The lad could not study eternally. The change from a toiling body and
idle mind to an idle body and toiling mind requires time to make the
latter condition unirksome. Happily there was small need to delve at
learning. His brain was like that of a healthy wild animal freshly
captured from nature. And as such an animal learns to snap at flung
bits of food, springing to meet them and sinking back on his haunches
keen-eyed for more; so mentally he caught at the lessons prepared for
him by his professors: every faculty asked only to be fed--and remained
hungry after the feeding.
Of afternoons, therefore, when recitations were over and his muscles
ached for exercise, he donned his old farm hat and went, stepping in
his high, awkward, investigating way around the town--unaware of
himself, unaware of the light-minded who often turned to smile at that
great gawk in grotesque garments, with his face full of beatitudes and
his pockets full of apples. For apples were beginning to come in from
the frosty orchards; and the fruit dealers along the streets piled them
into pyramids of temptation. It seemed a hardship to him to have to
spend priceless money for a thing like apples, which had always been as
cheap and plentiful as spring water. But those evening suppers in the
dormitory with the disciples! Even when he was filled (which was not
often) he was never comforted; and one day happening upon one of those
pomological pyramids, he paused, yearned, and bought the apex. It was
harder not to buy than to buy. After that he fell into this fruitful
vice almost diurnally; and with mortifying worldly-mindedness he would
sometimes find his thoughts straying apple-wards while his professors
were personally conducting him through Canaan or leading him dry-shod
across the Red Sea. The little dealer soon learned to anticipate his
approach; and as he drew up would have the requisite number ready and
slide them into his pockets without a word--and without the chance of
inspection. A man's candy famine attacked him also. He usually bought
some intractable, resisting medium: it left him rather tired of
pleasure.
So during those crude days he went strolling solemnly about the town,
eating, exploring, filling with sweetmeats and filled with wonder. It
was the first city he had ever seen, the chief interior city of the
state. From childhood he had longed to visit it. The thronged streets,
the curious stores, the splendid residences, the flashing
equipages--what a new world it was to him! But the first place he
inquired his way to was the factory where he had sold his hemp. Awhile
he watched the men at work, wondering whether they might not then be
handling some that he had broken.
At an early date also he went to look up his dear old neighborhood
schoolfellows who two years before had left him, to enter another
college of the University. By inquiry he found out where they lived--in
a big, handsome boarding-house on a fashionable street. He thought he
had never even dreamed of anything so fine as was this house--nor had
he. As he sat in the rich parlors, waiting to learn whether his friends
were at home, he glanced uneasily at his shoes to see whether they
might not be soiling the carpet; and he vigorously dusted himself with
his breath and hands--thus depositing on the furniture whatever dust
there was to transfer.
Having been invited to come up to his friends' room, he mounted and
found one of them waiting at the head of the stairs in his shirt
sleeves, smoking. His greeting was hearty in its way yet betokened some
surprise, a little uneasiness, condescension. David followed his host
into a magnificent room with enormous windows, now raised and opening
upon a veranda. Below was a garden full of old vines black with grapes
and pear trees bent down with pears and beds bright with cool autumn
flowers. (The lad made a note of how much money he would save on apples
if he could only live in reach of those pear trees.) There was a big
rumpled bed in the room; and stretched across this bed on his stomach
lay a student studying and waving his heels slowly in the air. A table
stood in the middle of the room: the books and papers had been scraped
off to the floor; four students were seated at it playing cards and
smoking. Among them his other friend, who rose and gave him a hearty
grip and resuming his seat asked what was trumps. A voice he had heard
before called out to him from the table:--
"Hello, preachy! Did you find your way to the Bible College?"
Whereupon the student on the bed rolled heavily over, sat up
dejectedly, and ogled him with red eyes and a sagging jaw.
"Have you matriculated?" he asked.
David did not think of the cards, and he liked the greeting of the two
strangers who guyed him better than the welcome of his old friends.
That hurt: he had never supposed there was anything just like it in the
nature of man. But during the years since he had seen them, old times
were gone, old manners changed. And was it not in the hemp fields of
the father of one of them that he had meantime worked with the negroes?
And is there any other country in the world where the clean laborer is
so theoretically honored and so practically despised as by the American
snob of each sex?
One afternoon he went over to the courthouse and got the county clerk
to show him the entry where his great-grandfather had had the deed to
his church recorded. There it all was!--all written down to hold good
while the world lasted: that perpetual grant of part and parcel of his
land, for the use of a free school and a free church. The lad went
reverently over the plain, rough speech of the mighty old pioneer, as
he spoke out his purpose.
During those early days also he sought out the different churches,
scrutinizing respectfully their exteriors. How many they were, and how
grand nearly all! Beyond anything he had imagined. He reasoned that if
the buildings were so fine, how fine must be the singing and the
sermons! The unconscious assumption, the false logic here, was
creditable to his heart at least--to that green trust of the young in
things as they should be which becomes in time the best seasoned staff
of age. He hunted out especially the Catholic Church. His
great-grandfather had founded his as free for Catholics as Protestants,
but he recalled the fact that no priest had ever preached there. He
felt very curious to see a priest. A synagogue in the town he could not
find. He was sorry. He had a great desire to lay eyes on a
synagogue--temple of that ancient faith which had flowed on its deep
way across the centuries without a ripple of disturbance from the
Christ. He had made up his mind that when he began to preach he would
often preach especially to the Jews: the time perhaps had come when the
Father, their Father, would reveal his Son to them also. Thus he
promptly fixed in mind the sites of all the churches, because he
intended in time to go to them all.
Meantime he attended his own, the size and elegance of which were a
marvel; and in it especially the red velvet pulpit and the vast
chandelier (he had never seen a chandelier before), blazing with stars
(he had never seen illuminating gas). It was under this chandelier that
he himself soon found a seat. All the Bible students sat there who
could get there, that being the choir of male voices; and before a
month passed he had been taken into this choir: for a storm-like bass
rolled out of him as easily as thunder out of a June cloud. Thus
uneventful flowed the tenor of his student life during those several
initiatory weeks: then something occurred that began to make grave
history for him.
The pastor announced at service one morning that he would that day
begin a series of sermons on errors in the faith and practice of the
different Protestant sects; though he would also consider in time the
cases of the Catholics and Jews: it would scarcely be necessary to
speak of the Mohammedans and such others. He was driven to do this, he
declared, and was anxious to do it, as part of the work of his brethren
all over the country; which was the restoration of Apostolic
Christianity to the world. He asked the especial attention of the Bible
students of the University to these sermons: the first of which he then
proceeded to preach.
That night the lad was absent from his place: he was seated in the
church which had been riddled with logic in the morning. Just why it
would be hard to say. Perhaps his motive resembled that which prompts
us to visit a battle-field and count the slain. Only, not a soul of
those people seemed even to have been wounded. They sang, prayed,
preached, demeaned themselves generally as those who believed that THEY
were the express chosen of the Lord, and greatly enjoyed the notorious
fact.
The series of sermons went on: every night the lad was missing from his
place--gone to see for himself and to learn more about those worldly
churches which had departed from the faith once delivered to the
saints, and if saved at all, then by the mercy of God and much of it.
In the history of any human soul it is impossible to grasp the first
event that starts up a revolution. But perhaps the troubles of the lad
began here. His absences from Sunday night service of course attracted
notice under the chandelier. His bass was missed. Another student was
glad to take his place. His roommate and the several other dormitory
students who had become his acquaintances, discussed with him the
impropriety of these absences: they agreed that he would better stick
to his own church. He gave reasons why he should follow up the pastor's
demonstrations with actual visits to the others: he contended that the
pastor established the fact of the errors; but that the best way to
understand any error was to study the erring. This was all new to him,
however. He had not supposed that in educating himself to preach the
simple Gospel, to the end that the world might believe in Christ, he
must also preach against those who believed in Christ already. Besides,
no one seemed to be convinced by the pastor but those who agreed with
him in advance: the other churches flourished quite the same.
He cited a sermon he had heard in one, which, to the satisfaction of
all present, had riddled his own church, every word of the proof being
based on Scripture: so there you were!
A little cloud came that instant between David and the students to whom
he expressed these views. Some rejoined hotly at once; some maintained
the cold silence which intends to speak in its own time. The next thing
the lad knew was that a professor requested him to remain after class
one day; and speaking with grave kindness, advised him to go regularly
to his own church thereafter. The lad entered ardently into the reasons
why he had gone to the others. The professor heard him through and
without comment repeated his grave, kind advice.
Thereafter the lad was regularly in his own seat there--but with a
certain mysterious, beautiful feeling gone. He could not have said what
this feeling was, did not himself know. Only, a slight film seemed to
pass before his eyes when he looked at his professor, so that he saw
him less clearly and as more remote.
One morning there was a sermon on the Catholics. David went dutifully
to his professor. He said he had never been to a Catholic Church and
would like to go. His professor assented cordially, evincing his
pleasure in the lad's frankness. But the next Sunday morning he was in
the Catholic Church again, thus for the first time missing the
communion in his own. Of all the congregations of Christian believers
that the lad had now visited, the Catholic impressed him as being the
most solemn, reverent, and best mannered. In his own church the place
did not seem to become the house of God till services began; and one
morning in particular, two old farmers in the pew behind him talked in
smothered tones of stock and crops, till it fairly made him homesick.
The sermon of the priest, too, filled him with amazement. It weighed
the claims of various Protestant sects to be reckoned as parts of the
one true historic church of God. In passing, he barely referred to the
most modern of these self-constituted Protestant bodies--David's own
church--and dismissed it with one blast of scorn, which seemed to
strike the lad's face like a hot wind: it left it burning. But to the
Episcopal Church the priest dispensed the most vitriolic criticism. And
that night, carried away by the old impulse, which had grown now almost
into a habit, David went to the Episcopal Church: went to number the
slain. The Bishop of the diocese, as it happened, was preaching that
night--preaching on the union of Christian believers. He showed how
ready the Episcopal Church was for such a union if the rest would only
consent: but no other church, he averred, must expect the Episcopal
Church ever to surrender one article of its creed, namely: that it
alone was descended not by historical continuity simply, but by Divine
succession from the Apostles themselves. The lad walked slowly back to
the dormitory that night with knit brows and a heavy heart.
A great change was coming over him. His old religious peace had been
unexpectedly disturbed. He found himself in the thick of the wars of
dogmatic theology. At that time and in that part of the United States
these were impassioned and rancorous to a degree which even now, less
than half a century later, can scarce be understood; so rapidly has
developed meantime that modern spirit which is for us the tolerant
transition to a yet broader future. Had Kentucky been peopled by her
same people several generations earlier, the land would have run red
with the blood of religious persecutions, as never were England and
Scotland at their worst. So that this lad, brought in from his solemn,
cloistered fields and introduced to wrangling, sarcastic, envious
creeds, had already begun to feel doubtful and distressed, not knowing
what to believe nor whom to follow. He had commenced by being so
plastic a medium for faith, that he had tried to believe them all. Now
he was in the intermediate state of trying to ascertain which. From
that state there are two and two only final ones to emerge: "I shall
among them believe this one only;" or, "I shall among them
believe--none." The constant discussion of some dogma and disproof of
some dogma inevitably begets in a certain order of mind the temper to
discuss and distrust ALL dogma.
Not over their theologies alone were the churches wrangling before the
lad's distracted thoughts. If the theologies were rending religion,
politics was rending the theologies. The war just ended had not
brought, as the summer sermon of the Bible College professor had
stated, breadth of mind for narrowness, calm for passion. Not while men
are fighting their wars of conscience do they hate most, but after they
have fought; and Southern and Union now hated to the bottom and nowhere
else as at their prayers. David found a Presbyterian Church on one
street called "Southern" and one a few blocks away called "Northern":
how those brethren dwelt together. The Methodists were similarly
divided. Of Baptists, the lad ascertained there had been so many kinds
and parts of kinds since the settlement of Kentucky, that apparently
any large-sized family anywhere could reasonably have constituted
itself a church, if the parents and children had only been fortunate
enough to agree.
Where politics did not cleave, other issues did. The Episcopal Church
was cleft into a reform movement (and one unreformable). In his own
denomination internal discord raged over such questions as diabolic
pleasures and Apostolic music. He saw young people haled before the
pulpit as before a tribunal of exact statutes and expelled for moving
their feet in certain ways. If in dancing they whirled like a top
instead of being shot straight back and forth like a bobbin in a
weaver's shuttle, their moral conduct was aggravated. A church organ
was ridiculed as a sort of musical Behemoth--as a dark chamber of
howling, roaring Belial.
These controversies overflowed from the congregation to the Bible
College. The lad in his room at the dormitory one Sunday afternoon
heard a debate on whether a tuning fork is a violation of the word of
God. The debaters turned to him excited and angry:--
"What do you think?" they asked.
"I don't think it is worth talking about," he replied quietly.
They soon became reconciled to each other; they never forgave him.
Meantime as for his Biblical studies, they enlarged enormously his
knowledge of the Bible; but they added enormously to the questions that
may be asked about the Bible--questions he had never thought of before.
And in adding to the questions that may be asked, they multiplied those
that cannot be answered. The lad began to ask these questions, began to
get no answers. The ground of his interest in the great Book shifted.
Out on the farm alone with it for two years, reading it never with a
critical but always with a worshipping mind, it had been to him simply
the summons to a great and good life, earthly and immortal. As he sat
in the lecture rooms, studying it book by book, paragraph by paragraph,
writing chalk notes about it on the blackboard, hearing the students
recite it as they recited arithmetic or rhetoric, a little homesickness
overcame him for the hours when he had read it at the end of a furrow
in the fields, or by his candle the last thing at night before he
kneeled to say his prayers, or of Sunday afternoons off by himself in
the sacred leafy woods. The mysterious untouched Christ-feeling was in
him so strong, that he shrank from these critical analyses as he would
from dissecting the body of the crucified Redeemer.
A significant occurrence took place one afternoon some seven months
after he had entered the University.
On that day, recitations over, the lad left the college alone and with
a most thoughtful air crossed the campus and took his course into the
city. Reaching a great central street, he turned to the left and
proceeded until he stood opposite a large brick church. Passing along
the outside of this, he descended a few steps, traversed an alley,
knocked timidly at a door, and by a voice within was bidden to enter.
He did so, and stood in his pastor's study. He had told his pastor that
he would like to have a little talk with him, and the pastor was there
to have the little talk.
During those seven months the lad had been attracting notice more and
more. The Bible students had cast up his reckoning unfavorably: he was
not of their kind--they moved through their studies as one flock of
sheep through a valley, drinking the same water, nipping the same
grass, and finding it what they wanted. His professors had singled him
out as a case needing peculiar guidance. Not in his decorum as a
student: he was the very soul of discipline. Not in slackness of study:
his mind consumed knowledge as a flame tinder. Not in any
irregularities of private life: his morals were as snow for whiteness.
Yet none other caused such concern.
All this the pastor knew; he had himself long had his eye on this lad.
During his sermons, among the rows of heads and brows and eyes upturned
to him, oftenest he felt himself looking at that big shock-head, at
those grave brows, into those eager, troubled eyes. His persistent
demonstrations that he and his brethren alone were right and all other
churches Scripturally wrong--they always seemed to take the light out
of that countenance. There was silence in the study now as the lad
modestly seated himself in a chair which the pastor had pointed out.
After fidgeting a few moments, he addressed the logician with a
stupefying premise:--
"My great-grandfather," he said, "once built a church simply to God,
not to any man's opinions of Him."
He broke off abruptly.
"So did Voltaire," remarked the pastor dryly, coming to the rescue.
"Voltaire built a church to God: 'Erexit deo Voltaire' Your
great-grandfather and Voltaire must have been kin to each other."
The lad had never heard of Voltaire. The information was rather
prepossessing.
"I think I should admire Voltaire," he observed reflectively.
"So did the Devil," remarked the pastor. Then he added pleasantly, for
he had a Scotch relish for a theological jest:--
"You may meet Voltaire some day."
"I should like to. Is he coming here?" asked the lad.
"Not immediately. He is in hell--or will be after the Resurrection of
the Dead."
The silence in the study grew intense.
"I understand you now," said the lad, speaking composedly all at once.
"You think that perhaps I will go to the Devil also."
"Oh, no!" exclaimed the pastor, hiding his smile and stroking his beard
with syllogistic self-respect. "My dear young brother, did you want to
see me on any--BUSINESS?"
"I did. I was trying to tell you. My great-grandfather--"
"Couldn't you begin with more modern times?"
"The story begins back there," insisted the lad, firmly. "The part of
it, at least, that affects me. My great-grandfather founded a church
free to all Christian believers. It stands in our neighborhood. I have
always gone there. I joined the church there. All the different
denominations in our part of the country have held services there.
Sometimes they have all had services together. I grew up to think they
were all equally good Christians in their different ways."
"Did you?" inquired the pastor. "You and your grandfather and Voltaire
must ALL be kin to each other."
His visage was not pleasant.
"My trouble since coming to College," said the lad, pressing across the
interruption, "has been to know which IS the right church--"
"Are you a member of THIS church?" inquired the pastor sharply, calling
a halt to this folly.
"I am."
"Then don't you know that it is the only right one?"
"I do not. All the others declare it a wrong one. They stand ready to
prove this by the Scriptures and do prove it to their satisfaction.
They declare that if I become a preacher of what my church believes, I
shall become a false teacher of men and be responsible to God for the
souls I may lead astray. They honestly believe this."
"Don't you know that when Satan has entered into a man, he can make him
honestly believe anything?"
"And you think it is Satan that keeps the other churches from seeing
this is the only right one?"
"I do! And beware, young man, that Satan does not get into YOU!"
"He must be in me already." There was silence again, then the lad
continued.
"All this is becoming a great trouble to me. It interferes with my
studies--takes my interest out of my future. I come to you then. You
are my pastor. Where is the truth--the reason--the proof--the
authority? Where is the guiding LAW in all this? I must find THE LAW
and that quickly."
There was no gainsaying his trouble: it expressed itself in his eyes,
voice, entire demeanor. The pastor was not seeing any of these things.
Here was a plain, ignorant country lad who had rejected his logic and
who apparently had not tact enough at this moment to appreciate his own
effrontery. In the whole sensitiveness of man there is no spot so
touchy as the theological.
"Have you a copy of the New Testament?"
It was the tone in which the school-master of old times said, "Bring me
that switch."
"I have,"
"You can read it?"
"I can."
"You find in it the inspired account of the faith of the original
church--the earliest history of Apostolic Christianity?"
"I do."
"Then, can you not compare the teachings of the Apostles, THEIR faith
and THEIR practice, with the teachings of this church? ITS faith and
ITS practice?"
"I have tried to do that."
"Then there is the truth. And the reason. And the proof. And the
authority. And the LAW. We have no creed but the creed of the Apostolic
churches; no practice but their practice; no teaching but their
teaching in letter and in spirit."
"That is what was told me before I came to college. It was told me that
young men were to be prepared to preach the simple Gospel of Christ to
all the world. There was to be no sectarian theology."
"Well? Has any one taught you sectarian theology?"
"Not consciously, not intentionally. Inevitably--perhaps. That is my
trouble now--ONE of my troubles."
"Well?"
"May I ask you some questions?"
"You may ask me some questions if they are not silly questions. You
don't seem to have any creed, but you DO seem to have a catechism!
Well, on with the catechism! I hope it will be better than those I have
read."