During the time that had intervened between Kike's conversion and
Magruder's second visit to the settlement, Kike had developed a very
considerable gift for earnest speech in the class meetings. In that
day every influence in Methodist association contributed to make a
preacher of a man of force. The reverence with which a self-denying
preacher was regarded by the people was a great compensation for the
poverty and toil that pertained to the office. To be a preacher was
to be canonized during one's lifetime. The moment a young man showed
zeal and fluency he was pitched on by all the brethren and sisters as
one whose duty it was to preach the Gospel; he was asked whether he
did not feel that he had a divine call; he was set upon watching the
movements within him to see whether or not he ought to be among the
sons of the prophets. Oftentimes a man was made to feel, in spite of
his own better judgment, that he was a veritable Jonah, slinking from
duty, and in imminent peril of a whale in the shape of some
providential disaster. Kike, indeed, needed none of these urgings to
impel him toward the ministry. He was a man of the prophetic
temperament--one of those men whose beliefs take hold of them more
strongly than the objects of sense. The future life, as preached by
the early Methodists, with all its joys and all its awful torments,
became the most substantial of realities to him. He was in constant
astonishment that people could believe these things theoretically and
ignore them in practice. If men were going headlong to perdition,
and could be saved and brought into a paradise of eternal bliss by
preaching, then what nobler work could there be than that of saving
them? And, let a man take what view he may of a future life, Kike's
opinion was the right one--no work can be so excellent as that of
helping men to better living.
Kike had been poring over some works of Methodist biography which he
had borrowed, and the sublimated life of Fletcher was the only one
that fulfilled his ideal. Methodism preached consecration to its
disciples. Kike had already learned from Mrs. Wheeler, who was the
class-leader at Hissawachee settlement, and from Methodist
literature, that he must "keep all on the altar." He must be ready
to do, to suffer, or to perish, for the Master. The sternest sayings
of Christ about forsaking father and mother, and hating one's own
life and kindred, he heard often repeated in exhortations. Most
people are not harmed by a literal understanding of hyperbolical
expressions. Laziness and selfishness are great antidotes to
fanaticism, and often pass current for common sense. Kike had no
such buffers; taught to accept the words of the Gospel with the dry
literalness of statutory enactments, he was too honest to evade their
force, too earnest to slacken his obedience. He was already prepared
to accept any burden and endure any trial that might be given as a
test of discipleship. All his natural ambition, vehemence, and
persistence, found exercise in his religious life; and the
simple-hearted brethren, not knowing that the one sort of intensity
was but the counter-part of the other, pointed to the transformation
as a "beautiful conversion," a standing miracle. So it was, indeed,
and, like all moral miracles, it was worked in the direction of
individuality, not in opposition to it.
It was a grievous disappointment to the little band of Methodists
that Brother Magruder's face was so swollen, after his encounter, as
to prevent his preaching. They had counted much upon the success of
this day's work, and now the devil seemed about to snatch the
victory. Mrs. Wheeler enthusiastically recommended Kike as a
substitute, and Magruder sent for him in haste. Kike was gratified
to hear that the preacher wanted to see him personally. His sallow
face flushed with pleasure as he stood, a slender stripling, before
the messenger of God.
"Brother Lumsden," said Mr. Magruder, "are you ready to do and to
suffer for Christ?"
"I trust I am," said Kike, wondering what the preacher could mean.
"You see how the devil has planned to defeat the Lord's work to-day.
My lip is swelled, and my jaw so stiff that I can hardly speak. Are
you ready to do the duty the Lord shall put upon you?"
Kike trembled from head to foot. He had often fancied himself
preaching his first sermon in a strange neighborhood, and he had even
picked out his text; but to stand up suddenly before his
school-mates, before his mother, before Brady, and, worse than all,
before Morton, was terrible. And yet, had he not that very morning
made a solemn vow that he would not shrink from death itself!
"Do you think I am fit to preach?" he asked, evasively.
"None of us are fit; but here will be two or three hundred people
hungry for the bread of life. The Master has fed you; he offers you
the bread to distribute among your friends and neighbors. Now, will
you let the fear of man make you deny the blessed Lord who has taken
you out of a horrible pit and set your feet upon the Rock of Ages?"
Kike trembled a moment, and then said: "I will do whatever you say,
if you will pray for me."
"I'll do that, my brother. And now take your Bible, and go into the
woods and pray. The Lord will show you the way, if you put your
whole trust in him."
The preacher's allusion to the bread of life gave Kike his subject,
and he soon gathered a few thoughts which he wrote down on a fly-leaf
of the Bible, in the shape of a skeleton. But it occurred to him
that he had not one word to say on the subject of the bread of life
beyond the sentences of his skeleton. The more this became evident
to him, the greater was his agony of fear. He knelt on the brown
leaves by a prostrate log; he made a "new consecration" of himself;
he tried to feel willing to fail, so far as his own feelings were
involved; he reminded the Lord of his promises to be with them he had
sent; and then there came into his memory a text of Scripture: "For
it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak." Taking
it, after the manner of the early Methodist mysticism, that the text
had been supernaturally "suggested" to him, he became calm; and
finding, from the height of the sun, that it was about the hour for
meeting, he returned to the house of Colonel Wheeler, and was
appalled at the sight that met his eyes. All the settlement, and
many from other settlements, had come. The house, the yard, the
fences, were full of people. Kike was seized with a tremor. He did
not feel able to run the gauntlet of such a throng. He made a
detour, and crept in at the back door like a criminal. For
stage-fright--this fear of human presence--is not a thing to be
overcome by the will. Susceptible natures are always liable to it,
and neither moral nor physical courage can avert it.
A chair had been placed in the front door of the log house, for Kike,
that he might preach to the congregation indoors and the much larger
one outdoors. Mr. Magruder, much battered up, sat on a wooden bench
just outside. Kike crept into the empty chair in the doorway with
the feeling of one who intrudes where he does not belong. The
brethren were singing, as a congregational voluntary, to the solemn
tune of "Kentucky," the hymn which begins:
"A charge to keep I have,
A God to glorify;
A never-dying soul to save
And fit it for the sky."
Magruder saw Kike's fright, and, leaning over to him, said: "If you
get confused, tell your own experience." The early preacher's
universal refuge was his own experience. It was a sure key to the
sympathies of the audience.
Kike got through the opening exercises very well. He could pray, for
in praying he shut his eyes and uttered the cry of his trembling soul
for help. He had been beating about among two or three texts, either
of which would do for a head-piece to the remarks he intended to
make; but now one fixed itself in his mind as he stood appalled by
his situation in the presence of such a throng. He rose and read,
with a tremulous voice:
"There is a lad here which hath five barley loaves and two small
fishes; but what are they among so many?"
The text arrested the attention of all. Magruder, though unable to
speak without pain, could not refrain from saying aloud, after the
free old Methodist fashion: "The Lord multiply the loaves! Bless and
break to the multitude!" "Amen!" responded an old brother from
another settlement, "and the Lord help the lad!" But Kike felt that
the advantage which the text had given him would be of short
duration. The novelty of his position bewildered him. His face
flushed; his thoughts became confused; he turned his back on the
audience out of doors, and talked rapidly to the few friends in the
house: the old brethren leaned their heads upon their hands and began
to pray. Whatever spiritual help their prayers may have brought him,
their lugubrious groaning, and their doleful, audible prayers of
"Lord, help!" depressed Kike immeasurably, and kept the precipice on
which he stood constantly present to him. He tried in succession
each division that he had sketched on the fly-leaf of the Bible, and
found little to say on any of them. At last, he could not see the
audience distinctly for confusion--there was a dim vision of heads
swimming before him. He stopped still, and Magruder, expecting him
to sit down, resolved to "exhort" if the pain should kill him. The
Philistines meanwhile were laughing at Kike's evident discomfiture.
But Kike had no notion of sitting down. The laughter awakened his
combativeness, and his combativeness restored his self-control.
Persistent people begin their success where others end in failure.
He was through with the sermon, and it had occupied just six minutes.
The lad's scanty provisions had not been multiplied. But he felt
relieved. The sermon over, there was no longer necessity for trying
to speak against time, nor for observing the outward manner of a
preacher.
"Now," he said, doggedly, "you have all seen that I cannot preach
worth a cent. When David went out to fight, he had the good sense
not to put on Saul's armor. I was fool enough to try to wear Brother
Magruder's. Now, I'm done with that. The text and sermon are gone.
But I'm not ashamed of Jesus Christ. And before I sit down, I am
going to tell you all what he has done for a poor lost sinner like
me."
Kike told the story with sincere directness. His recital of his own
sins was a rebuke to others; with a trembling voice and a simple
earnestness absolutely electrical, he told of his revengefulness, and
of the effect of Magruder's preaching on him. And now that the
flood-gates of emotion were opened, all trepidation departed, and
there came instead the fine glow of martial courage. He could have
faced the universe. From his own life the transition to the lives of
those around him was easy. He hit right and left. The excitable
crowd swayed with consternation as, in a rapid and vehement
utterance, he denounced their sins with the particularity of one who
had been familiar with them all his life. Magruder forgot to
respond; he only leaned back and looked in bewilderment, with open
eyes and mouth, at the fiery boy whose contagious excitement was fast
setting the whole audience ablaze. Slowly the people pressed forward
off the fences. All at once there was a loud bellowing cry from some
one who had fallen prostrate outside the fence, and who began to cry
aloud as if the portals of an endless perdition were yawning in his
face. Magruder pressed through the crowd to find that the fallen man
was his antagonist of the morning--Bill McConkey! Bill had concealed
his bruised nose behind a tree, but had been drawn forth by the
fascination of Kike's earnestness, and had finally fallen under the
effect of his own terror. This outburst of agony from McConkey was
fuel to the flames, and the excitement now spread to all parts of the
audience. Kike went from man to man, and exhorted and rebuked each
one in particular. Brady, not wishing to hear a public commentary on
his own life, waddled away when he saw Kike coming; his mother wept
bitterly under his exhortation; and Morton sat stock still on the
fence listening, half in anguish and half in anger, to Kike's public
recital of his sins.
At last Kike approached his uncle; for Captain Lumsden had come on
purpose to enjoy Morton's proposed interruption. He listened a
minute to Kike's exhortation, and the contrary emotions of alarm at
the thought of God's judgment and anger at Kike's impudence contended
within him until he started for his horse and was seized with that
curious nervous affection which originated in these religious
excitements and disappeared with them.* He jerked violently--his
jerking only adding to his excitement, which in turn increased the
severity of his contortions. This nervous affection was doubtless a
natural physical result of violent excitement; but the people of that
day imagined that it was produced by some supernatural agency, some
attributing it to God, others to the devil, and yet others to some
subtle charm voluntarily exercised by the preachers. Lumsden went
home jerking all the way, and cursing the Methodists more bitterly
than ever.
* It bore, however, a curious resemblance to the "dancing disease"
which prevailed in Italy in the Middle Ages.
_CHAPTER XV._