LAICUS;
OR, THE EXPERIENCES OF A LAYMAN IN A COUNTRY PARISH.
BY LYMAN ABBOTT.
NEW YORK:
1872.
CONTENTS.
I. HOW I HAPPENED TO GO TO WHEATHEDGE
II. MORE DIPLOMACY
III. WE JOIN THE CHURCH
IV. THE REAL PRESENCE
V. OUR CHURCH FINANCES
VI. AM I A DRONE
VII. THE FIELD IS THE WORLD
VIII. MR. GEAR
IX. I GET MY FIRST BIBLE SCHOLAR
X. THE DEACON'S SECOND SERVICE
XI. OUR PASTOR RESIGNS
XII. THE COMMITTEE ON SUPPLY HOLD AN INFORMAL MEETING
XIII. MAURICE MAPLESON DECLINES TO SUBMIT TO A COMPETITIVE
EXAMINATION
XIV. THE SUPPLY COMMITTEE HOLD THEIR FIRST FORMAL MEETING
XV. OUR CHRISTMAS AT WHEATHEDGE
XVI. MR. GEAR AGAIN
XVII. WANTED--A PASTOR
XVIII. OUR PRAYER-MEETING
XIX. WE ARE JILTED
XX. WE PROPOSE
XXI. MINISTERIAL SALARIES
XXII. ECCLESIASTICAL FINANCIERING
XXIII. OUR DONATION PARTY--BY JANE LAICUS
XXIV. MAURICE MAPLESON
XXV. OUR CHURCH-GARDEN
XXVI. OUR TEMPERANCE PRAYER-MEETING
XXVII. FATHER HYATT'S STORY
XXVIII. OUR VILLAGE LIBRARY
XXIX. MAURICE MAPLESON TRIES AN EXPERIMENT
XXX. MR. HARDCAP'S FAMILY PRAYERS
XXXI. IN DARKNESS
XXXII. GOD SAID "LET THERE BE LIGHT"
XXXIII. A RETROSPECT
PREFACE.
This book was not made; it has grown.
When three years ago I left the pulpit to engage in literary work
and took my seat among the laity in the pews, I found that many
ecclesiastical and religious subjects presented a different aspect
from that which they had presented when I saw them from the pulpit.
I commenced in the CHRISTIAN UNION, in a series of "Letters from a
Layman," to discuss from my new point of view some questions which
are generally discussed from the clerical point of view alone. The
letters were kindly received by the public. To some of the
characters introduced I became personally attached. And the series
of letters, commenced with the expectation that they might last
through six or eight weeks, extended over a period of more than a
year and a half--might perhaps have extended to the present it other
duties had not usurped my time and thoughts.
This was the beginning.
But after a time thoughts and characters which presented themselves
in isolated forms, and so were photographed for the columns of the
newspaper, began to gather in groups. The single threads that had
been spun for the weekly issue, wove themselves together in my
imagination into the pattern of a simple story, true as to every
substantial fact, yet fictitious in all its dress and form. And so
out of Letters of Layman grew, I myself hardly know how, this simple
story of a layman's life in a country parish.
I cannot dismiss this book from my table without adding that I am
conscious that the deepest problem it discusses is but barely
touched upon. This has obtruded itself upon the pattern in the
weaving. It was intended for a single thread; but it has given color
and character to all the rest. How shall Christian faith meet the
current rationalism of the day? Not by argument; this is the thought
I hope may be taught, or at least suggested, by the story of Mr.
Gear's experience,--and it is a true not a fictitious story, except
as all here is fictitious, i.e. in the external dress in which it is
clothed. The very essence of rationalism is that it assumes that the
reason is the highest faculty in man and the lord of all the rest.
Grant this, as too often our controversial theology does grant it,
and the battle is yielded before it is begun. Whether that
rationalism leads to orthodox or heterodox conclusions, whether it
issues in a Westminster Assembly's Confession of faith or a
Positivist Primer is a matter of secondary importance. Religion is
not a conclusion of the reason. The reason is not the lord of the
spiritual domain. There is a world which it never sees and with
which it is wholly incompetent to deal. And Christian faith wins its
victories only when by its own--heart life it gives some glimpse of
this hidden world and sends the rationalist, Columbus-like, on an
unknown sea to search for this unknown continent.
I am not sure whether this preface had not better have remained
unwritten; whether the parable had not better be left without an
interpretation. But it is written and it shall stand. And so this
simple story goes from my hands, I trust to do some little good, by
hinting to clerical readers how some problems concerning Christian
work appear to a layman's mind, and by quickening lay readers to
share more generously in their pastors' labors and to understand
more sympathetically their pastor's trials.
LYMAN ABBOTT.
The Knoll, Cornwall on the Hudson, N. Y.
LAICUS.
CHAPTER I.
How I happened to go to Wheathedge.
ABOUT sixty miles north of New York city,--not as the crow flies, for
of the course of that bird I have no knowledge or information
sufficient to form a belief, but as the Mary Powell ploughs her way
up the tortuous channel of the Hudson river,--lies the little village
of Wheathedge. A more beautiful site even this most beautiful of
rivers does not possess. As I sit now in my library, I raise my eyes
from my writing and look east to see the morning sun just rising in
the gap and pouring a long golden flood of light upon the awaking
village below and about me, and gilding the spires of the not far
distant city of Newtown, and making even its smoke ethereal, as
though throngs of angels hung over the city unrecognized by its too
busy inhabitants. Before me the majestic river broadens out into a
bay where now the ice-boats play back and forth, and day after day
is repeated the merry dance of many skaters--about the only kind of
dance I thoroughly believe in. If I stand on the porch upon which
one of my library windows opens, and look to the east, I see the
mountain clad with its primeval forest, crowding down to the water's
edge. It looks as though one might naturally expect to come upon a
camp of Indian wigwams there. Two years ago a wild-cat was shot in
those same woods and stuffed by the hunters, and it still stands in
the ante-room of the public school, the first, and last, and only
contribution to an incipient museum of natural history which the
sole scientific enthusiast of Wheathedge has founded--in imagination.
Last year Harry stumbled on a whole nest of rattlesnakes, to his and
their infinite alarm--and to ours too when afterwards he told us the
story of his adventure. If I turn and look to the other side of the
river, I see a broad and laughing valley,--grim in the beautiful
death of winter now however,--through which the Newtown railroad,
like the Star of Empire, westward takes its way. For the village of
Wheathedge, scattered along the mountain side, looks down from its
elevated situation on a wide expanse of country. Like Jerusalem of
old,--only, if I can judge anything from the accounts of Palestinian
travelers, a good deal more so,--it is beautiful for situation, and
deserves to be the joy of the whole earth.
A village I have called it. It certainly is neither town nor city.
There is a little centre where there is a livery stable, and a
country store with the Post Office attached, and a blacksmith shop,
and two churches, a Methodist and a Presbyterian, with the promise
of a Baptist church in a lecture-room as yet unfinished. This is the
old centre; there is another down under the hill where there is a
dock, and a railroad station, and a great hotel with a big bar and
generally a knot of loungers who evidently do not believe in the
water-cure. And between the two there is a constant battle as to
which shall be the town. For the rest, there is a road wandering
in an aimless way along the hill-side, like a child at play who is
going nowhere, and all along this road are scattered every variety
of dwelling, big and little, sombre and gay, humble and pretentious,
which the mind of man ever conceived of,--and some of which I
devoutly trust the mind of man will never again conceive. There are
solid substantial Dutch farm-houses, built of unhewn stone, that
look as though they were outgrowths of the mountain, which nothing
short of an earthquake could disturb; and there are fragile little
boxes that look as though they would be swept away, to be seen no
more forever, by the first winter's blast that comes tearing up the
gap as though the bag of Eolus had just been opened at West Point
and the imprisoned winds were off with a whoop for a lark. There are
houses in sombre grays with trimmings of the same; and there are
houses in every variety of color, including one that is of a light
pea-green, with pink trimmings and blue blinds. There are old and
venerable houses, that look as though they might have come over with
Peter Stuyvesant and been living at Wheathedge ever since; and there
are spruce little sprigs of houses that look as though they had just
come up from New York to spend a holiday, and did not rightly know
what to do with themselves in the country. There are staid and
respectable mansions that never move from the even tenor of their
ways; and there are houses that change their fashions every season,
putting on a new coat of paint every spring; and there is one that
dresses itself out in summer with so many flags and streamers that
one might imagine Fourth of July lived there.
All nations and all eras appear also to be gathered here. There are
Swiss cottages with overhanging chambers, and Italian villas with
flat roofs, and Gothic structures with incipient spires that look as
though they had stopped in their childhood and never got their
growth, and Grecian temples with rows of wooden imitations of marble
pillars of Doric architecture, and one house in which all nations
and eras combine--a Grecian porch, a Gothic roof, an Italian L, and a
half finished tower of the Elizabethan era, capped with a Moorish
dome, the whole approached through the stiffest of all stiff avenues
of evergreens, trimmed in the latest French fashion. That is Mr.
Wheaton's residence, the millionaire of Wheathedge. I wish I could
say he was as Catholic as his dwelling house.
I never fancied the country. Its numerous attractions were no
attractions to me. I cannot harness a horse. I am afraid of a cow. I
have no fondness for chickens--unless they are tender and
well-cooked. Like the man in parable, I cannot dig. I abhor a hoe. I
am fond of flowers but not of dirt, and had rather buy them than
cultivate them. Of all ambition to get the earliest crop of green
peas and half ripe strawberries I am innocent. I like to walk in my
neighbor's garden better than to work in my own. I do not drink
milk, and I do drink coffee; and I had rather run my risk with the
average of city milk than with the average of country coffee. Fresh
air is very desirable; but the air on the bleak hills of the Hudson
in March is at times a trifle too fresh. The pure snow as it lies on
field, and fence, and tree, is beautiful, I confess. But when one
goes out to walk, it is convenient to have the sidewalks shoveled.
At least that is what I used to think five years ago. And if my wife
had endeavored to argue me out of my convictions, she would only
have strengthened them. But my wife:--
Stop a minute. I may as well say here that this book is written in
confidence. It is personal. It deals with the interior history of a
very respectable church and some most respectable families. It
contains a great deal that is not proper to be communicated to the
public. The reader will please bear this in mind. Whatever I say,
particularly what I am going to say now, is confidential. Don't
mention it.
My wife is a diplomate. If ever I am president of the United
States--which may Heaven forbid,--she shall be secretary of State. She
never argues; but she always carries her point.
She always lets me have my own way without hinting an objection. But
it always ends in her having her own. She would have made no
objection to letting Mason and Slidell go--not the least in the
world. But she would have somehow induced England to entreat us to
take them back--I am sure of it. She would not have dismissed
Catacazy--not she. But if she did not like Catacazy, Gortschakoff
should have recalled him, and never known why he did it.
"John," said my wife, "where shall we spend the summer?"
It was six years ago this spring. We were sitting in the library in
our city house, Harry was a baby; and baby was not. I laid down the
Evening Post, and looked up with an incipient groan.
"The usual way I suppose," said I. "You'll go home with the baby,
and I--I shall camp out in New York."
"Home" is Jennie's home in Michigan, where she had spent two of the
three summers of our married life, while I existed in single misery
in my empty house in 38th street. Oh, the desolateness of those
summer experiences. Oh, the unutterable loneliness of a house
without the smile of the dear wife, and the laugh and prattle of the
baby boy. I even missed his cry at night.
"It's a long, long journey," said Jennie, "and a long, long way off;
and I did resolve last summer I never would put a thousand miles
again between me and my true home, John. For that is not my home--you
are my home."
And a soft hand stole gently up and toyed with my hair.
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, saith the preacher. To which I
add, especially husbands. No man is proof against the flatteries of
love. At least I am not, and I am glad of it.
"You can't stay here, Jennie," said I.
"I am afraid not," said she. "It is Harry's second summer, and I
would not dare."
"The sea shore?" said I, interrogatively.
"Not one of those great fashionable hotels, John. It would be worse
for Harry than the city. And then think of the cost."
"True," said I reflectively. "I wish we could find a quiet place,
not too far from the city so that I could come in and out during
term time, and stay out altogether during the summer vacation."
"There must be some such, many such," said Jennie.
"But to look for them," said I, "would be, to use an entirely new
simile, like looking for a needle in a haystack. There must be some
honest lawyers at the New York bar, and some impartial judges on the
New York bench, but I should not like to be set to find them."
I had been beaten in an important case that afternoon and was out
with my profession.
"Suppose you let me try," said Jennie--"that is to find the quiet
summer retreat, not the honest lawyer."
"By all means, my dear," said I. "And I have great confidence that
if you are patient and assiduous, you will find a place in time for
Harry to settle down in comfortably when he gets ready to be
married."
Jennie laughed a quiet little laugh at my incredulity, and sat
straightway down to write half a dozen letters of inquiry to as many
different friends in the environs of New York. I resumed the Evening
Post. As to anything coming of her plans I no more dreamt of it than
your grandfather, reader, dreamt of the Atlantic cable.
But though I had been married three years I did not know Jennie then
as well as I know her now. I have since learned that she has a habit
of accomplishing what she undertakes. But this again is strictly
confidential.
That June saw us snugly ensconced at Mr. Lines'. Glen-Ridge is the
euphonious title he has given to his pretty but unpretending place.
Jennie had written among others to Sophie Wheaton, n‚e Sophie
Nichols, an old school-fellow, and Sophie had sent down an
invitation to her to come and spend a week and look for herself, and
she had done so; save that two days had sufficed instead of a week.
Glen-Ridge had taken her fancy, Mr. Lines had met her housewifely
idea of a good house-keeper, and she had selected the rooms and
agreed on terms, and left nothing for me to do except to ratify the
bargain by a letter, which I did the day after her return. And so in
the early summer of 1866 the diplomate had carried her first point,
and committed me to two months' probation in the country; and two
very delightful months they were.