THE GOOD SAMARITAN.
The Methodist church to which Mrs. Matilda White and Miss Nancy Sawyer
belonged was the leading one in Lewisburg, as it was in most county-seat
villages in Indiana. If I may be permitted to express my candid and
charitable opinion of the difference between the two women, I shall have
to use the old Quaker locution, and say that Miss Sawyer was a Methodist
and likewise a Christian; Mrs. White was a Methodist, but I fear she was
not likewise.
As to the first part of this assertion, there was no room to doubt Miss
Nancy's piety. She could get happy in class-meeting (for who had a
better right?), and could witness a good experience in the quarterly
love-feast. But it is not upon these grounds that I base my opinion of
Miss Nancy. Do not even the Pharisees the same? She never dreamed that
she had any right to speak of "Christian Perfection" (which, as Mrs.
Partington said of total depravity, is an excellent doctrine if it is
lived up to); but when a woman's heart is full of devout affections and
good purposes, when her head devises liberal and Christlike things, when
her hands are always open to the poor and always busy with acts of love
and self-denial, and when her feet are ever eager to run upon errands of
mercy, why, if there be anything worthy of being called Christian
Perfection in this world of imperfection, I do not know why such an one
does not possess it. What need of analyzing her experiences _in vacuo_
to find out the state of her soul?
How Miss Nancy managed to live on her slender income and be so generous
was a perpetual source of perplexity to the gossips of Lewisburg. And
now that she declared that Mrs. Thomson and Shocky should not return to
the poor-house there was a general outcry from the whole Committee of
Intermeddlers that she would bring herself to the poor-house before she
died. But Nancy Sawyer was the richest woman in Lewisburg, though nobody
knew it, and though she herself did not once suspect it.
How Miss Nancy and the preacher conspired together, and how they managed
to bring Mrs. Thomson's case up at the time of the "Sacramental Service"
in the afternoon of that Sunday in Lewisburg, and how the preacher made
a touching statement of it just before the regular "Collection for the
Poor" was taken, and how the warm-hearted Methodists put in dollars
instead of dimes while the Presiding Elder read those passages about
Zaccheus and other liberal people, and how the congregation sang
"He dies, the Friend of sinners dies"
more lustily than ever, after having performed this Christian act--how
all this happened I can not take up the reader's time to tell. But I can
assure him that the nearly blind English woman did not room with
blasphemous old Mowley any more, and that the blue-drilling pauper frock
gave way to something better, and that grave little Shocky even danced
with delight, and declared that God hadn't forgot, though he'd thought
that He had. And Mrs. Matilda White remarked that it was a shame that
the collection for the poor at a Methodist sacramental service should be
given to a woman who was a member of the Church of England, and like as
not never soundly converted!
And Shocky slept in his mother's arms and prayed God not to forget
Hannah, while Shocky's mother knit stockings for the store day and
night, and day and night she prayed and hoped.