CONSCIENTIOUS SCRUPLES ABOUT THE CHURCH
I had thought that these letters were finished, but I am adding this
postscript to say that I leave New York to-morrow for the little house
between the hills on the Redwine Circuit. This resolution is not in
keeping with some views and sentiments I have written in these pages,
but, being a woman, I thank God I can be as inconsistent as is
necessary to feminine peace of mind. I reckon I'll never be satisfied
now in the world or in the church without William. I can't seem to
settle into any state of being of my own. I am not saying that I have
not had a good time here, but, after all, I do not belong with the
people of the world, either.
Since I have been with Sarah I have had constantly to resist the
temptation to speak to her about her soul, just from force of habit. I
have never seen, in all my years with William, a woman of her age so
youthfully, cheerfully unconscious of having a soul. And that is not
the worst of it: I can feel the moral elbows of mine sticking out in
every conversation, as if Heaven had made all my thoughts angular. It
is a sort of horned integrity that grows up in a woman who follows the
Gospel flag of the Methodist itinerancy. I am sure it is often
embarrassing to Sarah and the girls, especially when they have
company--not the kind of company William and I had, thinly-bred
missionaries, and Bible pedlers, and tramps, and beggars, and
occasionally, toward the last a little, sweet-faced, pod-headed
deaconess--but Lilith ladies and one or two that William would call
Delilahs, and handsome, sleek, intellectual men who appeared to be as
ignorant of God as I am of natural history. I am not saying that they
are not decent people, but they are not all there. I miss something
out of them. If they have ever had souls they have had them removed,
probably by a kind of reasoning surgery quite as effective as the
literal surgery with which so many of them have their poor appendixes
removed.
I have told Sarah, and while she expresses regret I am sure she feels
relieved. It is straining to have a person in the family who belongs
to a different spiritual species. And now I have just finished packing
my things. I am thankful I told the neighbors that I was going on a
visit. I came suddenly to the conclusion to-day that it was only a
visit because of a thing that happened. I have not been offended
morally by anything I have seen in the theaters or other places of
amusement, but I have had conscientious scruples about the churches
here!
This would be the Sabbath day far away in the country, where the hills
are at prayer and the pine trees swing their shadows over the graves in
Redwine churchyard. But here in New York it is merely the day when you
change your occupations and amusements. Still, there is preaching for
those who are not drunk, or asleep, or in the parks, or at Coney
Island, or giving week-end parties at their country places, or planning
the millennium without God along socialistic scantlings of thought and
barb-wire theories of the brotherhood of man. And I went with the
girls to a fashionable church. And this is how the morals in me that
William planted came to take offense, and how I reached the conclusion
that I had best go back home, where life is indeed made too hard for
the spirit, but where at least one may be decently conscious of having
one according to the Scriptures.
The church we attended was nearly as grand-looking inside as a theater.
Every pew was filled, and there was no misbehavior on the back benches,
such as William contended with to the last. We had a plush-covered one
near the front, and a stool to put our feet on, and a library hooked to
the back of the pew in front of us, containing a bulletin of the
church's news. I didn't have time to find the "society column," but I
was looking for it when the preacher came in. I expected to hear a
perfectly-scarifying sermon, he looked so much like a tintype of the
prophet Jeremiah; but he took his text from Mark about the healing of
the man with the withered hand, and preached on the hypnotism of Jesus.
He made a clean sweep of the miracles in the most elegant, convincing
language you ever heard. And I sat and cried to think of what he'd
done to Scriptures William would have died to preserve. The girls were
mortified at the scene I was making. I don't reckon anybody had ever
cried in that church before, and I am sure no man was ever convicted of
his sins there.
When we reached home I told Sarah about going back to Redwine, first
thing. Then I came on upstairs and had it out with William in a very
few words, while I was pulling out the dresser drawers and putting my
things in the trunk.
"William," I said, kneeling down on the floor with my back to his
picture on my dresser, laying my collars in the tray, "you were right.
There is something wrong with the church system, something wrong with
the institutional religion that the church is propagating; but there is
nothing wrong with the truth of God for which you stood and made me
stand for thirty years, and I am going back where some of the people
know it, whether they know anything else or not.
"Up here the best, the wisest people don't know what the truth of God
is; they think they can find it in science. Faith is for fools who
cannot think. They are not trying to reconcile God to man, but man to
God, and trimming down the Holy Ghost to suit his scientific bug
faculties."
Then I reached back, snatched up his photo, laid it bottom upward on
top of the collars. I didn't feel that I could look him squarely in
the face till I had it setting back on the mantel in the house at
Redwine.
I have got the first out-and-out orthodox Methodist feeling of being
backslid I ever had in my life. And it was not going to the theaters
and tea parties that brought it on. It was going to church every
Sunday and hearing some preacher explain away the Divinity of Jesus, or
reduce His miracles to scientific formulas. I do not wonder that so
many men and women go wrong in New York. They are orphans, deprived of
their Heavenly Father by the very preachers themselves. And it's very
hard for orphans to behave themselves. They know what is right, but
righteousness does not appeal to them, because it has never been
sanctified by love. That is what is the matter with these people.
They do not love God, they do not care, or know, or believe that He
loves them. They are so sensible, so profoundly reasonable that they
are sadly damned already by their own little intelligences. They have
theories, views and knowledges that are not going to show up well in
the next generation. And that is their crime, to propagate ideas that
will destroy the integrity of those who will come after them.