been because he knows so much better than you do how to make it
worldly-minded and how to intone the gospel to the same tune, but
_you_, William, are you going to begin to interpret the Scriptures just
to suit your times and modern conditions? I thought Scriptures had
nothing to do with mere 'times,' that they belonged to the ever-lasting
Order of Things."
"I fear you are prejudiced against Pendleton, and incapable of seeing
the good in what he says. Yet he showed a great interest in me, and he
talked to me very seriously about the limitations of my ministry."
"What did he say?"
"For one thing, he said I was identified with a view of God and Man and
the world such as no intelligent, healthy disciple of Christ after the
fashion of John Wesley ever held."
"Could you tell what _his_ view of God was?"
"No, I could not. That was my ignorance. I could not keep up with
him. He preached a very powerful sermon from one of the best texts in
the New Testament the Sunday I was there. He couldn't have done that
unless he had had a very plain view of God."
"Oh, yes, he could," I retorted. "You can preach a much more
satisfactorily powerful sermon in a fashionable modern church if you
don't see God than if you do."
Still William persisted. He began to read strange books that Pendleton
had loaned him, and the more he read the gloomier he looked. His
vocabulary changed. In the course of fourteen days, I remember, the
word "salvation" did not pass his lips and I could have prayed as good
a prayer as he prayed any night as we knelt together. The time came,
indeed, when I seriously considered making him the object of special
prayer on the sly, only William was so really good I was ashamed to
show this lack of confidence in him to the Lord.
Meanwhile the Sabbath in June, when the protracted meeting usually
began, approached, and I knew if things did not change it would be a
flat failure. For William was in a blue funk spiritually.
"I cannot think what is the matter with me," he complained to me late
one afternoon as we sat on the parsonage steps waiting for the prayer
meeting bell to ring.
"You have backslid, William. That is what is the matter with you! You
listened to the voice of Horace Pendleton till you cannot hear the
voice of God. You no longer have the single eye. It has been bunged
up, put out!"
That was the first and last sermon I ever preached to William. It was
a short one, but it brought him forward for prayers, so to speak, and
for the next few days we had a terrible time at the parsonage. He was
an honest man, and he was not slow to recognize his condition once it
was pointed out to him.
It is not so bad to lose the "witness of the Spirit," because you can
still believe in God, and presently the witness is there again, but
when you begin to read books that curtail the divinity of Jesus Christ
and make your Heavenly Father just a natural force in the Universe,
when you bud and blossom into rationalism, there is a good deal of
mischief to pay. I do not say that Pendleton went this far, but the
books he read and loaned to William did, and they unconsciously had a
profounder effect upon William than they had on Pendleton, because
William really had a soul. (I am not saying Pendleton did not have,
you understand; I am an agnostic on that subject.) But to have a soul
and to be without an immediate Almighty is to experience a frightful
tragedy. If a man never recognizes this diviner part of himself, he
may live and die in the comfort or discomfort of any other mere
creature. But once you realize your own immortality (I make a
distinction here between the self-consciousness of immortality and the
loud preaching of it that a man may do just from biblical hearsay), you
are a lonesome waif in a bad storm. This was William's fix. He was
exposed, all at once, to the inclemencies of the Infinitudes. But I
ceased to worry once he began to really pray and scourge himself, and I
did not interrupt the chastening. Usually, when he insisted upon
fasting all day Friday, I provided little intelligent temptations to
food at the earliest possible moment. But this time I let him starve
to his heart's content. I reckon I am a worldly-minded woman and
always shall be, but I know another, higher minded man when I see one,
and I have always been careful not to drag William down. Now I was
equally determined that Horace Pendleton should not.
Once, during the dreadful time, he came out of his study and looked at
me vaguely, pleadingly, as if he wanted help.
"Don't look at me that way, William," I cried, "I can't do anything but
kiss you. I never did know where your God was, but you knew, and
you'll just have to go back the way you came to Him. All I know for
certain is that there is a God, your kind, or you could never have
lived the way you have lived, nor accomplished the things you have
accomplished. You couldn't have; you haven't sense enough. And for
this reason you'd better not try to think your way back. If God is
God, He is far beyond our little thinking. You had better feel your
way to him. It is what you call Faith in your sermons!"
Something like this is what I said to him standing before him with my
head on his breast, wiping the tears from my eyes. Really a
spiritually sick preacher is about the most depressing thing a woman
can have in the house. And when I looked at William, pale,
hollow-eyed, with his mouth puckered into a penitential angle I longed
to lay Horace Pendleton across my knees and give him what he deserved
for disturbing a better man's peace.
About the middle of Saturday afternoon, however, I knew that his clouds
were breaking. I heard him in his study singing:
"How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your faith in His excellent word."
[Illustration: I Heard Him in His Study Singing.]
Later on, at bed-time, he chose a cheerful psalm to read and I heard
the happy rustling of his wings in the prayer he made.
The next evening had been chosen for the initial service of the
protracted meeting and I remember his text:
"I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of
Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things,
and do count them but refuse that I may win Christ and be found in Him."
I remember it because I remember William so well that evening. He
fitted into it as if it was his home. The great words seemed to belong
to him. They were his experience literally. They had the authority of
another simple, faithful, brave life behind them besides that of St.
Paul. And the people who listened knew it. If William had made a
great name and fame for himself out of preaching, if he had earned
fancy salaries as the pastor in rich churches it would have been
different. I don't know, of course, but it seems to me in that case
they might have clanged a little like sounding brass and tinkling
cymbals.
He stood in the little dim pulpit, the summer evening was fading, the
lamps in the church had not been lighted, and the faces of the village
folk were softened, sweetened in the gentle Sabbath gloom. He drew a
picture of Paul in prison at Rome, old and in anticipation of his end.
William never knew how to use words fancifully, therefore they used to
gather together truthfully in his sermons, as if he had wove them in.
And so now we had not an elegantly-painted portrait of St. Paul, but we
saw him really, the man who actually had counted all things but loss
for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus--so out of his
bonds in the spirit. It takes a rare preacher to portray one "found in
Christ." He cannot do it with the best theological vocabulary, nor
the finest scientific terms. But William, I cannot tell how he did
it--all I know is that every time he put his sentences together, they
cast again the image of the Saviour upon every heart before him. He
stood like a man who has his hand upon the latch-string of the door of
his Father's house, counting over one by one the things to be lost and
gained there. Nothing remained but a few simple things like loving one
another. He removed the world and the cares of it and set our feet in
the way of life like a wise man guiding little children.
If Horace Pendleton had put all he knew into one discourse, garnished
it with a thousand terms taken from the "new theology," he could not
have approached the awful simplicity and the high sweetness of that
sermon.
But one thing I must remember to tell; as long as he lived William
loved and honored this man with perfect devotion. That is the
wonderful thing about being good. You see it always, your eyes are
happily holden to evil. On the other hand, I had occasion to learn
after William's death that Pendleton regarded him with good-natured
derision. He thought him a stupid man bound down to the earth by a
meager theology. He even wrote an obituary notice of William that must
have made his guardian angel long to kick him--all a grand toot to show
the contrast between a preacher like himself and a foolish old
stutterer like William.