No such throng had ever before been seen in the building during all its
eight years of existence. People were wedged together most uncomfortably
upon the seats; they stood packed in the aisles and overflowed the
galleries; at the back, in the shadows underneath these galleries, they
formed broad, dense masses about the doors, through which it would be
hopeless to attempt a passage.
The light, given out from numerous tin-lined circles of flaring gas-jets
arranged on the ceiling, fell full upon a thousand uplifted faces--some
framed in bonnets or juvenile curls, others bearded or crowned with
shining baldness--but all alike under the spell of a dominant emotion
which held features in abstracted suspense and focussed every eye upon a
common objective point.
The excitement of expectancy reigned upon each row of countenances, was
visible in every attitude--nay, seemed a part of the close, overheated
atmosphere itself.
An observer, looking over these compact lines of faces and noting the
uniform concentration of eagerness they exhibited, might have guessed
that they were watching for either the jury's verdict in some peculiarly
absorbing criminal trial, or the announcement of the lucky numbers in
a great lottery. These two expressions seemed to alternate, and even to
mingle vaguely, upon the upturned lineaments of the waiting throng--the
hope of some unnamed stroke of fortune and the dread of some adverse
decree.
But a glance forward at the object of this universal gaze would have
sufficed to shatter both hypotheses. Here was neither a court of justice
nor a tombola. It was instead the closing session of the annual Nedahma
Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Bishop was about
to read out the list of ministerial appointments for the coming year.
This list was evidently written in a hand strange to him, and the slow,
near-sighted old gentleman, having at last sufficiently rubbed the
glasses of his spectacles, and then adjusted them over his nose
with annoying deliberation, was now silently rehearsing his task to
himself--the while the clergymen round about ground their teeth and
restlessly shuffled their feet in impatience.
Upon a closer inspection of the assemblage, there were a great many
of these clergymen. A dozen or more dignified, and for the most part
elderly, brethren sat grouped about the Bishop in the pulpit. As many
others, not quite so staid in mien, and indeed with here and there
almost a suggestion of frivolity in their postures, were seated on the
steps leading down from this platform. A score of their fellows sat
facing the audience, on chairs tightly wedged into the space railed off
round the pulpit; and then came five or six rows of pews, stretching
across the whole breadth of the church, and almost solidly filled with
preachers of the Word.
There were very old men among these--bent and decrepit veterans who
had known Lorenzo Dow, and had been ordained by elders who remembered
Francis Asbury and even Whitefield. They sat now in front places,
leaning forward with trembling and misshapen hands behind their hairy
ears, waiting to hear their names read out on the superannuated list, it
might be for the last time.
The sight of these venerable Fathers in Israel was good to the eyes,
conjuring up, as it did, pictures of a time when a plain and homely
people had been served by a fervent and devoted clergy--by preachers
who lacked in learning and polish, no doubt, but who gave their lives
without dream of earthly reward to poverty and to the danger and wearing
toil of itinerant missions through the rude frontier settlements. These
pictures had for their primitive accessories log-huts, rough household
implements, coarse clothes, and patched old saddles which told of weary
years of journeying; but to even the least sympathetic vision there
shone upon them the glorified light of the Cross and Crown. Reverend
survivors of the heroic times, their very presence there--sitting
meekly at the altar-rail to hear again the published record of their
uselessness and of their dependence upon church charity--was in the
nature of a benediction.
The large majority of those surrounding these patriarchs were
middle-aged men, generally of a robust type, with burly shoulders, and
bushing beards framing shaven upper lips, and who looked for the most
part like honest and prosperous farmers attired in their Sunday clothes.
As exceptions to this rule, there were scattered stray specimens of
a more urban class, worthies with neatly trimmed whiskers, white
neckcloths, and even indications of hair-oil--all eloquent of citified
charges; and now and again the eye singled out a striking and scholarly
face, at once strong and simple, and instinctively referred it to the
faculty of one of the several theological seminaries belonging to the
Conference.
The effect of these faces as a whole was toward goodness, candor,
and imperturbable self-complacency rather than learning or mental
astuteness; and curiously enough it wore its pleasantest aspect on
the countenances of the older men. The impress of zeal and moral worth
seemed to diminish by regular gradations as one passed to younger faces;
and among the very beginners, who had been ordained only within the past
day or two, this decline was peculiarly marked. It was almost a relief
to note the relative smallness of their number, so plainly was it to be
seen that they were not the men their forbears had been.
And if those aged, worn-out preachers facing the pulpit had gazed
instead backward over the congregation, it may be that here too their
old eyes would have detected a difference--what at least they would have
deemed a decline.
But nothing was further from the minds of the members of the First M. E.
Church of Tecumseh than the suggestion that they were not an improvement
on those who had gone before them. They were undoubtedly the smartest
and most important congregation within the limits of the Nedahma
Conference, and this new church edifice of theirs represented alike
a scale of outlay and a standard of progressive taste in devotional
architecture unique in the Methodism of that whole section of the State.
They had a right to be proud of themselves, too. They belonged to the
substantial order of the community, with perhaps not so many very rich
men as the Presbyterians had, but on the other hand with far fewer
extremely poor folk than the Baptists were encumbered with. The pews
in the first four rows of their church rented for one hundred dollars
apiece--quite up to the Presbyterian highwater mark--and they now had
almost abolished free pews altogether. The oyster suppers given by their
Ladies' Aid Society in the basement of the church during the winter
had established rank among the fashionable events in Tecumseh's social
calendar.
A comprehensive and satisfied perception of these advantages was
uppermost in the minds of this local audience, as they waited for the
Bishop to begin his reading. They had entertained this Bishop and his
Presiding Elders, and the rank and file of common preachers, in a style
which could not have been remotely approached by any other congregation
in the Conference. Where else, one would like to know, could the
Bishop have been domiciled in a Methodist house where he might have a
sitting-room all to himself, with his bedroom leading out of it? Every
clergyman present had been provided for in a private residence--even
down to the Licensed Exhorters, who were not really ministers at all
when you came to think of it, and who might well thank their stars
that the Conference had assembled among such open-handed people. There
existed a dim feeling that these Licensed Exhorters--an uncouth crew,
with country store-keepers and lumbermen and even a horse-doctor among
their number--had taken rather too much for granted, and were not
exhibiting quite the proper degree of gratitude over their reception.
But a more important issue hung now imminent in the balance--was
Tecumseh to be fairly and honorably rewarded for her hospitality by
being given the pastor of her choice?
All were agreed--at least among those who paid pew-rents--upon the great
importance of a change in the pulpit of the First M. E. Church. A change
in persons must of course take place, for their present pastor had
exhausted the three-year maximum of the itinerant system, but there was
needed much more than that. For a handsome and expensive church building
like this, and with such a modern and go-ahead congregation, it was
simply a vital necessity to secure an attractive and fashionable
preacher. They had held their own against the Presbyterians these past
few years only by the most strenuous efforts, and under the depressing
disadvantage of a minister who preached dreary out-of-date sermons, and
who lacked even the most rudimentary sense of social distinctions. The
Presbyterians had captured the new cashier of the Adams County Bank, who
had always gone to the Methodist Church in the town he came from, but
now was lost solely because of this tiresome old fossil of theirs; and
there were numerous other instances of the same sort, scarcely less
grievous. That this state of things must be altered was clear.
The unusually large local attendance upon the sessions of the Conference
had given some of the more guileless of visiting brethren a high notion
of Tecumseh's piety; and perhaps even the most sophisticated stranger
never quite realized how strictly it was to be explained by the anxiety
to pick out a suitable champion for the fierce Presbyterian competition.
Big gatherings assembled evening after evening to hear the sermons of
those selected to preach, and the church had been almost impossibly
crowded at each of the three Sunday services. Opinions had naturally
differed a good deal during the earlier stages of this scrutiny, but
after last night's sermon there could be but one feeling. The man for
Tecumseh was the Reverend Theron Ware.
The choice was an admirable one, from points of view much more exalted
than those of the local congregation.
You could see Mr. Ware sitting there at the end of the row inside the
altar-rail--the tall, slender young man with the broad white brow,
thoughtful eyes, and features moulded into that regularity of strength
which used to characterize the American Senatorial type in those
far-away days of clean-shaven faces and moderate incomes before the War.
The bright-faced, comely, and vivacious young woman in the second side
pew was his wife--and Tecumseh noted with approbation that she knew
how to dress. There were really no two better or worthier people in the
building than this young couple, who sat waiting along with the rest to
hear their fate. But unhappily they had come to know of the effort being
made to bring them to Tecumseh; and their simple pride in the triumph of
the husband's fine sermon had become swallowed up in a terribly anxious
conflict of hope and fear. Neither of them could maintain a satisfactory
show of composure as the decisive moment approached. The vision of
translation from poverty and obscurity to such a splendid post as
this--truly it was too dazzling for tranquil nerves.
The tedious Bishop had at last begun to call his roll of names, and the
good people of Tecumseh mentally ticked them off, one by one, as the
list expanded. They felt that it was like this Bishop--an unimportant
and commonplace figure in Methodism, not to be mentioned in the same
breath with Simpson and Janes and Kingsley--that he should begin with
the backwoods counties, and thrust all these remote and pitifully rustic
stations ahead of their own metropolitan charge. To these they listened
but listlessly--indifferent alike to the joy and to the dismay which he
was scattering among the divines before him.
The announcements were being doled out with stumbling hesitation. After
each one a little half-rustling movement through the crowded rows of
clergymen passed mute judgment upon the cruel blow this brother had
received, the reward justly given to this other, the favoritism by which
a third had profited. The Presiding Elders, whose work all this was,
stared with gloomy and impersonal abstraction down upon the rows of
blackcoated humanity spread before them. The ministers returned this
fixed and perfunctory gaze with pale, set faces, only feebly masking the
emotions which each new name stirred somewhere among them. The Bishop
droned on laboriously, mispronouncing words and repeating himself as if
he were reading a catalogue of unfamiliar seeds.
“First church of Tecumseh--Brother Abram G. Tisdale!”
There was no doubt about it! These were actually the words that had been
uttered. After all this outlay, all this lavish hospitality, all this
sacrifice of time and patience in sitting through those sermons, to draw
from the grab-bag nothing better than--a Tisdale!
A hum of outraged astonishment--half groan, half wrathful snort bounded
along from pew to pew throughout the body of the church. An echo of it
reached the Bishop, and so confused him that he haltingly repeated the
obnoxious line. Every local eye turned as by intuition to where the
calamitous Tisdale sat, and fastened malignantly upon him.
Could anything be worse? This Brother Tisdale was past fifty--a
spindling, rickety, gaunt old man, with a long horse-like head and
vacantly solemn face, who kept one or the other of his hands continually
fumbling his bony jaw. He had been withdrawn from routine service for a
number of years, doing a little insurance canvassing on his own account,
and also travelling for the Book Concern. Now that he wished to return
to parochial work, the richest prize in the whole list, Tecumseh, was
given to him--to him who had never been asked to preach at a Conference,
and whose archaic nasal singing of “Greenland's Icy Mountains” had made
even the Licensed Exhorters grin! It was too intolerably dreadful to
think of!
An embittered whisper to the effect that Tisdale was the Bishop's cousin
ran round from pew to pew. This did not happen to be true, but indignant
Tecumseh gave it entire credit. The throngs about the doors dwindled as
by magic, and the aisles cleared. Local interest was dead; and even some
of the pewholders rose and made their way out. One of these murmured
audibly to his neighbors as he departed that HIS pew could be had now
for sixty dollars.
So it happened that when, a little later on, the appointment of Theron
Ware to Octavius was read out, none of the people of Tecumseh either
noted or cared. They had been deeply interested in him so long as
it seemed likely that he was to come to them--before their clearly
expressed desire for him had been so monstrously ignored. But now what
became of him was no earthly concern of theirs.
After the Doxology had been sung and the Conference formally declared
ended, the Wares would fain have escaped from the flood of handshakings
and boisterous farewells which spread over the front part of the church.
But the clergymen were unusually insistent upon demonstrations of
cordiality among themselves--the more, perhaps, because it was evident
that the friendliness of their local hosts had suddenly evaporated--and,
of all men in the world, the present incumbent of the Octavius pulpit
now bore down upon them with noisy effusiveness, and defied evasion.
“Brother Ware--we have never been interduced--but let me clasp your
hand! And--Sister Ware, I presume--yours too!”
He was a portly man, who held his head back so that his face seemed all
jowl and mouth and sandy chin-whisker. He smiled broadly upon them with
half-closed eyes, and shook hands again.
“I said to 'em,” he went on with loud pretence of heartiness, “the
minute I heerd your name called out for our dear Octavius, 'I must go
over an' interduce myself.' It will be a heavy cross to part with those
dear people, Brother Ware, but if anything could wean me to the notion,
so to speak, it would be the knowledge that you are to take up my labors
in their midst. Perhaps--ah--perhaps they ARE jest a trifle close in
money matters, but they come out strong on revivals. They'll need a good
deal o' stirrin' up about parsonage expenses, but, oh! such seasons
of grace as we've experienced there together!” He shook his head, and
closed his eyes altogether, as if transported by his memories.
Brother Ware smiled faintly in decorous response, and bowed in silence;
but his wife resented the unctuous beaming of content on the other's
wide countenance, and could not restrain her tongue.
“You seem to bear up tolerably well under this heavy cross, as you call
it,” she said sharply.
“The will o' the Lord, Sister Ware--the will o' the Lord!” he responded,
disposed for the instant to put on his pompous manner with her, and then
deciding to smile again as he moved off. The circumstance that he was to
get an additional three hundred dollars yearly in his new place was not
mentioned between them.
By a mutual impulse the young couple, when they had at last gained the
cool open air, crossed the street to the side where over-hanging trees
shaded the infrequent lamps, and they might be comparatively alone. The
wife had taken her husband's arm, and pressed closely upon it as they
walked. For a time no word passed, but finally he said, in a grave
voice,--
“It is hard upon you, poor girl.”
Then she stopped short, buried her face against his shoulder, and fell
to sobbing.
He strove with gentle, whispered remonstrance to win her from this mood,
and after a few moments she lifted her head and they resumed their walk,
she wiping her eyes as they went.
“I couldn't keep it in a minute longer!” she said, catching her breath
between phrases. “Oh, WHY do they behave so badly to us, Theron?”
He smiled down momentarily upon her as they moved along, and patted her
hand.
“Somebody must have the poor places, Alice,” he said consolingly. “I am
a young man yet, remember. We must take our turn, and be patient. For
'we know that all things work together for good.'”
“And your sermon was so head-and-shoulders above all the others!” she
went on breathlessly. “Everybody said so! And Mrs. Parshall heard it so
DIRECT that you were to be sent here, and I know she told everybody how
much I was lotting on it--I wish we could go right off tonight without
going to her house--I shall be ashamed to look her in the face--and
of course she knows we're poked off to that miserable Octavius.--Why,
Theron, they tell me it's a worse place even than we've got now!”
“Oh, not at all,” he put in reassuringly. “It has grown to be a large
town--oh, quite twice the size of Tyre. It's a great Irish place, I've
heard. Our own church seems to be a good deal run down there. We must
build it up again; and the salary is better--a little.”
But he too was depressed, and they walked on toward their temporary
lodging in a silence full of mutual grief. It was not until they had
come within sight of this goal that he prefaced by a little sigh of
resignation these further words,--
“Come--let us make the best of it, my girl! After all, we are in the
hands of the Lord.”
“Oh, don't, Theron!” she said hastily. “Don't talk to me about the Lord
tonight; I can't bear it!”