WORKING "BY THE DAY."
Something is written elsewhere of the graveyard luncheons they took in
the Sunday noonings. Those were the times when the minister worked by
the day. The Sunday school in the morning, for the lambs led off the
flock. Then a hymn on both sides of the threshold of prayer, and a
little carpet of Scripture laid down before it. The preacher would read
the hymn, and say, "Sing five verses;" and if he did not happen to put
up the bars in this way across the narrow lane of praise, the choir
were bound to sing it through, if it was as long as "The Ancient
Mariner." Then the sermon, wherein there was a world of scoring and
hewing, and showers of chips that hit people here and there, and the
work was laid out generally. Then another hymn, the prayer and the
benediction. This took till high noon. Then afternoon, wherein the
morning's frame was put together, mortise and tenon each adjusted in
its own place, raised, roofed and sided, and a doctrine or so put into
it to keep house.
The afternoon was the forenoon over again, except that the grandest of
all mere human breaths of praise, the Doxology, was sung, and "the
disciples went out." The congregation always stood when the clergyman
called upon the name of the Lord; and sometimes he called a long time,
and occasionally a feeble body, and now and then a lazy one, went down
like a forest before a mighty wind! Is there any becoming posture in
public prayer between kneeling and standing? Is it not either the one
extreme or the other? To see a congregation with their heads every way,
like a field of barley after a hail-storm, does not inspire a sentiment
of reverence; but a people rising to their feet as one man is an
impressive act of homage. Then the Bible class was chinked in somewhere
between songs and sermons, and the conference-meeting came in the
evening, and held till nine o'clock. For a day of rest, the
old-fashioned Sunday was about as busy as a meadow full of hands with
the hay down and a storm coming!
Once in four weeks was covenant-meeting. It occurred on Saturday
afternoons, began at one, and lasted till four or five. The little boys
of good people in the writer's childhood had to go to covenant-meeting.
The writer's parents were good people, and _he_ went. The reader
is requested to remember that Saturday afternoon was the old-time
holiday--the only day in the week when the small animal, man, could
kick up its heels with the halter off. There is no recollection more
vivid and more painful than of those tremendous Saturday afternoons. I
had heard of Joshua, and I couldn't persuade myself that he was dead,
though I wickedly hoped he was, for somebody must have commanded the
sun "to stand still," and it obeyed.
The laugh of the children of the perverse generation came faintly and
sweetly from the neighboring orchard. The rays of the sun streamed
aslant through the still air of the church like the visible ladder of
glory, but not to the restless eyes that watched, but only the token of
the expended day, and no other to be had till the last of next week. It
was the later covenant the church members were renewing, but the old
covenant made by the Lord with Noah would have been far preferable.
There was something beautiful to look at about that--the seal of the
covenant--the Bow of Seven. As it seems, now, there was a blunder
somewhere.
There was nothing upon wheels in that church. The shepherd stayed by
his flock till his hair silvered, and his deacons were as gray as he.
No clergyman was on wheels but the Methodist. Had the gauge been right,
and had there been railroads, it would have been convenient to have
casters attached to the boots of the clergymen of that faith and order,
for so they could be trundled away at will like pieces of heavy
furniture!
There was a time when people put on their slippers, took a night-lamp,
bade each other good night, and went up stairs to bed. Those people now
go to bed by railway. They think nothing of fifty miles between
counting-room and bedroom. They die out of the city every evening, and
are born into it with newness of life every morning. It is a good
thing. They live more, and they live longer, if the engine behaves
itself; but when it gets a notion to pass a sister engine on a single
track, or to try the bare ground, like a horse with his shoes off, that
kicks up its heels in the pasture, or to climb aboard the train and be
a passenger itself, perhaps the bedroom may be a few miles too far
away, and the old geography be best.
There was a time when we kept our dead about us; in sight of the church
windows where folks went in the Sunday noons to eat their luncheon, and
leaned against gray slabs and read the dim-lettered records of the
hamlet's forefathers, and talked about the sermon and the--crops. They
had observed that things kept growing on Sundays, and they mentioned
it! If not in sight of the church windows, then just in the edge of the
village, a pleasant stroll after tea, where old people walked and
looked grave, and young people sat and talked low, not so much about
the mute Miltons or the village Hampdens, as an article, or so they
fancied, situated somewhere under the left half of their jackets and
bodices. Now, from "sanitary" considerations--I think that is the
word--they have located the cemetery so far away that you must buy a
ticket to reach it. When first they began to hurry the dead to the
grave at the rate of thirty miles an hour, it _did_ give the
old-time sense of the proprieties a little wrench, but it was not an
outright fracture of anything, and so the proprieties were long ago
convalescent.