WILLIAM WRESTLING WITH TRAVELING ANGELS
I have had little to say about the joy of William, although he was one
of the most joyful men I have ever known. The reason is I never
understood it. His joy was not natural like mine (in so far as I had
any)--it was supernatural, and not at all dependent upon the actual
visible circumstance about him. It used to frighten me sometimes to
face the last month before quarterly conference with only two dollars,
half a sack of flour and the hock end of a ham. But then it was that
William rose to the heights of a strange and almost exasperating
cheerfulness. He could see where he was going plainer. Our extremity
gave him an opportunity to trust more in the miracles of providence,
and that afforded him the greatest pleasure. He was never weary of
putting his faith to the test. He was like a strong wrestling Jacob,
going about looking for new angels to conquer. And I am bound to
confess that his Lord never really failed him, although he sometimes
came within five minutes of doing so.
One Sabbath, I remember, he had an appointment at a church ten miles
distant where he was to begin a protracted meeting. At the last moment
his horse went lame. It so happened that some weeks previous William
had overreached himself in a horse trade. He had swapped an irritable
crop-eared mare for a very handsome animal who proved to have a gravel
in one of his fore feet. This horse would lay his tail over the
dashboard and travel like inspiration for days at a time up and down
the long country roads; then, suddenly, if there was a hurried message
to go somewhere to comfort a dying man or preach his funeral, the
creature would begin to limp as if he never expected to use but three
legs again. I believe William suspected the devil had something to do
with this diabolical gravel, for he never gave way to impatience as a
natural man would have done in such a predicament. Upon the occasion I
have mentioned, he helped the old hypocrite back into the stable with a
mildness that exasperated me as I watched with my hat on from the
window, for it was already past the time when we should have started.
"Silas is too lame to travel to-day," said he a moment later as he
entered the kitchen.
"But what will you do, William?" I exclaimed, provoked in spite of
myself at his serenity. "It will be dreadful if you miss your
appointment at the beginning of the meeting."
"I can do nothing but pray. Mine is the Lord's work. Doubtless he
will provide a way for me to get to it," he answered, withdrawing into
the parlor and closing the door after him.
I knew that meant wrestling with one of the traveling angels, and held
my tongue, but the natural temper in my blood was not so easily
controlled. I flopped down in the chair, laid my head upon the window
sill and yielded to tears. I was far along in my middle years then,
but never to the end did I get accustomed to the stubbornness of
William's faith. I always wanted to do something literal and effective
myself in the emergency. I seemed to be made so that I couldn't look
to God for help until I had worn myself out.
While I sat there, in a sort of tearful rage with William and the
horse, there was a sound of wheels at the front gate. I arose, hastily
wiping my eyes, and was just in time to face William's smiling
countenance in the parlor doorway.
"Mary, Sister Spindle is not well, and Brother Spindle has driven by to
offer us seats in his carriage."
Brother Spindle was the only man in the community who owned a carriage
and horses. I flung my arms around William's neck and whispered:
"Forgive me, William, I never can get used to it that the Lord is
illogically and incredibly good to you. But I am glad to tag along
after you in His mercies."
He had a gentle way of enjoying these triumphs over me. He would cast
the blue beam of his eye humorously over me, and then kiss me as if I
was still young and beautiful.
Never in all our married life did he get the best of me in an argument.
His arguing faculty was not highly developed. It was easier to silence
him than to stir him into opposing speech. But whenever he entered the
sacred parsonage parlor and closed the door after him, I always knew he
would have the best of me one way or another when he came out.
But it was not this faith in prayer that confused me most, it was the
answers that William, and others like him, received to their prayers.
We never went to any church where there was not at least one man or
woman who knew, actually knew, how to reach his or her empty hands up
to God and get them filled. And they were always people of rare
dignity in the community, although some of them bordered on the
simplicity of childhood mentally.
I recall in this connection Sister Carleton. She was a very old woman
who seemed to have settled down to be mostly below her waist. Her
shoulders were thin, her bosom flat, but she widened out in the hips
amazingly. Her face was the most beautifully wrinkled countenance I
ever beheld. Every line seemed to enhance some celestial quality in
her expression. And she had the dim look of the very old after they
begin to recede spiritually from the ruthlessness of mere realities.
She had palsy and used to sit in the Amen Corner of the church at
Eureka, gently, incessantly wagging her lovely old head beneath a
little black horseshoe bonnet that was tied under her chin with long
black ribbons. Sabbath after Sabbath, year after year she was always
to be seen there, sweetly abstracted like an old saint in a dream. She
had one thought, one purpose left in life. This was to live to see all
of her "boys saved." These were three middle-aged men, all of whom had
been wild in their youth. Her one connection now with the church was
expressed, not by any personal interest in the preacher or his sermons,
but in this thought for her children. Some time during every
experience meeting we always knew that Sister Carleton would rise
trembling to her feet, steady herself with both hands on the bench in
front of her, look about her vaguely and ask the prayers of "all
Christian people" that her boys might repent and be saved from their
sins. They were already excellent and prosperous citizens and
remarkable for their devotion to her, but she was not the woman to
mince matters. They had not been converted, therefore she prayed for
them as if they were still dead in their trespasses and sins.
The first year of William's ministry in this place the two younger sons
were converted and joined the church, but the oldest still "held out,"
as the saying was. In fact, he stayed out of the church literally,
never coming to any service.
The next year Sister Carleton had grown very feeble, but at a
consecration meeting held one afternoon before the regular revival
service at night, she appeared as usual. Before the closing hymn she
arose, clasped her old hands over the back of the bench in front of her
and made her last petition for the "prayers of all Christian people."
"Brother Thompson," she concluded in the deep raucous voice of extreme
age, "I have prayed for my youngest boy fifty years, and for my second
boy fifty-two years, and for my oldest son nearly sixty years. The two
youngest air saved now, but t'other is still out of the fold. I ain't
losin' faith, but I'm gittin' tired. Seems as if I couldn't hold out
much longer. But I can't go till Jimmy is saved. I ain't got nothin'
else keepin' me but that." She paused, looked about her as if she felt
a memory brush past. "When he was jest a little one, no higher 'an
that, he was afeerd of the dark. I always had to set by him till he
was asleep. And now, seems as if I couldn't leave him for good out in
the dark. I want to ast you to pray, not that he may be converted, but
that he may be converted this very night. I ain't got time to wait no
longer--seems as if I'm jest obliged to git still and rest soon."
She sank back upon the bench, and I wondered what William would do. I
never was prepared for the audacity of his faith. But that was one
kind of dare he never took.
"Sister Carleton," he replied, "I feel that your prayer will be
answered. I've got the faith to believe your son will come here
tonight and be saved from his sins."
I wished that he had not been so definite. I felt that it would have
been wiser to give some general expression of hope. I feared the
effects upon the rest of the congregation and upon William, when we
returned for the night service and James Carleton should not be there
even, and I was sure he would not be. I reckon first and last I must
have halved the strength of William's faith by my lack of faith.
The truth is so bold, so absurd from the present worldly point of view
that I almost hesitate to write it here. James Carleton was present at
the evening service. He was the first man to reach the altar when the
invitation to penitents was given. He was soundly converted, and lived
a changed life from that hour.
The next night Sister Carleton was not in her accustomed place for the
first time in nearly forty years. A month later she passed away,
having already received the joy of her reward in the salvation of her
children.
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 God 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 hardships 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
fashionable 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 God
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 pass 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 naïvely 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 God.
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 dicky-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 circumstances.
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 God 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-shirt,
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.