The fragrance of perfected harvests pervaded Foxden. The air was full of
those sweet remembrances of summer which are better than her radiant
presence. The sky overhead was flooded with rich autumnal sunshine. Far
to the north lay glimmering a heavy bank of clouds. There might be rain
before night.
I entered the familiar parsonage and inquired for its occupant. He had
walked to the end of the garden with Miss Hurribattle, who had been with
him for some hours. I was at liberty to await his return in a depressing
theological lumber-room, called the study. The First Church had
liberally supplied its former ministers with the current literature of
their craft. Current literature! are not the words a mockery? could they
ever have applied to those printed petrifactions? One would sooner look
for vitality among the frozen denizens of the Morgue on St. Bernard! Yet
I doubt if these stately authors, wrapped in the cerements of their
prosiness, may reasonably reproach a forgetful world. They ministered to
the wants of _their_ present, and by so doing were privileged to fashion
a future which they might not enter and possess. Complain indeed! Why,
their progeny had a good ten, twenty, or fifty years' life of it, as the
case might be,--and here about us are men of greater enterprise and
grasp doomed to work off paragraphs that perish on the day of printing.
Well, no earnest soul can fail to modify the character of his age, and
thus of all ages. So, if our generation demands ministry in newspapers
instead of folios, a man may still win an honest immortality without the
biography and the bother of it.
I looked up from the books to see the clergyman part with Miss
Hurribattle at the gate, and then turn his steps towards the house.
There was something like embarrassment as we exchanged greetings, yet
there was hardly time to mark this before it had passed.
"Ah, Heaven!" exclaimed Clifton, passionately, "how I envy that woman's
faith in the omnipotence of a trifle! Suppose you or I can attain a
judicial largeness of view, is it any compensation for that intense glow
of the sympathies as they crowd into one specious channel? Why this
man's yearning after intellectual satisfaction, when we only want a
little fragment of truth to hang our sentiments upon?"
There was bitterness in the tone in which Clifton spoke. It hinted of
the living death of a proud, disappointed man, who has renounced his
youth of high motives and warm ideas, who has learned to contemn his
boyish ambition to do some great thing for the world. Truly it is better
to consume in the flame of a fierce sectarianism than to permit the
spirit of youth to die when the gray hairs come.
"Nay, Sir," said I, "it is for you to be heartily thankful for this
exuberant enthusiasm which has come to town. The complaint of the day
is, that the doctrines of Christianity have either dissolved into
abstractions or hardened into formalisms; and here you have a crop of
fresh insights to direct aright, and to keep from degenerating into
fanatical clamor."
"But how satisfy or control these crazy people who begin by ignoring the
creeping pace of Time? Why, here is Miss Hurribattle, who has been these
two hours beating into me, as with logical sledge-hammers, that it is my
duty to denounce Deacon Greenlaw from the pulpit. The argument, to her
mind, is overwhelming, as thus: Intoxicating fluids cause the breaking
of all the commandments; cider, if one drinks enough of it, is
intoxicating; Deacon Greenlaw presses apples, and sells the juice; he
therefore upholds and encourages the aforesaid commandment-breaking;--it
is the business of the pulpit to denounce sinners persisting in their
sin, therefore, etc., etc.,--you perceive the conclusion. In short, if I
do not instantly take the ruts of their narrow logic, and go about
pounding into some and propounding unto others their pet scheme of
regeneration,--why, I am a wolf in the sheep-fold, the Antichrist of
prophecy, and I know not what other accursed thing. And here is truly
the alternative,--to stagnate in a lifeless church, or to join these
ravers in their breakneck leap at the Millennium."
"There is a noble element in this one-sided pertinacity," I suggested,
"and a wise man might humor and use it for the best ends. Instead of
attempting to pull these hopeful people back into the church, cannot you
urge the church forward to comprehend their position? This
impulse,--fanatical as some of its manifestations doubtless are,--might
it not be constrained, or at least directed?"
"Never by me!" exclaimed Clifton, haughtily. "I should have to commit
myself to all the wild Saturnalia of their moralities before it would be
possible to acquire any power over them."
"But surely you might go as far as any one in the advocacy of
Temperance."
"Temperance! Why, you forget that I must denounce Temperance as the
deadliest of sins, and proclaim Abstinence to be the only virtue. There
is a grand State Convention of Progressive Gladiators at present in
session in Foxden; all the neighboring towns have sent delegates. Well,
it was only yesterday afternoon that Stellato, in behalf of one of the
committees, denounced the clergy of New England as gross flesh-eaters
who had made themselves incapable of perceiving any spiritual truth. And
I happen to know that Mrs. Romulus so successfully manipulated Chepunic,
not a hundred miles up the river, that before leaving that town she
publicly delivered her lecture entitled, 'Marriage a Barbarism,' and
professed to have discovered something far higher and holier than the
chain of wedlock."
"I am sure that Miss Patience Hurribattle is ignorant of any such
tendency in these new doctrines," I exclaimed, indignantly.
"Doubtless she is," assented Clifton. "There is a hopeful,
simple-hearted gleam in her eye, a fine simplicity in her speech, which
betokens enthusiasm of a purely religious type. But she is banded with
those who would use religion only as a fiery stimulant to the intellect,
never as a balm to the heart."
A crunching upon the gravel-walk. A man and a woman were hurrying up to
the parsonage. The woman short, sharp, lean; the man unctious and
foxy,--yet also representing a chronic state of gelatinous bewilderment.
The Great Socialists,--I knew them at once.
"Triumph! triumph!" cried Mr. Stellato, bursting into the study. "Deacon
Greenlaw has been converted at last! He will make a holocaust of his
cider-mill!"
"He will signalize his submission to the Gladiators by a great Act of
Faith!" exclaimed Mrs. Romulus. "His cider-mill will be publicly burned
this afternoon at five o'clock. All the delegate Gladiators will march
in procession to the ground. Invitations have been sent to the Order of
Frugivorous Brothers, the Infants' Anti-Tobacco League,"--
"Two drops of the oil of tobacco will kill a tomcat of the largest
proportions," murmured Mr. Stellato, in choral parenthesis.
--"the Principal and Patients of the Lilac-Hill Water-Cure, the Children
of the Public Schools, the Millennial Choir, and Progressive Citizens
generally," said Mrs. Romulus, finishing her sentence.
"It is the afternoon of Mrs. Widesworth's semiannual supper to the
singing-school," hissed Mr. Stellato, maliciously. "The Deacon's
cider-mill stands on the hill just before Mrs. Widesworth's house: the
procession may be expected to pass before her windows about four
o'clock; it will then make the circuit of the town, and reach the top of
the hill a little before five, when the exercises will commence."
Some petulant reply seemed ready to spring from the lips of the
clergyman, but he checked it, and said,--
"You will have more water than fire: those clouds drifting up over the
river mean rain."
"Only wine-bibbers and flesh-eaters are affected by the weather!"
responded Stellato, with great contempt. "Sunshine and storm are alike
wholesome to the purified seekers for truth!"
"But there is no time to lose," cried Mrs. Romulus. "We have come to ask
you, as pastor of the first church in this place, to make the prayer
before the torch is applied. You will doubtless decline; but we shall
then be able to assure the people that the Gladiators are rejected by an
apostate church, which has been cordially invited to become their
fellow-worker."
"You had really better think of it," urged Stellato, in a seductive
whisper. "The fact is, there is a great excitement, and we are getting
on famously. We are bound to carry the county at the next election, and
in a year or two we shall sweep the State. We have already enrolled some
of the best members of your parish, and you see the Deacon is added to
the list. Influential men who join us now will be well provided for when
we come into power. We want funds to carry on the cause. Think how much
you might do with such men as Prowley and Dastick! Ah, those abominable
old sinners, it would be a charity to get something out of them to
repair a little of the mischief they have done in the world."
I protested at the way in which these gentlemen were mentioned: they
were friends of mine, and highly esteemed citizens.
"Sir, they are _Moderate Drinkers_," said Mrs. Romulus, with an emphasis
which claimed the settlement of the whole question. "The Gladiators are
full of pity for the poor lost inebriate. They propose to convert their
bar-keeping brothers by a course of moral suasion. But they will ever
proscribe and defy those relentless Moderate Drinkers who admit the
wine-cup into their families, and--and--why, Sir, did you ever see the
stomach of a Moderate Drinker?"