IV

Autumn came, the university opened wide its harmonious doors, welcoming

Youth and Peace.

All that day a lad, alone at his field work away off on the edge of the

bluegrass lands, toiled as one listening to a sublime sound in the

distance--the tramping, tramping, tramping of the students as they

assembled from the farms of the state and from other states. Some boys

out of his own neighborhood had started that morning, old

schoolfellows. He had gone to say good-by; had sat on the bed and

watched them pack their fine new trunks--cramming these with fond

maternal gifts and the thoughtless affluence of necessary and

unnecessary things; had heard all the wonderful talk about classes and

professors and societies; had wrung their hands at last with eyes

turned away, that none might see the look in them--the immortal hunger.

How empty now the whole land without those two or three boys! Not far

away across the fields, soft-white in the clear sunshine, stood the

home of one of them--the green shutters of a single upper room tightly

closed. His heart-strings were twisted tight and wrung sore this day;

and more than once he stopped short in his work (the cutting of briers

along a fence), arrested by the temptation to throw down his hook and

go. The sacred arguments were on his side. Without choice or search of

his they clamored and battered at his inner ear--those commands of the

Gospels, the long reverberations of that absolute Voice, bidding

irresolute workaday disciples leave the plough in the furrow, leave

whatsoever task was impending or duty uppermost to the living or the

dead, and follow,--"Follow Me!"

Arguments, verily, had he in plenty; but raiment--no; nor scrip. And

knew he ever so little of the world, sure he felt of this: that for

young Elijahs at the university there were no ravens; nor wild honey

for St. John; nor Galilean basketfuls left over by hungry fisherfolk,

fishers of men.

So back to his briers. And back to the autumn soil, days of hard

drudging, days of hard thinking. The chief problem for the nigh future

being, how soonest to provide the raiment, fill the scrip; and so with

time enough to find out what, on its first appearance, is so terrible a

discovery to the young, straining against restraint: that just the lack

of a coarse garment or two--of a little money for a little plain

food--of a few candles and a few coverlets for light and warmth with a

book or two thrown in--that a need so poor, paltry as this, may keep

mind and heart back for years. Ah, happy ye! with whom this last not

too long--or for always!

Yet happy ye, whether the waiting be for short time or long time, if

only it bring on meanwhile, as it brought on with him, the struggle!

One sure reward ye have, then, as he had, though there may be none

other--just the struggle: the marshalling to the front of rightful

forces--will, effort, endurance, devotion; the putting resolutely back

of forces wrongful; the hardening of all that is soft within, the

softening of all that is hard: until out of the hardening and the

softening results the better tempering of the soul's metal, and higher

development of those two qualities which are best in man and best in

his ideal of his Maker--strength and kindness, power and mercy. With an

added reward also, if the struggle lead you to perceive (what he did

not perceive), as the light of your darkness, the sweet of bitter, that

real struggling is itself real living, and that no ennobling thing of

this earth is ever to be had by man on any other terms: so teaching

him, none too soon, that any divine end is to be reached but through

divine means, that a great work requires a great preparation.

Of the lad's desperate experience henceforth in mere outward matters

the recital may be suppressed: the struggle of the earth's poor has

grown too common to make fresh reading. He toiled direfully, economized

direfully, to get to his college, but in this showed only the heroism

too ordinary among American boys to be marvelled at more. One fact may

be set down, as limning some true figure of him on the landscape of

those years in that peculiar country.

The war had just closed. The farmers, recollecting the fortunes made in

hemp before, had hurried to the fields. All the more as the long

interruption of agriculture in the South had resulted in scarcity of

cotton; so that the earnest cry came to Kentucky for hemp at once to

take many of its places. But meantime the slaves had been set free:

where before ordered, they must now be hired. A difficult agreement to

effect at all times, because will and word and bond were of no account.

Most difficult when the breaking of hemp was to be bargained for; since

the laborer is kept all day in the winter fields, away from the

fireside, and must toil solitary at his brake, cut off from the talk

and laughter which lighten work among that race. So that wages rose

steadily, and the cost of hemp with them.

The lad saw in this demand for the lowest work at the highest prices

his golden opportunity--and seized it. When the hemp-breaking season

opened that winter, he made his appearance on the farm of a rich farmer

near by, taking his place with the negroes.

There is little art in breaking hemp. He soon had the knack of that:

his muscles were toughened already. He learned what it was sometimes to

eat his dinner in the fields, warming it, maybe, on the coals of a

stump set on fire near his brake; to bale his hemp at nightfall and

follow the slide or wagon to the barn; there to wait with the negroes

till it was weighed on the steelyards; and at last, with muscles stiff

and sore, throat husky with dust, to stride away rapidly over the

bitter darkening land to other work awaiting him at home.

Had there been call to do this before the war, it might not have been

done. But now men young and old, who had never known what work was,

were replacing their former slaves. The preexisting order had indeed

rolled away like a scroll; and there was the strange fresh universal

stir of humanity over the land like the stir of nature in a boundless

wood under a new spring firmament He was one of a multitude of new

toilers; but the first in his neighborhood, and alone in his grim

choice of work.

So dragged that winter through. When spring returned, he did better.

With his father's approval, he put in some acres for himself--sowed it,

watched it, prayed for it; in summer cut it; with hired help stacked it

in autumn; broke it himself the winter following; sold it the next

spring; and so found in his pocket the sorely coveted money.

This was increased that summer from the sale of cord wood, through

driblets saved by his father and mother; and when, autumn once more

advanced with her days of shadow and thoughtfulness--two years having

now passed--he was in possession of his meagre fortune, wrung out of

earth, out of sweat and strength and devotion.

Only a few days remained now before his leaving for the

university--very solemn tender days about the house with his father and

mother.

And now for the lad's own sake, as for the clearer guidance of those

who may care to understand what so incredibly befell him afterward, an

attempt must be made to reveal somewhat of his spiritual life during

those two years. It was this, not hard work, that writ his history.

As soon as he had made up his mind to study for the ministry, he had

begun to read his Bible absorbingly, sweeping through that primitive

dawn of life among the Hebrews and that second, brilliant one of the

Christian era. He had few other books, none important; he knew nothing

of modern theology or modern science. Thus he was brought wholly under

the influence of that view of Man's place in Nature which was held by

the earliest Biblical writers, has imposed itself upon countless

millions of minds since then, and will continue to impose itself--how

much longer?

As regarded, then, his place in Nature, this boy became a contemporary

of the Psalmist; looked out upon the physical universe with the eye of

Job; placed himself back beside that simple, audacious, sublime

child--Man but awakening from his cradle of faith in the morning of

civilization. The meaning of all which to him was this: that the most

important among the worlds swung in space was the Earth, on account of

a single inhabitant--Man. Its shape had been moulded, its surface

fitted up, as the dwelling-place of Man. Land, ocean, mountain-range,

desert, valley--these were designed alike for Man. The sun--it was for

him; and the moon; and the stars, hung about the earth as its

lights--guides to the mariner, reminders to the landsman of the Eye

that never slumbered. The clouds--shade and shower--they were

mercifully for Man. Nothing had meaning, possessed value, save as it

derived meaning and value from him. The great laws of Nature--they,

too, were ordered for Man's service, like the ox and the ass; and as he

drove his ox and his ass whither he would, caused them to move forward

or to stop at the word of command, so Man had only to speak properly

(in prayer) and these laws would move faster or less fast, stop still,

turn to the right or the left side of the road that he desired to

travel. Always Man, Man, Man, nothing but Man! To himself measure of

the universe as to himself a little boy is sole reason for the food and

furnishings of his nursery.

This conception of Man's place in Nature has perhaps furnished a very

large part of the history of the world. Even at this close of the

nineteenth century, it is still, in all probability, the most important

fact in the faith and conduct of the race, running with endless

applications throughout the spheres of practical life and vibrating

away to the extremities of the imagination. In the case of this poor,

devout, high-minded Kentucky boy, at work on a farm in the years 1866

and 1867, saving his earnings and reading his Bible as the twofold

preparation for his entrance into the Christian ministry, this belief

took on one of its purest shapes and wrought out in him some of its

loftiest results.

Let it be remembered that he lived in a temperate, beautiful, bountiful

country; that his work was done mostly in the fields, with the aspects

of land and sky ever before him; that he was much alone; that his

thinking was nearly always of his Bible and his Bible college. Let it

be remembered that he had an eye which was not merely an opening and

closing but a seeing eye--full of health and of enjoyment of the

pageantry of things; and that behind this eye, looking through it as

through its window, stood the dim soul of the lad, itself in a temple

of perpetual worship: these are some of the conditions which yielded

him during these two years the intense, exalted realities of his inner

life.

When of morning he stepped out of the plain farm-house with its rotting

doors and leaking roof and started off joyously to his day's work, at

the sight of the great sun just rising above the low dew-wet hills, his

soul would go soaring away to heaven's gate. Sometimes he would be

abroad late at night, summoning the doctor for his father or returning

from a visit to another neighborhood. In every farmhouse that he passed

on the country road the people were asleep--over all the shadowy land

they were asleep. And everywhere, guardian in the darkness, watched the

moon, pouring its searching beams upon every roof, around every

entrance, on kennel and fold, sty and barn--with light not enough to

awaken but enough to protect: how he worshipped toward that lamp tended

by the Sleepless! There were summer noons when he would be lying under

a solitary tree in a field--in the edge of its shade, resting; his face

turned toward the sky. This would be one over-bending vault of serenest

blue, save for a distant flight of snow-white clouds, making him think

of some earthward-wandering company of angels. He would lie motionless,

scarce breathing, in that peace of the earth, that smile of the Father.

Or if this same vault remained serene too long; if the soil of the

fields became dusty to his boots and his young grain began to wither,

when at last, in response to his prayer, the clouds were brought

directly over them and emptied down, as he stepped forth into the

cooled, dripping, soaking green, how his heart blessed the Power that

reigned above and did all things well!

It was always praise, gratitude, thanks-giving, whatever happened. If

he prayed for rain for his crops and none was sent, then he thought his

prayer lacked faith or was unwise, he knew not how; if too much rain

fell, so that his grain rotted, this again was from some fault of his

or for his good; or perhaps it was the evil work of the prince of the

powers of the air--by permission of the Omnipotent. In the case of one

crop all the labor of nearly a year went for nothing: he explained this

as a reminder that he must be chastened.

Come good, come ill, then, crops or no crops, increase or decrease, it

was all the same to him: he traced the cause of all plenty as of all

disappointment and disaster reaching him through the laws of nature to

some benevolent purpose of the Ruler. And ever before his eyes also he

kept that spotless Figure which once walked among men on earth--that

Saviour of the world whose service he was soon to enter, whose words of

everlasting life he was to preach: his father's farm became as the

vineyard of the parables in the Gospels, he a laborer in it.

Thus this lad was nearer the first century and yet earlier ages than

the nineteenth. He knew more of prophets and apostles than modern

doctors of divinity. When the long-looked-for day arrived for him to

throw his arms around his father and mother and bid them good-by, he

should have mounted a camel, like a youth of the Holy Land of old, and

taken his solemn, tender way across the country toward Jerusalem.

V

One crisp, autumn morning, then, of that year 1867, a big, raw-boned,

bashful lad, having passed at the turnstile into the twenty-acre

campus, stood reverently still before the majestical front of Morrison

College. Browned by heat and wind, rain and sun; straight of spine,

fine of nerve, tough of muscle. In one hand he carried an enormous,

faded valise, made of Brussels carpet copiously sprinkled with small,

pink roses; in the other, held like a horizontal javelin, a family

umbrella. A broken rib escaped his fingers.

It was no time and place for observation or emotion. The turnstile

behind him was kept in a whirl by students pushing through and hurrying

toward the college a few hundred yards distant; others, who had just

left it, came tramping toward him and passing out. In a retired part of

the campus, he could see several pacing slowly to and fro in the grass,

holding text-books before their faces. Some were grouped at the bases

of the big Doric columns, at work together. From behind the college on

the right, two or three appeared running and disappeared through a

basement entrance. Out of the grass somewhere came the sound of a

whistle as clear and happy as of a quail in the wheat; from another

direction, the shouts and wrangling of a playground. Once, barely

audible, through the air surged and died away the last bars of a

glorious hymn, sung by a chorus of fresh male voices. The whole scene

was one of bustle, work, sport, worship.

A few moments the lad remained where he had halted, drinking through

every thirsting pore; but most of all with his eyes satisfied by the

sight of that venerable building which, morning and night, for over two

years had shaped itself to his imagination--that seat of the

university--that entrance into his future.

Three students came strolling along the path toward him on their way

down town. One was slapping his book against his thigh; one was blowing

a ditty through his nose, like music on a comb; one, in the middle, had

his arms thrown over the shoulders of the others, and was at intervals

using them as crutches. As they were about to pass the lad, who had

stepped a few feet to one side of the path, they wheeled and laughed at

him.

"Hello, preachy!" cried one. His face was round, red, and soft, like

the full moon; the disk was now broken up by smiling creases.

"Can you tell me," inquired the lad, coloring and wondering how it was

already known that he was to be a preacher, "Can you tell me just the

way to the Bible College?"

The one of the three on the right turned to the middle man and repeated

the question gravely:--

"Can you tell me just the way to the Bible College?"