looked into the Presbyterian church, where they were held one evening,
just to see how the thing was drawing. All the ministers in town, except
the Episcopalian minister, were sitting on the platform waiting their
cues. The Episcopalian minister had been asked to join in the services,
but he had declined, saying that if it was all the same to his dissenting
and partially Christian friends he would prefer to play a lone hand; and
the colored minister was serving out his time in connection with some of
his neighbors’ chickens that, he said, had flown into his kitchen and
committed suicide there, so he couldn’t have been asked, even if the
white ministers had been willing to unite with him.
“The Presbyterian minister was finishing his sermon when I entered, and
soon as he had retired the Baptist minister got up and gave out a hymn
which was simply crowded with Baptist doctrine. I had often heard it, and
I remember that first verse, which ran this way:
“‘I’d rather be a Baptist
And wear a smiling face,
Than for to be a Methodist
And always fall from grace.’
“The hymn was no sooner given out than the Methodist minister rose and
claimed a foul, on the ground that Baptist doctrine had been introduced
into a union meeting. There was no manner of doubt that he was right,
but the Baptists in the congregation sang the hymn with such enthusiasm
that they drowned the minister’s voice. But when the hymn was over there
was just a heavenly row. One Presbyterian deacon actually went so far
as to draw on a Baptist elder, and there would have been blood shed if
the elder had not knocked him down with a kerosene lamp, and convinced
him that drawing pistols in church was not the spirit of the Gospel.
Everybody was talking at once, and the women who were not scolding
were crying. The meeting was beginning to look like an enthusiastic
political meeting in Cork, when I rapped on the pulpit and called for
order. Everybody knew me and wanted to hear what I had to say, so the
meeting calmed down, except near the door, where the Methodists had got a
large Baptist jammed into the wood-box, and in the vestibule, where the
Unitarians had formed a ring to see the Unitarian minister argue with an
Unleavened Disciple.
“I told the people that they were making a big mistake in trying to run
that sort of an entertainment without an umpire. The idea pleased them,
and before I knew what was going to be done they had passed a resolution
making me umpire and calling on me to decide whether the Baptist hymn
constituted a foul. I decided that it did not, on the ground that,
according to the original agreement, no minister was to preach any
sectarian doctrines, but that nothing was said about the hymns that might
be sung. Then I proposed that in order to prevent any future disputes and
to promote brotherly feeling, a new system of singing hymns should be
adopted. I said, as far as I can recollect, that singing hymns did not
come under the head of incidental music, but was a sort of _entr’acte_
music, intended to relax and divert the audience while bracing up to
hear the next sermon. This being the case, it stood to reason that
hymn-singing should be made a real pleasure, and not an occasion for hard
feeling and the general heaving of books and foot-stools. ‘Now,’ said I,
‘that can be managed in this way. When you sing let everybody sing the
same tune, but each denomination sing whatever words it prefers to sing.
Everybody will sing his own doctrines, but nobody will have any call to
feel offended.’
“The idea was received with general enthusiasm, especially among the
young persons present, and the objections made by a few hard-headed
old conservatives were overruled. The next time singing was in order
the Unitarian minister selected a familiar short-metre tune, and each
minister told his private flock what hymn to sing to it. Everybody sang
at the top of his or her lungs, and as nobody ever understands the
words that anybody else is singing, there did not seem to be anything
strange in the singing of six different hymns to the same tune. There
was a moment when things were a little strained in consequence of the
Presbyterians, who were a strong body, and had got their second wind,
singing a verse about predestination with such vigor as partly to swamp
their rivals, but I decided that there was no foul, and the audience,
being rather tired with their exertions, settled down to listen to the
next sermon.
“The next time it was the Methodist minister who gave out the tune,
and he selected one that nobody who was not born and bred a Methodist
had ever heard of. We used to sing something very much like it at the
windlass when I was a sailor, and it had a regular hurricane chorus. When
the Methodist contingent started in to sing their hymn to this tune,
not a note could any of the rival denominations raise. They stood it in
silence until two verses had been sung, and then——
“Well, I won’t undertake to describe what followed. After about five
minutes the Methodists didn’t feel like singing any more. In fact,
most of them were outside the meeting-house limping their way home,
and remarking that they had had enough of ‘thish yer fellowship with
other churches’ to last them for the rest of their lives. Inside the
meeting-house the triumphant majority were passing resolutions calling me
a depraved worldling, who, at the instigation of the devil, had tried to
convert a religious assemblage into an Orange riot. Even the Unitarians,
who always maintained that they did not believe in the devil, voted
for the resolutions, and three of them were appointed on the committee
charged with putting me out. I didn’t stay to hear any more sermons, but
I afterward understood that all the ministers preached at me, and that
the amount of union displayed in putting the blame of everything on my
shoulders was so touching that men who had been enemies for years shook
hands and called one another brothers.
“Yes! we are an enterprising people in ecclesiastical matters, and I
calculate that it will be a long time before an English village will see
a first-class union meeting.”
A CLERICAL ROMANCE.
“If you want to know my opinion of women-preachers,” said the Colonel,
“I can give it to you straight. They draw well at first, but you can’t
depend upon them for a run. I have had considerable experience of them,
and at one time I thought well of them, but a woman, I think, is out of
place in the pulpit.
“Although I never was a full member of the New Berlinopolisville
Methodist church, I was treated as a sort of honorary member, partly
because I subscribed pretty largely to the pastor’s salary, the annual
picnics, and that sort of thing, and partly because the deacons, knowing
that I had some little reputation as a theatrical manager and was a man
of from fair to middling judgment, used to consult me quietly about the
management of the church. There was a large Baptist church in the same
town, and its opposition was a little too much for us. The Baptist
house was crowded every Sunday, while ours was thin and discouraging. We
had a good old gentleman for a minister, but he was over seventy, and a
married man besides, which kept the women from taking much interest in
him; while his old-fashioned notions didn’t suit the young men of the
congregation. The Baptists, on the other hand, had a young unmarried
preacher, with a voice that you could hear a quarter of a mile off, and a
way of giving it to the Jews, and the Mormons, and other safe and distant
sinners that filled his hearers with enthusiasm and offended nobody. It
was growing more and more evident every day that our establishment was
going behindhand, and that something must be done unless we were willing
to close our doors and go into bankruptcy; so one day the whole board of
trustees and all the deacons came round to talk the matter over with me.
“My mind was already made up, and I was only waiting to have my advice
asked before giving it. ‘What we want,’ said I, ‘is a woman-preacher.
She’ll be a sensation that will take the wind out of that Baptist
windmill, and if she is good-looking, which she has got to be, I will bet
you—that is, I am prepared to say—that within a fortnight there will be
standing-room only in the old Methodist church.’
“‘But what are we to do with Dr. Brewster?’ asked one of the deacons. ‘He
has been preaching to us now for forty years, and it don’t seem quite the
square thing to turn him adrift.’
“‘Oh! that’s all right,’ said I. ‘We’ll retire him on a pension, and
he’ll be glad enough to take it. As for your woman-preacher, I’ve got
just what you want. At least, I know where she is and how much we’ll
have to pay to get her. She’ll come fast enough for the same salary that
we are paying Dr. Brewster, and if she doesn’t double the value of your
pew-rents in six months, I will make up the deficit myself.’
“The trustees were willing to take my advice, and in the course of a few
days Dr. Brewster had been retired on half-pay, the church had extended a
call to the Rev. Matilda Marsh, and the reverend girl, finding that the
salary was satisfactory, accepted it.
“She was only about twenty-five years old, and as pretty as a picture
when she stood in the pulpit in her black silk dress with a narrow
white collar, something like the sort of thing that your clergymen
wear. I couldn’t help feeling sad, when I first saw her, to think that
she did not go into the variety business or a circus, where she would
have made her fortune and the fortune of any intelligent manager. As
a dance-and-song artiste she would have been worth a good six hundred
dollars a week. But women are always wasting their talents, when they
have any, and doing exactly what Nature didn’t mean them to do.
[Illustration: “THE REV. MATILDA MARSH.”]
“Miss Marsh was a success from the moment that she came among us. Being
both unmarried and pretty, she naturally fetched the young men, and as
she let it be understood that she believed in the celibacy of the clergy
and never intended to marry under any circumstances, the greater part of
the women were willing to forgive her good looks. Then she could preach a
first-class sermon, and I call myself a judge of sermons, for at one time
I managed an agency for supplying preachers with ready-made sermons, and
I never put a single one on the market that I hadn’t read myself. I don’t
mean to say that Miss Marsh was strong on doctrinal sermons, but every
one knows that the public doesn’t want doctrinal sermons. What it wants
is poetry and pathos, and Miss Marsh used to ladle them out as if she had
been born and bred an undertaker’s poet.
“As I had prophesied, the Baptists couldn’t stand the competition when
we opened with our woman-preacher. Their minister took to going to the
gymnasium to expand his chest, and by that means increased his lung-power
until he could be heard almost twice as far as formerly, but it didn’t
do any good. His congregation thinned out week by week, and while our
church was crowded, his pew-rents fell below what was necessary to pay
his salary, not to speak of the other incidental expenses. A few of
the young men continued to stick by him until our minister began her
series of sermons ‘To Young Men Only,’ and that brought them in. I had
the sermons advertised with big colored posters, and they proved to be
the most attractive thing ever offered to the religious public. The
church was crammed with young men, while lots of men of from fifty to
seventy years old joined the Young Men’s Christian Association as soon
as they heard of the course of sermons, and by that means managed to get
admission to hear them. Miss Marsh preached to young men on the vices
of the day, such as drinking, and card-playing, and dancing, and going
to the theatre, and she urged them to give up these dissipations and
cultivate their minds. Some of them started a Browning Club that for a
time was very popular. Every time the club met one of Browning’s poems
would be selected by the president, and each member who put up a dollar
was allowed to guess its meaning. The man who made the best guess took
all the money, and sometimes there was as much as thirty dollars in the
pool. The young men told Miss Marsh that they had given up poker and
gone in for Browning, and of course she was greatly pleased. Then some
of the older men started a Milton Club, and used to cut for drinks by
putting a knife-blade into ‘Paradise Lost’—the man who made it open at
a page the first letter of which was nearer to the head of the alphabet
than any letter cut by any other man winning the game. Under Miss Marsh’s
influence a good many other schemes for mental cultivation were invented
and put into operation, and everybody said that that noble young woman
was doing an incalculable amount of good.
“As a matter of course, at least half the young men of the congregation
fell in love with the girl-preacher. They found it very difficult to make
any progress in courting her, for she wouldn’t listen to any conversation
on the subject. When Christmas came, the question what to give her kept
the young men awake night after night. The women had an easy job, for
they could give the preacher clothes, and lace, and hairpins, and such,
which the young men knew that they could not give without taking a
liberty. If she had been a man, slippers would, of course, have been the
correct thing, but the young men felt that they couldn’t work slippers
for a girl that always wore buttoned boots, and that if they did venture
upon such a thing the chances were that she would feel herself insulted.
One chap thought of working on the front of an underskirt—if that is the
right name of it—I mean one of those petticoats that are built for show
rather than use—the words, ‘Bless our Pastor,’ in yellow floss silk, but
when he asked his sister to lend him one of her skirts as a model, she
told him that he was the champion fool of the country. You may ask, why
didn’t the preacher’s admirers give her jewelry? For the reason that
she never wore anything of the kind except a pair of ear-rings that her
mother had given her, and which she had promised always to wear. They
represented chestnut-burs, and it is clear to my mind that her mother
knew that no young man who had much regard for his eyesight would come
very near a girl defended by that sort of ear-ring. Miss Marsh used to
say that other people could wear what they thought right, but she felt it
to be inconsistent with her holy calling to wear any jewelry except the
ear-rings that her sainted mother had given her.
“The best running was undoubtedly made by the cashier of the savings bank
and a young lawyer. Not that either of them had any real encouragement
from Miss Marsh, but she certainly preferred them to the rest of the
field, and was on what was certainly entitled to be called friendly terms
with both of them. Of the two the cashier was by far the most devoted.
He was ready to do anything that might give him a chance of winning. He
even wanted to take a class in the Sunday-school, but the bank directors
forbade it. They said it would impair the confidence of the public in the
bank, and would be pretty sure to bring about a run which the bank might
not be able to stand. They consented, however, that he should become
the president of the new temperance society which the Rev. Miss Marsh
had started, as the president had the right to buy wines and liquors at
wholesale in order to have them analyzed, and thus show how poisonous
they were. As the cashier offered to stand in with the bank directors
and let them fill their cellars at wholesale rates, both he and the
directors made a good thing of it.
“The other young man, the lawyer, was a different sort of chap. He was
one of those fellows that begin to court a girl by knocking her down with
a club. I don’t mean to say that he ever actually knocked a woman down,
but his manner toward women was that of a superior being, instead of a
slave, and I am bound to say that as a general thing the women seemed
to like it. He wasn’t a handsome man, like the cashier, but he had a
big yellow beard that any sensible girl would have held to be worth
twice the smooth-shaved cheek of his rival. He never tried to join the
Sunday-school or the temperance society, or do anything else of the kind
to curry favor with the minister; but he used occasionally to give her
good advice, and to tell her that this or that thing which she was doing
was a mistake. Indeed, he didn’t hesitate to tell her that she had no
business in the pulpit, and had better go out as a governess or a circus
rider, and so conform to the dictates of Nature.
[Illustration: “MAKING THE RUNNING.”]
“I used to watch the game pretty closely, because I had staked my
professional reputation on the financial success of the girl-preacher,
and I didn’t want her to marry and so put an end to her attractiveness
with the general public. I didn’t really think that there was much danger
of any such thing, for Miss Marsh seemed to be entirely absorbed in her
work, and her salary was exceptionally large. Still, you can never tell
when a woman will break the very best engagement, and that is one reason
why they will never succeed as preachers. You pay a man a good salary,
and he will never find that Providence calls him elsewhere, unless, of
course, he has a very much better offer; but a woman-preacher is capable
of throwing up a first-class salary because she don’t like the color of a
deacon’s hair, or because the upholstery of the pulpit doesn’t match with
her complexion.
“That winter we had a very heavy fall of snow, and after that the
sleighing was magnificent for the next month or two. The cashier made the
most of it by taking the minister out sleigh-riding two or three times a
week. The lawyer did not seem to care anything about it, even when he saw
the minister whirling along the road behind the best pair of horses in
the town, with the cashier by her side and her lap full of caramels. But
one Saturday afternoon, when he knew that the cashier would be detained
at the bank until very late—the president having just skipped to Canada,
and it being necessary to ascertain the amount of the deficit without
delay—the lawyer hired a sleigh and called for the minister. Although
she was preparing her next day’s sermon by committing to memory a lot of
Shelley’s poetry, she dropped Shelley and had on her best hat and was
wrapped in the buffalo robe by the side of the lawyer in less than half
an hour after she had told him that she positively wouldn’t keep him
waiting three minutes.
[Illustration: “CALLED FOR THE MINISTER.”]
“You remember what I said about the peculiar pattern of her ear-rings. It
is through those ear-rings that the Methodist church lost its minister,
and I became convinced that a female ministry is not a good thing to tie
to. Miss Marsh and her admirer were driving quietly along and enjoying
themselves in a perfectly respectable way, when one runner of the
sleigh went over a good-sized log that had dropped from somebody’s load
of wood and had been left in the road. The sleigh didn’t quite upset,
but Miss Marsh was thrown against the lawyer with a shock for which
she apologized, and he thanked her. But it happened that one of her
ear-rings caught in the lawyer’s beard, and was so twisted up with it
that it was impossible to disentangle it. Unless Miss Marsh was ready to
drag about half her companion’s heard out by the roots, there was nothing
to be done except for her to sit with her cheek close against his until
some third person could manage to disentangle the ear-ring. While she
was in this painful position—at least she said at the time that it was
painful—a sleigh containing two of her deacons and a prominent Baptist
drove by. Miss Marsh saw them and saw the horrified expression on their
faces. She knew quick enough that her usefulness as a minister in New
Berlinopolisville was at an end and that there was going to be a terrible
scandal. So, being a woman, she burst into tears and said that she wished
she were dead.
“But the lawyer was equal to the occasion. He told her that there was
nothing left to be done except for them to be married and disentangled at
the next town. Then he would take her on a long wedding-trip, stopping
at Chicago to buy some clothes, and that if she so wished they would
afterward settle in some other town, instead of coming back to New
Berlinopolisville. Of course she said that the proposal was not to be
thought of for a moment, and of course she accepted it within the next
ten minutes. They drove to the house of the nearest minister, and the
minister’s wife disentangled them, to save time, while the minister was
engaged in marrying them.
“That was the end of the experiment of playing a woman-preacher on the
boards of the First Methodist Church of Berlinopolisville. Everybody was
content to call a man in the place of Miss Marsh, and everybody agreed
to blame me for the failure of the experiment. I don’t know whether the
lawyer ever had any reason to regret his marriage or not, but when I saw
his wife at a fancy dress hall at Chicago, a year or two later, I could
see that she was not sorry that she had given up the ministry. Ever since
that time I have been opposed to women-preachers, and consider a woman in
the pulpit as much out of place as a deacon in the ballet.”
A MYSTERY.
“Do I believe in spiritualism?” repeated the Colonel. “Well, you wouldn’t
ask me that question if you knew that I had been in the business myself.
I once ran a ‘Grand Spiritual Combination Show.’ I had three first-class
mediums, who did everything, from knocking on a table to materializing
Napoleon, or Washington, or any of your dead friends. It was a good
business while it lasted, but, unfortunately, we showed one night in a
Texas town before a lot of cowboys. One of them brought his lasso under
his coat, and when the ghost of William Penn appeared the cowboy lassoed
him and hauled him in, hand over hand, for further investigation. The
language William Penn used drove all the ladies out of the place, and
his want of judgment in tackling the cowboy cost him all his front
teeth. I and the other mediums and the doorkeeper had to take a hand
in the manifestation, and the result was that the whole Combination was
locked up over-night, and the fines that we had to pay made me tired of
spiritualism.
“No, sir! I don’t believe in spiritualism, but for all that there are
curious things in the world. Why is it that if a man’s name is Charles
G. Haseltine he will lose his right leg in a railway accident? The
police some years ago wanted a Charles G. Haseltine with a wooden right
leg in the State of Massachusetts, and they found no less than five
Charles G. Haseltines, and every one of them had lost his right leg in
a railway accident. What makes it all the more curious is that they
were no relation to one another, and not one of them had ever heard of
the existence of the others. Then, will someone tell me what is the
connection between darkies and chickens? I say ‘darkies’ instead of
‘niggers’ because I had a colored regiment on my right flank at the
battle of Corinth, and that night I swore I would never say ‘nigger’
again. However, that don’t concern you. What I meant to say was that
there is a connection between darkies and chickens which nobody has ever
yet explained. Of course no darky can resist the temptation to steal a
chicken. Everybody knows that. Why, I knew a colored minister who was as
honest a man as the sun ever tried to tan—and failed—and I have known
him to preach a sermon with a chicken that he had lifted on his way
to meeting shoved up under his vest. He wouldn’t have stolen a dollar
bill if he was starving, but he would steal every chicken that he could
lay his hands on, no matter if his own chicken-house was crowded with
chickens. It’s in the blood—or the skin—and no darky can help it.