The discourse of Dylks the second night was a chain of biblical passages,
as it had been the first night. But an apparent intention, which had been
wanting before, ran through the incoherent texts, leaping as it were from
one to another, and there binding them in an intimation of a divine
mission. He did not say that he had been sent of God, but he made the
texts which he gave, swiftly and unerringly, say something like that for
him to such as were prepared to believe it. Not all were prepared; many
denied; the most doubted; but those who accepted that meaning of the
inspired words were of the principal people, respected for their higher
intelligence and their greater wealth.
He had come to the Temple with Peter Hingston and he went with him from
it. Hingston's quarter section of the richest farmland in the bottom
bordered his mill privilege, with barns and corncribs and tobacco sheds,
and his brick house behind the mill was the largest and finest dwelling in
the place. His flocks and herds abounded; his state was patriarchal; and
in the neighborhood which loved and honored him, for some favor and
kindness done nearly every man there: for money when the crops failed; for
the storage of their wheat and corn in the deep bins of his mill when the
yield was too great for their barns; for the use of his sheds in drying
their tobacco before their own were ready. His growing sons and daughters,
until they were grown men and women, obeyed his counsel as they had obeyed
his will while children. But he was severe with no one; since his wife had
died his natural gentleness was his manner as it had always been his make,
and it tempered the piety, which in many was forbidding and compelling, to
a wistful kindness. His faith admitted no misgiving, for himself, but his
toleration of doubts and differences in others extended to the worst of
skeptics. He believed that revelation had never ceased; he was of those
who looked for a sign, because if God had ever given Himself in communion
with His creatures it was not reasonable that he should afterwards always
withhold Himself. A friendly humor looked from his dull eyes, and, in
never quite coming to a formulated joke, stayed his utterance as if he
were hopeful of some such event in time. He stood large in bulk as well as
height, and drew his breath in slow, audible respirations.
The first people of the community tacitly recognized him as the first man
in it, though none would have compared him in education with his nearest
friend, Richard Enraghty, who had been the schoolmaster and was now the
foremost of the United Brethren. He led their services in the Temple, and
sometimes preached for them when it came their turn to occupy the house
which they shared with the other sects. Hingston was a Methodist, but
perhaps because their sects were so akin in doctrine and polity their
difference made no division between the friends: Enraghty little and
fierce and restless, Hingston large and kind and calm. What they joined in
saying prevailed in questions of public interest; those who yielded to
their wisdom liked to believe that Enraghty's opinion ruled with Hingston.
Matthew Braile alone had the courage to disable their judgment which he
liked to say was no more infallible than so much Scripture, but the hardy
infidel, who knew so much law and was inexpugnable in his office, owned
that he could not make head against their gospel. He could darken their
counsel with citations from “Common Sense” and “The Age of Reason,” but
the piety of the community remained safe from his mockery.
The large charity of Hingston covered the multitude of the Squire's sins;
he would have argued that he had not been understood perhaps in the worst
things he said; but the fiercer godliness of Enraghty was proof against
the talk of a man whose conversation was an exhalation from the Pit. He
had bitterly opposed Matthew Braile's successive elections; he had made
the pulpit of the Temple an engine of political warfare and had launched
its terrors against the invulnerable heathen. He was like Hingston in
looking for a sign; in that day of remoteness from any greater world the
people of the backwoods longed to feel themselves near the greatest world
of all, and well within the radius of its mysteries. They talked mostly of
these when they met together, and in the solitude of their fields they
dwelt upon them; on their week days and work days they turned over the
threats and promises of the Sabbath and expected a light or a voice from
on high which should burst their darkness and silence.
To most of them there was nothing sacrilegious in the pretensions which
could be read into the closely scriptured discourse of Dylks when he
preached the second time in the Temple. The affability which he used in
descending from the pulpit among them, and shaking hands and hailing them
Brother and Sister, and personally bidding each come to the mercy seat,
convinced them of his authority; no common man would so fearlessly trust
his dignity among those who had little of their own. They thronged upon
him gladly, and the women, old and young alike, trembled before him with a
strange joy.
“Where is your father, Sister Gillespie?” he demanded of the girl, who
wavered in his strong voice like a plant in the wind.
“I don't know--he's at home,” she said.
“See that he comes, another time. I send him my peace, and tell him that
it will not return to me. Say that I said he needs me.”
He went out between Enraghty and Hingston, and as they walked away, he
sank his voice back in words of Scripture; farther away he began his hymn:
“Plunged in a gulf of dark despair,
We wretched sinners lay”--
and ended with his shout of “Salvation!”