SKELETONS IN WILLIAM'S DOCTRINAL CLOSET
I have often wondered what a writer of fiction would have made out of
such a story. As a matter of fact, the woman is living to-day, highly
respected, serenely proud of her two grown daughters; and I believe
William simply covered up her sin so deep with his wisdom that she has
forgotten it. His Methodist doctrinal closet has more than one
skeleton like this in it.
"Repentance is not remorse," he used to argue upon rare occasions when
I dragged them out. "Mrs. Martin could not make the proper
distinction. God understood."
I have no doubt his conference would have fired him for fathering very
curious heresies, if all his doings with sinners had been published.
There was the apostate, for example, whom he tried to save at the
expense of one of the doctrines of his church. Just as Baptists
believe in "election" and Presbyterians in predestination, the
Methodists believe in apostasy--that is, that God will forsake a man
and never answer his prayers if the man waits too long before he begins
to pray; and that if after he has been converted he leaves the way of
righteousness there is always danger that God will abandon him in his
sins.
A most desperate situation is that of the Methodist apostate, because
there is so much elasticity about grace in our church, and it is so
easy to fall from it that a modest man is, by the very delicacy and
humility of his spirit, apt to fall under the delusion that God has had
enough patience with him, that he has "sinned away his day of grace."
I recall the day William came home and burned seven of his best sermons
on such texts as this: "The soul that sinneth it shall die." It was
after he had read the burial service over the body of Philip Hale, who
killed himself because he had "lost God and could not find Him." Hale
had been a Methodist, brought up in that faith literally by parents who
had had him baptized when he was an infant and who had kept the promise
made then to bring him up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
They did, and he was converted at an early age before the tide of
adolescence set in. It seems that he "sinned away his day of grace"
during this dangerous period.
When William came on the circuit where he lived he was a sad,
middle-aged man who spent much of his spare time looking for God and
praying for the witness of His Spirit. His was the most tragic figure
I ever saw in the house of God. He was a large, dark man with a
blasted look on his somber face. For years it was said that he was the
first to accept the invitation to sinners to the altar for prayers and
the last to leave it, always with that lost look--never blessed, never
forgiven. William stood before him powerless. He could cast no light
in that darkness; it was literally the outer darkness where light
cannot be created. Toward the end of a revival, during which he had
wandered back and forth from the altar night after night like a dazed
sleepwalker, he went out and shot himself.
The fate of this man was one of the tragedies in William's life. He
must have had much the same feeling toward him that a surgeon feels
toward a patient who dies on the operating table. If he had survived
he would have lived. I never heard him preach after that about the
"dead line" in the spiritual life.
One thing impressed me even more than it did William: he never was able
to reach the chief sinners in his congregation. Some of them sat in
such high places in the church--perhaps behind him in the pulpit.
Compared with these the reprobates on the back benches were easily
stirred and awakened to a sense of their lost condition. Sometimes one
of these members would confess to feeling "cold" spiritually, but I do
not now recall a single one who really confessed his sins or renounced
them.
Suppose a steward owns a big flour mill and can afford to pay the
preacher liberally, bear more than his share of the "assessments," and
own an automobile besides, because he cheats every customer out of a
few ounces of real flour by substituting "fancy flour." What shall he
do--sacrifice the auto and the church "causes"? He never does, because
at bottom he has a sneaking conviction that the auto in particular is
worth more than his kind of a soul, and he is shockingly correct in his
estimate of values. If there really are any apostates in this world
they belong to this spiritually-refrigerated class to be found in every
religious denomination.
But if he did not close in often with the chief sinners, William
occasionally came upon a rare saint. I mean "rare" in the scientific,
spiritual sense--that is, different, moving in time, but not of it--the
unconscious prophet of a new order in the souls of mankind. And it was
a grand sight to see him measure the sword of his spirit with one of
these.
The last encounter he had of this kind, I remember, was on the Bowtown
Circuit not long before he was superannuated, and it was with a woman.
She was called Sal Prout. The omission of the last syllable of her
given name implied social ostracism and personal contempt. And she
deserved both, having been a notorious woman in her younger days. We
heard of her first from Brother Rheubottom. He was the shriveled,
grizzled local preacher who furnished a kind of gadfly gospel to the
church at Bowtown when he was invited to fill the pulpit, which was no
oftener than could be helped. He called to tell William about the
"Prout woman" before we had had time to unpack our clothes and
commentaries.
"She's been a terrible creature," he explained, wagging his hard old
hickorynut head and clawing his beard with a kind of spiritual rapacity
for devouring the worst of Sal's character.
"She's done more harm than a dozen wildcat stills. Then all at once,
here about five years ago she turned good, 'lowed she'd heerd from God.
It was blasphemous. Seems she hadn't went to church since she was a
gal. I don't say she ain't behavin' herself and all that, but 'tain't
orthodox for a person like that to jest set down before her do' in the
grass and git religion without ever goin' nigh a church and makin'
public confession of her sins--not that everybody don't know what she
has been!
"If them kind of heresies spread, where will the church be? What's the
use of havin' churches? We want you to go down there and 'tend to her,
Brother Thompson. Some folks in this community have been worried ever
since she done it.
"We ain't satisfied with her experience after the way she's carried
on--talks as if she'd found God as easy as if she'd been an innocent
child, when some of us that have lived honorable and decent all our
lives had to mourn and repent and take on like a house afire before we
could claim the blessin'."
"I'll look into Sister Prout's condition as soon as possible, Brother
Rheubottom," said William, folding one long leg over the other and
fidgeting in his chair, because he wanted to be back at his
bookshelves, settling the relations of his commentaries for the coming
year.
"She ain't even a sister," retorted our visitor, who had risen and was
on his way to the door. "She's never j'ined the church. When somebody
named it to her as a duty if she'd repented of her sins she jest
laughed and said she wouldn't. Not bein' respectable enough to belong
in with church folks she 'lowed she'd stay outside with the wicked
where she belonged and not embarrass nobody by settin' by 'em in
church. 'Lowed she reckoned she could find enough to do out there
instead of 'h'isting herself up with respectable women in the foreign
missionary society.' That's the way she talks, Brother Thompson, and
there can't nobody stop her!"
Bowtown was an ugly little streaked mountain village that followed the
windings of the country road for half a mile and then gave out. The
last house was not a house at all, but an old box car. And this was
the home of Sal Prout. But she denied that it was a box car, with a
hundred fanciful deceptions. First, it was whitewashed within and
without; second, it was covered with house vines; third, the dooryard
smiled at you from the face of a thousand flowers, like a Heavenly
catechism of color. But go as often as we would we never found Sal at
home. She was busy with the wicked. She could do anything from
pulling fodder to nursing a teething baby, and all you had to do to get
her was to need her.
This was how we came to meet her at last. William's health was failing
fast now, and he got down with sciatica that spring. He had been in
bed a month; the people on the circuit began to show they were
disappointed in not having an active man who could fill his
appointments, and I was tired and discouraged with being up so much at
night and with anxiety for fear William would have to give up his work.
A preacher in our church cannot get even the little it affords from the
superannuate fund until he has been on the superannuate list a year;
and if he gives up his work in the middle of the previous year that
means he must go, say, eighteen months without resources. That is a
long time when you have not been able to save anything, and when you
are old and sick. So, I was sitting in the kitchen door of the
parsonage one morning after William had had a particularly bad night,
wondering what God was going to do about it, for I knew we could not
expect help from any other source. The agnostics may say what they
please, but if you get cornered between old age and starvation you will
find out that there is a real sure-enough good God who numbers the
remaining hairs of your head and counts the sparrows fall. William and
I tried Him, and we know. There were terrible times toward the last,
when we never could have made it if it had not been for just God.
And I reckon that morning was one of the times, for as I was sitting
there wondering sadly what would happen next, an immense woman came
around the corner of the house and stood before me on the doorstep.
She was past fifty years of age, and had the appearance of a dismantled
woman. Nothing of youth or loveliness remained. I have never seen a
face so wrecked with wrinkles, so marred with frightful histories--yet
there was a kind of fairness over all her ruins.
"I am Sal Prout," she said, and it was so deep and rich a voice that it
was as if one of the bare brown hills of the earth had spoken to me.
"And I've come to git breakfast," she added, spreading peace over her
dreadful face with an ineffable smile. An hour later she was in
possession of William and me and the parsonage. She was clearing up
the breakfast things when she said:
"You looked fagged; go and git some rest. I'll take care of him,"
nodding her head toward the door of William's room.
When I awakened in the middle of the afternoon he was sitting up
against four hot-water bottles, letting her call him "Brother Billy."
That sounds scandalous, but listening from where I lay on the sofa in
the front room I could tell that they were having a duel of spirits,
and that she was taking liberties with William's theology that must
have made his guardian angel pale. He wore his red flannel nightshirt,
had a quilt folded around his legs and one of Benson's Commentaries
open upon his knees. His hair was bristling in fine style, and his
long beard lay like a stole upon his breast. His hands were resting on
the arms of his chair, and he was regarding Sal, who sat in the
opposite corner openly dipping snuff, with a kind of fascinated
disapproval.
"The kind of faith you have in God don't do Him jestice," she was
saying. "It's sorter infernal--it's so mean and partial. Your God
ain't nothing but a Paradise capitalist and aristocrat--the sort of one
that fixes up a flower garden for Him and jest His saints to set in the
middle of and sing and harp on their harps, while a right smart chance
of the best folks sneak and shuffle around in the outer darkness
forever because, like me, they had no chance to be good, and so went
wrong before they knowed where they were going. Sometimes these last
years since I had my vision of Him, I've wanted to tell you preachers
that the little ornamental divinity that you shout about ain't nothing
but a figger of speech took from the heathens and made over by heathen
Christians."
"Stop!" said William, lifting one of his thin, white hands and waving
it imperatively at her. "You must not speak irreverently. I know you
don't mean it, but----"
"Jest answer me, this, sir--is your leg hurtin' any worse?"
"No," replied William, mollified.
"Not a mite?" she insisted.
"No, I am much easier of the pain."
"Well, then, I'm goin' to say this much more even if it strangles you:
the word God stands for something in the hearts of men and women
bigger'n a Paradise gardener with a taste for music!"
"You don't put it fair, Sister Prout," said William, aggrieved.
"I can't put it in as fine language as Saint John, if that's what you
mean."
"What is the nature of God as you see Him?"
We are made very queer by the soul, not nearly so much alike as we are
in other respects. I saw now the same light pass over Sal's face that
I had often seen in William's, yet they could not agree about their one
Heavenly Father.
"The God I trust is the One that makes flowers like them bloom for sech
as me," she began, pointing through the window at a rose; "that lets
His rain fall in my garden same as He does in your'n; that never takes
His spite out on me for bein' what I was, but jest made it hard for me
and waited patient for me. He's the kind of God, sir, that can change
a heart like mine from all the evil there is, and make it so I can
think good thoughts and be kind, and enjoy His hills and hear the birds
sing again, same as I used to pay attention to 'em when I was a little
gal."
She lowered her voice as if speaking of a mortal sorrow. "There were
years and years, sir, when them little creatures were singin' all
around me every day, but I couldn't hear 'em--my deeds were so evil. I
don't reckon you know it--livin' the little you have--but sin affects
you that way--takes away your hearin' for sweet sounds, your sight for
what is lovely. But God, He jest kept on lettin' His birds sing for
me, and the sun riz jest as fine above the hills behind my house. He
didn't pick at me, nor put a sign on me same as folks did of my shame,
as He could have done with a cloud or something over my house. You
see, He'd fixed things from the foundations of the world so as they'd
work out good and not evil for us every one, beca'se He knowed we'd all
git tired and come home some time, the same as I've come. I don't know
whether you ever found it out or not, sir, but sinners git awful tired
of sinnin'. God knows that. He knows they just can't keep it up
forever!"
The next winter Sal Prout died of smallpox, after nursing a community
of sawmill hands farther up in the mountains who had been stricken with
the disease, and many of whom must have died but for her care.
William never recovered from that attack of rheumatism. His legs got
well, but he did not. He was different afterward, as if he had fallen
into a trance. He seemed always to look and speak across a space of
which he was not conscious. He filled his appointments after a fashion
during the remainder of the year at the Bowtown district, but he grew
increasingly forgetful of people and all earthly considerations.
Sometimes he fell to dreaming in the middle of his sermon, looking over
the heads of his congregation as if he was expecting Noah's dove to
bring him a token or Michael to blow his trumpet. Then again he would
make his prayer longer than his sermon. The people did not like it,
and the Presiding Elder called for his superannuation at the conference
that fall, on the grounds that Brother Thompson showed signs of
"failing powers."
Maybe he did, but it was only his mortal faculties that were failing.
To the last he retained a clear and definite knowledge of the Kingdom
of Heaven that many a man in possession of all his powers never
attains. The great change was that he took on a melancholy attitude to
reality.