CURIOUS FACTS ABOUT THE NATURE OF A PRIEST
What we call history is a sorry part of literature, confined to a few
great wars and movements in national life and to the important events
in the lives of a few important people. The common man has never
starred his rôle in it. Therefore, it has never been written according
to the scientific method. It is simply the spray--the big
splash--humanity throws up as it goes down in the sea forever. It is
what most of us do and what we think perishes with us, leaving not a
record behind of the little daily deeds and wingflappings of our
spirits that really make us what we are. This is why we make so little
progress. The history of the great majority is never compiled for
reference. We are always bunched in a paragraph, while the rest of the
chapter is given to his Excellency the President, or some other
momentary figure of the times.
Nobody knows exactly how the planters of Thomas Jefferson's day lived.
We must depend upon fiction to give a sort of romantic impression of
it. And fifty years from now no one will know how the farmers and
brickmasons, grocers and merchants, managed their affairs in our own
times. We shall be obliged to accept the sensational accounts left by
a few wild-eyed, virus-brained socialists.
I do not know that I ought to pretend to rescue the class to which
William belonged from the same kind of oblivion. But by keeping
memories of the little daily things in life a preacher's wife learns
some curious facts about the nature of a priest--facts that should
enable the reader to make profitable comparisons between those of the
old and those of the new order, and to determine which is the real
minister and which is not.
One thing I discovered was that you cannot domesticate a preacher like
William on this earth in this life. A woman might get married to him
and hang like a kissing millstone about his neck; she might sew on his
buttons, bear children for him, teach him to eat rolled oats, surround
him with every evidence, privilege and obligation of strong earthly
ties and a home; but he will not live there in his spirit. He belongs
neither to his wife, nor to his children, nor to the civilization of
his times. He belongs to God, and not to a god tamed and diminished by
modern thought, but to The God, the one who divided the light from
darkness, who actually did create Adam and Eve and blow His breath into
them, who accepted burnt offerings sometimes, and who caused flowers to
bloom upon the same altars between times.
So William never really belonged in his own house with his own body,
his own wife and his breakfast, though he often rested there and seemed
to enjoy the latter. He was more at home in the Psalms. I will not
say he went so far as Jehovah, but when he was in a Leviticus frame of
mind very few of the minor prophets satisfied his cravings for the
awful. The gentle springtime of his heart was when he took up with
Saint John in the New Testament. He never professed the intimate
fellow-feeling I have heard some conceited preachers express for Saint
Paul. He was not a great man; he was just a good one and too much of a
gentleman to thrust himself upon a big saint like Paul, even in his
imagination.
And I do not know which has been the greatest influence in making me
what I am: the sense of reverence I had for him and his high Bible
company, or the sense of bereavement I had when, having fed him and
warmed him, he was still "not at home" with me, but following some
pillar of cloud in his thoughts toward his great God's far eternity. A
woman is a very poor creature. I think she hankers more for just love
than she does for Heaven. I don't know how she will get on in a place
where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. It's bound to
be hard on her if the Lord does not give her something more than a harp
and a golden crown with which to fill the aching void she is sure to
have somewhere under her breast feathers.
But no one can say that I did not stand by William through the entire
widowhood of my marriage. I was the world compass of his life, always
sitting in his amen corner with my attention fixed anxiously upon the
spiritual pulse of the congregation, always giving him the most
nourishing food our limited means afforded, always standing between him
and sordid dickering with the butcher and candlestick maker, always
making myself a Chinese wall to separate him on sermon-making days from
the church public.
Many a time I have taken my hands out of the biscuit dough to meet a
steward who was determined to see him about the increased foreign
mission assessment, or it might be the Sunday-school superintendent
come to discuss the May picnic. I could usually pacify the steward and
put off the superintendent, but if it was a messenger from some remote
neighborhood on the circuit come to say that Brother Beatem was dead
and the family wanted Brother Thompson to conduct the funeral services
next morning at the nearest Methodist church I would be obliged to give
in, even if William was in the very heat of spiritual constructions.
For a funeral is a thing that cannot be put off. The corpse will not
endure it, nor the family, either, for that matter. They want the
preacher to be on hand promptly with all the laurels of language to
bestow upon their dead in the funeral wreath discourse.
And this brings me to mention a peculiarity of "surviving relatives" as
a class. They demand that the pastor of the dead man or woman shall
furnish him his titles to mansions in the sky, whether he deserves them
or not. Even if Brother Beatem was a mean man who neglected his wife
and children, cheated his neighbors, abused his horse and failed to
support the church, he must have a funeral that praised him for a
saint. And if the pastor failed to do this the surviving relatives
whom the dead man had victimized every day he lived would be the first
to resent it.
I never knew but one pastor who told the truth in a funeral sermon, and
he had to be "moved" immediately by his presiding elder. The whole
community regarded it as one of the most brutal outrages that had ever
been perpetrated in their midst. As for William, there was something
sublime in the way he permitted his mind to skip the facts and stir his
imagination when he preached a funeral. The curious part of it was, he
believed what he said, and generally by the time he had finished nearly
everyone else believed it. There were occasions, of course, when he
was disgracefully duped by the "surviving relatives." However, I pass
over a thousand little epitaphs of memory and come to our last years in
the itinerancy. And it is curious how life winds itself into a circle,
like the trail a lost man makes in the desert. After a few years as
pastor of village churches, William was sent back to the country
circuits. He was failing some, and, of course, younger and more
progressive men were needed in the villages--preachers who could keep
up with the committee-meeting times in modern church life. And I am
obliged to admit William was a poor church committeeman. Occasionally
he would go off to see an old sick woman or some barren fig-tree man
who was not even a member of the church, and forget all about an
important committee meeting on the brotherhood of man. This would give
offense to some of the people in the church, who, in turn, would
complain that he was not sufficiently interested in spreading the
gospel.
As I have said before, William was a good man, but he was neither
brilliant nor enterprising, as we understand these terms nowadays. He
never did get it into his head that salvation could be furnished a
dying world through a thorough organization of it into committees that
furnished not only the salvation, but also the goat districts which had
to receive this salvation as fast as it was offered. It was as simple
as commerce and as naïve as a rich man's charity, but William couldn't
see it. Somehow, he was secretly opposed to it. He was for catching
every goat separately and feeding him on truth and tenderness till he
turned into a lamb. It was no use to argue that this required too much
time and would take an eternity to get the world ready for Heaven. He
refused to think of immortal souls as if they were bunches of heathen
cattle, or slum cattle, that must be got into the salvation market on
the hoof as soon as possible.
As he grew older, more set in his ways, he became a trifle contrary
about it, like a thorny old priest who has received private orders from
his God to go on seeking his lost lambs one at a time. Once he
insulted a man who came to him about the Laymen's Movement which is
organized to convert the world to Christianity in this generation and
probably before Christmas.
"We can do it if we have faith enough!" said he.
"No, you can't!" retorted William. "Not unless the heathens get faith
enough to believe, and faith is a thing you cannot send out through the
mails as if it was sample packages of patent medicine!"
Such talk as that sent him back to the circuits, where there were the
same old fashions in sleeves and headgear for women, and where he could
take his text from Jonah's gourd if he chose, without exciting the
higher critical faculties of his congregation.
It was harder on us in some ways. I never could understand why the old
preachers who have got rheumatism in their knees, and maybe lumbago
besides, should be sent back to the exposure of all weathers on the
circuits, while the young ones with plenty of oil in their joints
fatten in the more comfortable charges. And I am not the one to say
with resignation that it is "all right." Still, the good God evens
things up in wonderful ways.
William got so stiff in his legs toward the last that he had to stand
up to pray; but we had come back to the region of simplicities, where
there were just three elements to consider and put together in his
sermons--Man, his field and his God, and they were only separated by a
little grass, a few stars and the creation light and darkness of days
and nights. When a man gets as near home as that he does not mind the
pains in his mere body. At least William never complained.
Looking back, I think he was at his best about the time he went back to
the real circuit itinerancy. He had the glory of presence. Faith, I
think, gave him a halo. You could not see it, but you could feel it,
and in this connection I recall an illustration of the difference
between such a halo and the "aura" we hear so much about these days
from people who think they are interested in psychic phenomena, but who
are really psychic epileptics.
We were on a circuit which included a summer resort, and the varieties
of diseases among patients in a sanitarium are as nothing compared to
the mental, moral, spiritual and physical disorders to be found among
the class who frequent "springs." To this place came a "New Thoughter"
who was always in a spiritual sweat about her "astral shape." She
manifested a condescending interest in the Sunday services at our
church, which finally led her to call on William one afternoon at the
parsonage. She was a dingy little blonde, with a tight forehead and a
thin nose. William was sitting alone in the peace of his spirit behind
the morning-glory vines on the front porch. Providence had wisely
removed me to the sewing-machine inside the adjoining room.
The sense of humor in me has never been converted, and there were
occasions when it was best for me not to be too literally present when
William was examining the spiritual condition of some puzzled soul. He
had risen and provided her with a chair and sat down opposite,
regarding her with a hospitable blue beam in his eyes. She had the
fatal facility for innocuous expression common to her class. All the
time I knew William was waiting like an experienced fisherman for a
chance to swing his net on her side of the boat. The poor man did not
dream that she was one of those unfortunate persons who has swapped her
real soul for a Hindu vagary. But presently she let it out.
"Mr. Thompson," she continued, without a rhetorical pause to indicate
the decimal points between her thoughts, "I was interested in what you
said about immortality last Sunday. Now, I wonder if you know it is an
actual fact that by breathing rhythmically thirty times, counting three
while you inhale, three while you exhale and three while you hold your
breath, you can actually get into touch at once with your astral shape?"
William fumbled in his pocket for his glasses, deliberately put them on
and then regarded her over the steel rims. I could see the Jehovah
crest of his spirit erect itself as he replied with divine dignity:
"Madam, I do not know what you mean by your astral shape, but I do not
have to pant like a lizard to keep in touch with my soul!"
But she bore with him, showing far more calmness than he as she went on
to describe the wonderful power of spirit she had developed. She had
even gone so far, she said, as a matter of experiment, to "put her
thought" upon the unborn child of a friend, and when the child came it
was not like its own mother or father, but her exact image. Now, she
declared, she was sure it was her own "thought" child. And what was
more convincing still, she had at last attained to a "sky-blue
aura"--she added this with an indescribable air of triumph. William
tightened his spectacles on his nose, drew his face close and stared at
her with the sort of scandalized sunsmile Moses must have worn the
first time he caught sight of the golden calf.
"Madam," he exclaimed after a dreadful inquisitive silence, "I can see
no signs of an aura, either blue or otherwise; but if you actually did
try to steal another woman's child with your thoughts you have been
guilty of an unimaginable meanness, and you should go down on your
knees to Almighty God for forgiveness!"
But William was never at his best when he was brought into contrast
morally or intellectually with the temporary illusions of modern times.
They cast him "out of drawing" and gave him a look of the grotesque, as
a great and solemn figure on a vaudeville stage suggests the comical.
He belonged to a time when the scriptures of men's hearts had not
suffered the moderation and sacrilege of the sense of humor. He had a
mind illumined with the old Eden figures of speech, and loved to refer
to the "thick bosses of Jehovah's buckler."
There were occasions, indeed, when I could not preserve a proper inner
reverence for his favorite hymns, as, for example, when he would be
standing during a revival season behind an altar heavily laden with
"dying souls" who had come up for prayers. In order to interpret for
them a proper frame of mind he would sometimes choose one of Watts'
famous hymns. He would stand with his feet wide apart, his fingers
interlaced, palms downward, eyes lifted in anguished supplication and
sing in his great organ bass:
"Inspire a feeble worm to rush into Thy Kingdom, Lord,
And take it as by storm!"
Still, if you do not dwell upon the vision of the suddenly valorous
worm, the words express a higher form of courage than that denoted in
Matthew Arnold's famous poem, "The Last Word;" and I have seen many a
"worm" rise shouting from the altar rail under their inspired meaning.
The sense of humor has, in my opinion, very little to do with poetry or
salvation. It belongs entirely to the critical human faculties, and I
have found it one of the greatest limitations in my own spiritual
development. And as time went on I was more and more convinced that
this was an evidence of a lower imaginative faculty in me rather than
in him. He had less humor, but he had infinitely more of the grace
that belongs to immortality. He had a spirit that withstood adversity,
hardship, failure, with a sort of ancient dignity and that could face
tragedy with Promethean fortitude. And I love best to think of him in
relation to the bare and awful sorrows that show so nakedly in the
lives of poor, simple folk. I can see him now in the dismal twilight
of one winter evening, as he started on that strange mission to Mrs.
Martin, looking like an old, weatherbeaten angel breasting a storm.
The wide brim of his black hat flared up from his face in the wind, his
long, gray beard was blown over the shoulders of his greatcoat. He had
started without his muffler. I ran out to fetch it and, winding it
about his neck, I saw the blue bloom of Heaven in his eyes, that always
turned young when he was on his way to roll the stones away from the
door of some sinner's heart.
"William," I cried, "it's going to be an awful night; don't go--she is
not a member of your church."
[Illustration: "It's Going To Be an Awful Night; Don't Go--She Is Not a
Member of Your Church."]
"Nor of any other; but she is all the more in need of help," he
replied, putting his foot in the stirrup to mount his horse.
Mrs. Martin was a vague little woman, superstitious about dreams, a
widow, who lived with her two small children in a thickly-populated
neighborhood about a stone quarry. The day before, the community had
been shocked to learn from some one who happened in just in time to
prevent the tragedy that Mrs. Martin had gone suddenly insane and had
tried to murder both of her children. She must go to the asylum, of
course; but pending the preliminary trial for lunacy she lay silent on
her bed with staring, horrified eyes, surrounded by watchful neighbors.
Suddenly toward night she had grown restless and had implored them to
send for the Methodist preacher. To quiet her the messenger had come,
and William made haste to go to her.
He found her sitting the very figure of desolation in the midst of her
bed, with her face thinned and whitened to the little white hull of a
prayer. The moment she was alone with him she poured forth such a tale
of degradation as rarely passes the lips of a woman. Since a year
after her husband's death she had been the mistress of the manager of
the quarry. She had lived in the most atrocious debauchery for years;
no one had suspected, and she had not suffered a qualm. But two nights
since she had gone to the bed where her two little girls lay asleep,
and suddenly it had come upon her that she was to be discovered, now
very soon, not by strangers, but by her own children growing old enough
to observe and understand. Moreover, that her degradation would become
theirs. And then it came--the horror that had convinced her the only
way out was to kill them and afterward herself. Now, what was to be
done? She was not insane. She was just a sinner who felt obliged to
be damned!
God had at least a dozen ways of inspiring William, and not all of them
orthodox. Instead of harrowing this woman with a prayer he took on a
competent executive air.
"You are to do nothing," he told her, "and be sure you do not confess
your sin to anyone else. Leave everything to me. We will see about
the forgiveness later; now you are to rest and not think till I get the
way clear for your feet." He went out, told the attendants that Mrs.
Martin was not insane, but had suffered a shock and would now be all
right. They thought he had achieved a miracle when they had returned
to the room and found her weeping like any other sane woman.
Before daylight he had escorted the manager of the quarry to the
nearest railway station with instructions never to return, so
emphatically given that he never did. He prayed earnestly for the
unfortunate woman himself, but he forbade her to pray for herself until
long afterward, when she had resumed existence upon the simple basis of
being the innocent mother of her innocent children.
"If she begins to agonize in prayer," he explained to me, "she will go
mad again. So soon as she recovers from the insanity of evil she may
pray, but not now."