She sank back upon the bench, and I wondered what William would do. I never was prepared for the audacity of his faith. But that was one kind of dare he never took.

"Sister Carleton," he replied, "I feel that your prayer will be answered. I've got the faith to believe your son will come here tonight and be saved from his sins."

I wished that he had not been so definite. I felt that it would have been wiser to give some general expression of hope. I feared the effects upon the rest of the congregation and upon William, when we returned for the night service and James Carleton should not be there even, and I was sure he would not be. I reckon first and last I must have halved the strength of William's faith by my lack of faith.

The truth is so bold, so absurd from the present worldly point of view that I almost hesitate to write it here. James Carleton was present at the evening service. He was the first man to reach the altar when the invitation to penitents was given. He was soundly converted, and lived a changed life from that hour.

The next night Sister Carleton was not in her accustomed place for the first time in nearly forty years. A month later she passed away, having already received the joy of her reward in the salvation of her children.

I have noticed that rich people do not have this kind of faith in prayer. They want, as a rule, only those things that can be bought with money, and they buy them. I have never seen a rich father nearly so anxious for the salvation of his children as he was for their success in the world. And the same thing has been my observation in regard to rich mothers. Sometimes they pray for their sons and daughters, but they do not often mean what they pray, and God knows it, for he never horrifies one of them by granting their prayer.

Still, there is a kind of sacrilegious confidence in prayer that always offended some delicacy in me, and William felt it too, only he never learned how to condemn it. His sense of reverence was not sufficiently discriminating. And there was an occasion where I had to rid him and his congregation of this sublimated form of spiritual indecency.

As I have said, we were sent now to small stations, village churches, or mission churches in the factory edges of the big cities. But William's years, the hardships and anxieties, both earthly and unearthly, to which he had been exposed began to tell on his strength. And the year we were at Springdale as the summer came on he felt unequal to conducting the usual six weeks' protracted meeting without help. And while six weeks may seem a long time to hold such services, it is really a very short time for people to get revived and heaven-minded in when all the rest of the year they have been otherwise minded. The wonder to me was that men who had driven hard bargains and hated some one or more neighbors for ten months; that women who had given themselves over to the littleness and lightness of a small fashionable life in a small town, or to gossip about those who did, could so quickly recover their moral and spiritual standards in a revival.

I remember that it was William's custom, as soon as there was the least interest manifested, to have a very searching service for his church members in which he called upon all those who were at enmity with one another to rectify whatever wrong they had committed and to be reconciled. Nearly always some stiff-necked steward had had a row with somebody else, apt as not a sinner. He would be expected to go out and find the man, whoever it was, and patch up the difficulty, and to report at the next service. I can see now the old spiritual hard-heads in William's congregations with whom, year in and year out, he had the greatest trouble. They always managed to "fall out with somebody" between revivals. But nothing in or out of the Kingdom of Heaven would make one of them admit he was in the wrong or induce him to go to the other person and attempt a reconciliation. The most you could get out of any one of them would be that if his enemy came to him and asked his pardon, he was willing to "forgive him!" If the said enemy was a good natured fellow, William usually managed to get him to make this concession, otherwise the old hard-head remained cold and aggrieved through out the revival, maybe casting a damper over the whole meeting: a figure in the Amen corner at which the young unregenerated sinners would point the finger of scorn and accusation when they were implored to repent and believe and behave themselves.

No one who has not been through it can understand how heartbreaking all this is to the preacher and how wearing on his human nerves. There have been times when I should have been almost willing to see William lose patience and expend about two pages of fierce Plutonian vocabulary on some old stumbling-block in the church. But he never did. And it will serve them right if the ten thousand prayers he made, asking God to soften their obdurate hearts, are registered against them somewhere in the debit column of the Book of Life.

Thus, I say, it came to pass that William was wearing out and no longer able to get through a protracted meeting alone. So at Springdale, he engaged Brother Dunn to come and help him.

Brother Dunn was what may be called a professional evangelist. We had never seen him, but he had a reputation for being "wonderfully successful" with sinners. And if sinners made a ripe harvest Springdale was as much in need of reapers as any place we had ever been. You might have inferred that the original forbidden fruit-tree flourished in the midst of it, the people were so given to frank, straightforward sinning of the most naively primitive character.

I never knew how William felt, but I was not favorably impressed with Brother Dunn when he arrived on the late evening train, a frisky, dapper young man, who looked in the face as if his light was turned too high. That night as he preceded us up the aisle of the church, which was crowded to hear him, he showed to my mind a sort of irreverent confidence in the grace of God.

The service that followed was indescribable in any religious language, or even in any secular language. Brother Dunn brought his own hymn-books with him and distributed them in the congregation with an activity and conversational freedom that made him acquainted at once. The hymns proved to be nursery rhymes of salvation set to what may be described as lightly spinning dicky-bird music. Anybody could sing them, and everybody did, and the more they sang the more cheerful they looked, but not repentant. The service was composed mostly of these songs interspersed now and then with wildly excruciating exhortations from Brother Dunn to repent and believe. He explained, with an occasional "ha! ha!" how easy it was to do, and there is no denying that the altar was filled with confused young people who knelt and hid their eyes and behaved with singular reverence under the circumstances.

The cheating began when Brother Dunn attempted to make them "claim the blessing." He induced half a dozen young girls and two or three youths to "stand up and testify" that their sins had been forgiven, simple young creatures who had no more sense of the nature of sin or the depth of genuine repentance than field larks.

Later he frisked home with us, praising God in little foolish words, and rejoicing over the success of the service. Shortly after he retired to his room we heard a great commotion punctuated with staccato shouts. William hurried to the door to inquire what the trouble was. He discovered Brother Dunn hopping about the room in his night-shirt, slapping his palms together in a religious frenzy. He declared that as he prayed by his bed a light had appeared beside him.

William tried to look cheerful and blessed, but there is one thing I can always say for him, he was an honest man in dealing with the most illusive and deceptive things men have ever dealt in, that is, spiritual values, and the more he observed Brother Dunn, the more his misgivings increased.

The next morning I met the evangelist in the hall.

"Hallelujah!" he exclaimed.

"What for?" I demanded coldly.

He gave some stammering reply. But that was the beginning of the end of his spiritual peace in our house. After that I consistently punctured his ecstasies, quoting some of the sternest Scriptures I could remember to confound him.

William remonstrated with me. He said Dunn said my lack of spirituality "depressed him."

"And, William, his lack of reverence incenses me. If you don't get rid of that cotton haloed evangelist everybody in this town will claim a 'blessing' without repenting or being converted," I replied.

Fortunately Dunn dismissed himself. He said that it was impossible to have a revival in such an atmosphere. He implied as plainly as he could that he was sorry for William, accepted the sum of ten dollars which had been promised him for his services and left.

I have never known what to think of such preachers. No one who ever knew one can doubt his sincerity. But they cultivate a kind of spiritual idiocy and frenzy that is more damaging to souls than any amount of hypocrisy.

I have always been thankful that the joy of William in the religious life was a stern and great thing, no more resembling this lightness, this flippancy than integrity resembles folly.



CHAPTER XIV

CURIOUS FACTS ABOUT THE NATURE OF A PRIEST

What we call history is a sorry part of literature, confined to a few great wars and movements in national life and to the important events in the lives of a few important people. The common man has never starred his role in it. Therefore, it has never been written according to the scientific method. It is simply the spray—the big splash—humanity throws up as it goes down in the sea forever. It is what most of us do and what we think perishes with us, leaving not a record behind of the little daily deeds and wingflappings of our spirits that really make us what we are. This is why we make so little progress. The history of the great majority is never compiled for reference. We are always bunched in a paragraph, while the rest of the chapter is given to his Excellency the President, or some other momentary figure of the times.

Nobody knows exactly how the planters of Thomas Jefferson's day lived. We must depend upon fiction to give a sort of romantic impression of it. And fifty years from now no one will know how the farmers and brickmasons, grocers and merchants, managed their affairs in our own times. We shall be obliged to accept the sensational accounts left by a few wild-eyed, virus-brained socialists.

I do not know that I ought to pretend to rescue the class to which William belonged from the same kind of oblivion. But by keeping memories of the little daily things in life a preacher's wife learns some curious facts about the nature of a priest—facts that should enable the reader to make profitable comparisons between those of the old and those of the new order, and to determine which is the real minister and which is not.

One thing I discovered was that you cannot domesticate a preacher like William on this earth in this life. A woman might get married to him and hang like a kissing millstone about his neck; she might sew on his buttons, bear children for him, teach him to eat rolled oats, surround him with every evidence, privilege and obligation of strong earthly ties and a home; but he will not live there in his spirit. He belongs neither to his wife, nor to his children, nor to the civilization of his times. He belongs to God, and not to a god tamed and diminished by modern thought, but to The God, the one who divided the light from darkness, who actually did create Adam and Eve and blow His breath into them, who accepted burnt offerings sometimes, and who caused flowers to bloom upon the same altars between times.

So William never really belonged in his own house with his own body, his own wife and his breakfast, though he often rested there and seemed to enjoy the latter. He was more at home in the Psalms. I will not say he went so far as Jehovah, but when he was in a Leviticus frame of mind very few of the minor prophets satisfied his cravings for the awful. The gentle springtime of his heart was when he took up with Saint John in the New Testament. He never professed the intimate fellow-feeling I have heard some conceited preachers express for Saint Paul. He was not a great man; he was just a good one and too much of a gentleman to thrust himself upon a big saint like Paul, even in his imagination.

And I do not know which has been the greatest influence in making me what I am: the sense of reverence I had for him and his high Bible company, or the sense of bereavement I had when, having fed him and warmed him, he was still "not at home" with me, but following some pillar of cloud in his thoughts toward his great God's far eternity. A woman is a very poor creature. I think she hankers more for just love than she does for Heaven. I don't know how she will get on in a place where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. It's bound to be hard on her if the Lord does not give her something more than a harp and a golden crown with which to fill the aching void she is sure to have somewhere under her breast feathers.

But no one can say that I did not stand by William through the entire widowhood of my marriage. I was the world compass of his life, always sitting in his amen corner with my attention fixed anxiously upon the spiritual pulse of the congregation, always giving him the most nourishing food our limited means afforded, always standing between him and sordid dickering with the butcher and candlestick maker, always making myself a Chinese wall to separate him on sermon-making days from the church public.

Many a time I have taken my hands out of the biscuit dough to meet a steward who was determined to see him about the increased foreign mission assessment, or it might be the Sunday-school superintendent come to discuss the May picnic. I could usually pacify the steward and put off the superintendent, but if it was a messenger from some remote neighborhood on the circuit come to say that Brother Beatem was dead and the family wanted Brother Thompson to conduct the funeral services next morning at the nearest Methodist church I would be obliged to give in, even if William was in the very heat of spiritual constructions. For a funeral is a thing that cannot be put off. The corpse will not endure it, nor the family, either, for that matter. They want the preacher to be on hand promptly with all the laurels of language to bestow upon their dead in the funeral wreath discourse.

And this brings me to mention a peculiarity of "surviving relatives" as a class. They demand that the pastor of the dead man or woman shall furnish him his titles to mansions in the sky, whether he deserves them or not. Even if Brother Beatem was a mean man who neglected his wife and children, cheated his neighbors, abused his horse and failed to support the church, he must have a funeral that praised him for a saint. And if the pastor failed to do this the surviving relatives whom the dead man had victimized every day he lived would be the first to resent it.

I never knew but one pastor who told the truth in a funeral sermon, and he had to be "moved" immediately by his presiding elder. The whole community regarded it as one of the most brutal outrages that had ever been perpetrated in their midst. As for William, there was something sublime in the way he permitted his mind to skip the facts and stir his imagination when he preached a funeral. The curious part of it was, he believed what he said, and generally by the time he had finished nearly everyone else believed it. There were occasions, of course, when he was disgracefully duped by the "surviving relatives." However, I pass over a thousand little epitaphs of memory and come to our last years in the itinerancy. And it is curious how life winds itself into a circle, like the trail a lost man makes in the desert. After a few years as pastor of village churches, William was sent back to the country circuits. He was failing some, and, of course, younger and more progressive men were needed in the villages—preachers who could keep up with the committee-meeting times in modern church life. And I am obliged to admit William was a poor church committeeman. Occasionally he would go off to see an old sick woman or some barren fig-tree man who was not even a member of the church, and forget all about an important committee meeting on the brotherhood of man. This would give offense to some of the people in the church, who, in turn, would complain that he was not sufficiently interested in spreading the gospel.

As I have said before, William was a good man, but he was neither brilliant nor enterprising, as we understand these terms nowadays. He never did get it into his head that salvation could be furnished a dying world through a thorough organization of it into committees that furnished not only the salvation, but also the goat districts which had to receive this salvation as fast as it was offered. It was as simple as commerce and as naive as a rich man's charity, but William couldn't see it. Somehow, he was secretly opposed to it. He was for catching every goat separately and feeding him on truth and tenderness till he turned into a lamb. It was no use to argue that this required too much time and would take an eternity to get the world ready for Heaven. He refused to think of immortal souls as if they were bunches of heathen cattle, or slum cattle, that must be got into the salvation market on the hoof as soon as possible.

As he grew older, more set in his ways, he became a trifle contrary about it, like a thorny old priest who has received private orders from his God to go on seeking his lost lambs one at a time. Once he insulted a man who came to him about the Laymen's Movement which is organized to convert the world to Christianity in this generation and probably before Christmas.

"We can do it if we have faith enough!" said he.

"No, you can't!" retorted William. "Not unless the heathens get faith enough to believe, and faith is a thing you cannot send out through the mails as if it was sample packages of patent medicine!"

Such talk as that sent him back to the circuits, where there were the same old fashions in sleeves and headgear for women, and where he could take his text from Jonah's gourd if he chose, without exciting the higher critical faculties of his congregation.

It was harder on us in some ways. I never could understand why the old preachers who have got rheumatism in their knees, and maybe lumbago besides, should be sent back to the exposure of all weathers on the circuits, while the young ones with plenty of oil in their joints fatten in the more comfortable charges. And I am not the one to say with resignation that it is "all right." Still, the good God evens things up in wonderful ways.

William got so stiff in his legs toward the last that he had to stand up to pray; but we had come back to the region of simplicities, where there were just three elements to consider and put together in his sermons—Man, his field and his God, and they were only separated by a little grass, a few stars and the creation light and darkness of days and nights. When a man gets as near home as that he does not mind the pains in his mere body. At least William never complained.

Looking back, I think he was at his best about the time he went back to the real circuit itinerancy. He had the glory of presence. Faith, I think, gave him a halo. You could not see it, but you could feel it, and in this connection I recall an illustration of the difference between such a halo and the "aura" we hear so much about these days from people who think they are interested in psychic phenomena, but who are really psychic epileptics.

We were on a circuit which included a summer resort, and the varieties of diseases among patients in a sanitarium are as nothing compared to the mental, moral, spiritual and physical disorders to be found among the class who frequent "springs." To this place came a "New Thoughter" who was always in a spiritual sweat about her "astral shape." She manifested a condescending interest in the Sunday services at our church, which finally led her to call on William one afternoon at the parsonage. She was a dingy little blonde, with a tight forehead and a thin nose. William was sitting alone in the peace of his spirit behind the morning-glory vines on the front porch. Providence had wisely removed me to the sewing-machine inside the adjoining room.

The sense of humor in me has never been converted, and there were occasions when it was best for me not to be too literally present when William was examining the spiritual condition of some puzzled soul. He had risen and provided her with a chair and sat down opposite, regarding her with a hospitable blue beam in his eyes. She had the fatal facility for innocuous expression common to her class. All the time I knew William was waiting like an experienced fisherman for a chance to swing his net on her side of the boat. The poor man did not dream that she was one of those unfortunate persons who has swapped her real soul for a Hindu vagary. But presently she let it out.

"Mr. Thompson," she continued, without a rhetorical pause to indicate the decimal points between her thoughts, "I was interested in what you said about immortality last Sunday. Now, I wonder if you know it is an actual fact that by breathing rhythmically thirty times, counting three while you inhale, three while you exhale and three while you hold your breath, you can actually get into touch at once with your astral shape?"

William fumbled in his pocket for his glasses, deliberately put them on and then regarded her over the steel rims. I could see the Jehovah crest of his spirit erect itself as he replied with divine dignity:

"Madam, I do not know what you mean by your astral shape, but I do not have to pant like a lizard to keep in touch with my soul!"

But she bore with him, showing far more calmness than he as she went on to describe the wonderful power of spirit she had developed. She had even gone so far, she said, as a matter of experiment, to "put her thought" upon the unborn child of a friend, and when the child came it was not like its own mother or father, but her exact image. Now, she declared, she was sure it was her own "thought" child. And what was more convincing still, she had at last attained to a "sky-blue aura"—she added this with an indescribable air of triumph. William tightened his spectacles on his nose, drew his face close and stared at her with the sort of scandalized sunsmile Moses must have worn the first time he caught sight of the golden calf.

"Madam," he exclaimed after a dreadful inquisitive silence, "I can see no signs of an aura, either blue or otherwise; but if you actually did try to steal another woman's child with your thoughts you have been guilty of an unimaginable meanness, and you should go down on your knees to Almighty God for forgiveness!"

But William was never at his best when he was brought into contrast morally or intellectually with the temporary illusions of modern times. They cast him "out of drawing" and gave him a look of the grotesque, as a great and solemn figure on a vaudeville stage suggests the comical. He belonged to a time when the scriptures of men's hearts had not suffered the moderation and sacrilege of the sense of humor. He had a mind illumined with the old Eden figures of speech, and loved to refer to the "thick bosses of Jehovah's buckler."

There were occasions, indeed, when I could not preserve a proper inner reverence for his favorite hymns, as, for example, when he would be standing during a revival season behind an altar heavily laden with "dying souls" who had come up for prayers. In order to interpret for them a proper frame of mind he would sometimes choose one of Watts' famous hymns. He would stand with his feet wide apart, his fingers interlaced, palms downward, eyes lifted in anguished supplication and sing in his great organ bass:

"Inspire a feeble worm to rush into Thy Kingdom, Lord, And take it as by storm!"

Still, if you do not dwell upon the vision of the suddenly valorous worm, the words express a higher form of courage than that denoted in Matthew Arnold's famous poem, "The Last Word;" and I have seen many a "worm" rise shouting from the altar rail under their inspired meaning. The sense of humor has, in my opinion, very little to do with poetry or salvation. It belongs entirely to the critical human faculties, and I have found it one of the greatest limitations in my own spiritual development. And as time went on I was more and more convinced that this was an evidence of a lower imaginative faculty in me rather than in him. He had less humor, but he had infinitely more of the grace that belongs to immortality. He had a spirit that withstood adversity, hardship, failure, with a sort of ancient dignity and that could face tragedy with Promethean fortitude. And I love best to think of him in relation to the bare and awful sorrows that show so nakedly in the lives of poor, simple folk. I can see him now in the dismal twilight of one winter evening, as he started on that strange mission to Mrs. Martin, looking like an old, weatherbeaten angel breasting a storm. The wide brim of his black hat flared up from his face in the wind, his long, gray beard was blown over the shoulders of his greatcoat. He had started without his muffler. I ran out to fetch it and, winding it about his neck, I saw the blue bloom of Heaven in his eyes, that always turned young when he was on his way to roll the stones away from the door of some sinner's heart.

"William," I cried, "it's going to be an awful night; don't go—she is not a member of your church."



"Nor of any other; but she is all the more in need of help," he replied, putting his foot in the stirrup to mount his horse.

Mrs. Martin was a vague little woman, superstitious about dreams, a widow, who lived with her two small children in a thickly-populated neighborhood about a stone quarry. The day before, the community had been shocked to learn from some one who happened in just in time to prevent the tragedy that Mrs. Martin had gone suddenly insane and had tried to murder both of her children. She must go to the asylum, of course; but pending the preliminary trial for lunacy she lay silent on her bed with staring, horrified eyes, surrounded by watchful neighbors. Suddenly toward night she had grown restless and had implored them to send for the Methodist preacher. To quiet her the messenger had come, and William made haste to go to her.

He found her sitting the very figure of desolation in the midst of her bed, with her face thinned and whitened to the little white hull of a prayer. The moment she was alone with him she poured forth such a tale of degradation as rarely passes the lips of a woman. Since a year after her husband's death she had been the mistress of the manager of the quarry. She had lived in the most atrocious debauchery for years; no one had suspected, and she had not suffered a qualm. But two nights since she had gone to the bed where her two little girls lay asleep, and suddenly it had come upon her that she was to be discovered, now very soon, not by strangers, but by her own children growing old enough to observe and understand. Moreover, that her degradation would become theirs. And then it came—the horror that had convinced her the only way out was to kill them and afterward herself. Now, what was to be done? She was not insane. She was just a sinner who felt obliged to be damned!

God had at least a dozen ways of inspiring William, and not all of them orthodox. Instead of harrowing this woman with a prayer he took on a competent executive air.

"You are to do nothing," he told her, "and be sure you do not confess your sin to anyone else. Leave everything to me. We will see about the forgiveness later; now you are to rest and not think till I get the way clear for your feet." He went out, told the attendants that Mrs. Martin was not insane, but had suffered a shock and would now be all right. They thought he had achieved a miracle when they had returned to the room and found her weeping like any other sane woman.

Before daylight he had escorted the manager of the quarry to the nearest railway station with instructions never to return, so emphatically given that he never did. He prayed earnestly for the unfortunate woman himself, but he forbade her to pray for herself until long afterward, when she had resumed existence upon the simple basis of being the innocent mother of her innocent children.

"If she begins to agonize in prayer," he explained to me, "she will go mad again. So soon as she recovers from the insanity of evil she may pray, but not now."



CHAPTER XV

SKELETONS IN WILLIAM'S DOCTRINAL CLOSET

I have often wondered what a writer of fiction would have made out of such a story. As a matter of fact, the woman is living to-day, highly respected, serenely proud of her two grown daughters; and I believe William simply covered up her sin so deep with his wisdom that she has forgotten it. His Methodist doctrinal closet has more than one skeleton like this in it.

"Repentance is not remorse," he used to argue upon rare occasions when I dragged them out. "Mrs. Martin could not make the proper distinction. God understood."

I have no doubt his conference would have fired him for fathering very curious heresies, if all his doings with sinners had been published. There was the apostate, for example, whom he tried to save at the expense of one of the doctrines of his church. Just as Baptists believe in "election" and Presbyterians in predestination, the Methodists believe in apostasy—that is, that God will forsake a man and never answer his prayers if the man waits too long before he begins to pray; and that if after he has been converted he leaves the way of righteousness there is always danger that God will abandon him in his sins.

A most desperate situation is that of the Methodist apostate, because there is so much elasticity about grace in our church, and it is so easy to fall from it that a modest man is, by the very delicacy and humility of his spirit, apt to fall under the delusion that God has had enough patience with him, that he has "sinned away his day of grace."

I recall the day William came home and burned seven of his best sermons on such texts as this: "The soul that sinneth it shall die." It was after he had read the burial service over the body of Philip Hale, who killed himself because he had "lost God and could not find Him." Hale had been a Methodist, brought up in that faith literally by parents who had had him baptized when he was an infant and who had kept the promise made then to bring him up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. They did, and he was converted at an early age before the tide of adolescence set in. It seems that he "sinned away his day of grace" during this dangerous period.

When William came on the circuit where he lived he was a sad, middle-aged man who spent much of his spare time looking for God and praying for the witness of His Spirit. His was the most tragic figure I ever saw in the house of God. He was a large, dark man with a blasted look on his somber face. For years it was said that he was the first to accept the invitation to sinners to the altar for prayers and the last to leave it, always with that lost look—never blessed, never forgiven. William stood before him powerless. He could cast no light in that darkness; it was literally the outer darkness where light cannot be created. Toward the end of a revival, during which he had wandered back and forth from the altar night after night like a dazed sleepwalker, he went out and shot himself.

The fate of this man was one of the tragedies in William's life. He must have had much the same feeling toward him that a surgeon feels toward a patient who dies on the operating table. If he had survived he would have lived. I never heard him preach after that about the "dead line" in the spiritual life.

One thing impressed me even more than it did William: he never was able to reach the chief sinners in his congregation. Some of them sat in such high places in the church—perhaps behind him in the pulpit. Compared with these the reprobates on the back benches were easily stirred and awakened to a sense of their lost condition. Sometimes one of these members would confess to feeling "cold" spiritually, but I do not now recall a single one who really confessed his sins or renounced them.

Suppose a steward owns a big flour mill and can afford to pay the preacher liberally, bear more than his share of the "assessments," and own an automobile besides, because he cheats every customer out of a few ounces of real flour by substituting "fancy flour." What shall he do—sacrifice the auto and the church "causes"? He never does, because at bottom he has a sneaking conviction that the auto in particular is worth more than his kind of a soul, and he is shockingly correct in his estimate of values. If there really are any apostates in this world they belong to this spiritually-refrigerated class to be found in every religious denomination.

But if he did not close in often with the chief sinners, William occasionally came upon a rare saint. I mean "rare" in the scientific, spiritual sense—that is, different, moving in time, but not of it—the unconscious prophet of a new order in the souls of mankind. And it was a grand sight to see him measure the sword of his spirit with one of these.

The last encounter he had of this kind, I remember, was on the Bowtown Circuit not long before he was superannuated, and it was with a woman. She was called Sal Prout. The omission of the last syllable of her given name implied social ostracism and personal contempt. And she deserved both, having been a notorious woman in her younger days. We heard of her first from Brother Rheubottom. He was the shriveled, grizzled local preacher who furnished a kind of gadfly gospel to the church at Bowtown when he was invited to fill the pulpit, which was no oftener than could be helped. He called to tell William about the "Prout woman" before we had had time to unpack our clothes and commentaries.

"She's been a terrible creature," he explained, wagging his hard old hickorynut head and clawing his beard with a kind of spiritual rapacity for devouring the worst of Sal's character.

"She's done more harm than a dozen wildcat stills. Then all at once, here about five years ago she turned good, 'lowed she'd heerd from God. It was blasphemous. Seems she hadn't went to church since she was a gal. I don't say she ain't behavin' herself and all that, but 'tain't orthodox for a person like that to jest set down before her do' in the grass and git religion without ever goin' nigh a church and makin' public confession of her sins—not that everybody don't know what she has been!

"If them kind of heresies spread, where will the church be? What's the use of havin' churches? We want you to go down there and 'tend to her, Brother Thompson. Some folks in this community have been worried ever since she done it.

"We ain't satisfied with her experience after the way she's carried on—talks as if she'd found God as easy as if she'd been an innocent child, when some of us that have lived honorable and decent all our lives had to mourn and repent and take on like a house afire before we could claim the blessin'."

"I'll look into Sister Prout's condition as soon as possible, Brother Rheubottom," said William, folding one long leg over the other and fidgeting in his chair, because he wanted to be back at his bookshelves, settling the relations of his commentaries for the coming year.

"She ain't even a sister," retorted our visitor, who had risen and was on his way to the door. "She's never j'ined the church. When somebody named it to her as a duty if she'd repented of her sins she jest laughed and said she wouldn't. Not bein' respectable enough to belong in with church folks she 'lowed she'd stay outside with the wicked where she belonged and not embarrass nobody by settin' by 'em in church. 'Lowed she reckoned she could find enough to do out there instead of 'h'isting herself up with respectable women in the foreign missionary society.' That's the way she talks, Brother Thompson, and there can't nobody stop her!"

Bowtown was an ugly little streaked mountain village that followed the windings of the country road for half a mile and then gave out. The last house was not a house at all, but an old box car. And this was the home of Sal Prout. But she denied that it was a box car, with a hundred fanciful deceptions. First, it was whitewashed within and without; second, it was covered with house vines; third, the dooryard smiled at you from the face of a thousand flowers, like a Heavenly catechism of color. But go as often as we would we never found Sal at home. She was busy with the wicked. She could do anything from pulling fodder to nursing a teething baby, and all you had to do to get her was to need her.

This was how we came to meet her at last. William's health was failing fast now, and he got down with sciatica that spring. He had been in bed a month; the people on the circuit began to show they were disappointed in not having an active man who could fill his appointments, and I was tired and discouraged with being up so much at night and with anxiety for fear William would have to give up his work.

A preacher in our church cannot get even the little it affords from the superannuate fund until he has been on the superannuate list a year; and if he gives up his work in the middle of the previous year that means he must go, say, eighteen months without resources. That is a long time when you have not been able to save anything, and when you are old and sick. So, I was sitting in the kitchen door of the parsonage one morning after William had had a particularly bad night, wondering what God was going to do about it, for I knew we could not expect help from any other source. The agnostics may say what they please, but if you get cornered between old age and starvation you will find out that there is a real sure-enough good God who numbers the remaining hairs of your head and counts the sparrows fall. William and I tried Him, and we know. There were terrible times toward the last, when we never could have made it if it had not been for just God.

And I reckon that morning was one of the times, for as I was sitting there wondering sadly what would happen next, an immense woman came around the corner of the house and stood before me on the doorstep. She was past fifty years of age, and had the appearance of a dismantled woman. Nothing of youth or loveliness remained. I have never seen a face so wrecked with wrinkles, so marred with frightful histories—yet there was a kind of fairness over all her ruins.

"I am Sal Prout," she said, and it was so deep and rich a voice that it was as if one of the bare brown hills of the earth had spoken to me.

"And I've come to git breakfast," she added, spreading peace over her dreadful face with an ineffable smile. An hour later she was in possession of William and me and the parsonage. She was clearing up the breakfast things when she said:

"You looked fagged; go and git some rest. I'll take care of him," nodding her head toward the door of William's room.

When I awakened in the middle of the afternoon he was sitting up against four hot-water bottles, letting her call him "Brother Billy." That sounds scandalous, but listening from where I lay on the sofa in the front room I could tell that they were having a duel of spirits, and that she was taking liberties with William's theology that must have made his guardian angel pale. He wore his red flannel nightshirt, had a quilt folded around his legs and one of Benson's Commentaries open upon his knees. His hair was bristling in fine style, and his long beard lay like a stole upon his breast. His hands were resting on the arms of his chair, and he was regarding Sal, who sat in the opposite corner openly dipping snuff, with a kind of fascinated disapproval.

"The kind of faith you have in God don't do Him jestice," she was saying. "It's sorter infernal—it's so mean and partial. Your God ain't nothing but a Paradise capitalist and aristocrat—the sort of one that fixes up a flower garden for Him and jest His saints to set in the middle of and sing and harp on their harps, while a right smart chance of the best folks sneak and shuffle around in the outer darkness forever because, like me, they had no chance to be good, and so went wrong before they knowed where they were going. Sometimes these last years since I had my vision of Him, I've wanted to tell you preachers that the little ornamental divinity that you shout about ain't nothing but a figger of speech took from the heathens and made over by heathen Christians."

"Stop!" said William, lifting one of his thin, white hands and waving it imperatively at her. "You must not speak irreverently. I know you don't mean it, but——"

"Jest answer me, this, sir—is your leg hurtin' any worse?"

"No," replied William, mollified.

"Not a mite?" she insisted.

"No, I am much easier of the pain."

"Well, then, I'm goin' to say this much more even if it strangles you: the word God stands for something in the hearts of men and women bigger'n a Paradise gardener with a taste for music!"

"You don't put it fair, Sister Prout," said William, aggrieved.

"I can't put it in as fine language as Saint John, if that's what you mean."

"What is the nature of God as you see Him?"

We are made very queer by the soul, not nearly so much alike as we are in other respects. I saw now the same light pass over Sal's face that I had often seen in William's, yet they could not agree about their one Heavenly Father.

"The God I trust is the One that makes flowers like them bloom for sech as me," she began, pointing through the window at a rose; "that lets His rain fall in my garden same as He does in your'n; that never takes His spite out on me for bein' what I was, but jest made it hard for me and waited patient for me. He's the kind of God, sir, that can change a heart like mine from all the evil there is, and make it so I can think good thoughts and be kind, and enjoy His hills and hear the birds sing again, same as I used to pay attention to 'em when I was a little gal."

She lowered her voice as if speaking of a mortal sorrow. "There were years and years, sir, when them little creatures were singin' all around me every day, but I couldn't hear 'em—my deeds were so evil. I don't reckon you know it—livin' the little you have—but sin affects you that way—takes away your hearin' for sweet sounds, your sight for what is lovely. But God, He jest kept on lettin' His birds sing for me, and the sun riz jest as fine above the hills behind my house. He didn't pick at me, nor put a sign on me same as folks did of my shame, as He could have done with a cloud or something over my house. You see, He'd fixed things from the foundations of the world so as they'd work out good and not evil for us every one, beca'se He knowed we'd all git tired and come home some time, the same as I've come. I don't know whether you ever found it out or not, sir, but sinners git awful tired of sinnin'. God knows that. He knows they just can't keep it up forever!"

The next winter Sal Prout died of smallpox, after nursing a community of sawmill hands farther up in the mountains who had been stricken with the disease, and many of whom must have died but for her care.

William never recovered from that attack of rheumatism. His legs got well, but he did not. He was different afterward, as if he had fallen into a trance. He seemed always to look and speak across a space of which he was not conscious. He filled his appointments after a fashion during the remainder of the year at the Bowtown district, but he grew increasingly forgetful of people and all earthly considerations. Sometimes he fell to dreaming in the middle of his sermon, looking over the heads of his congregation as if he was expecting Noah's dove to bring him a token or Michael to blow his trumpet. Then again he would make his prayer longer than his sermon. The people did not like it, and the Presiding Elder called for his superannuation at the conference that fall, on the grounds that Brother Thompson showed signs of "failing powers."

Maybe he did, but it was only his mortal faculties that were failing. To the last he retained a clear and definite knowledge of the Kingdom of Heaven that many a man in possession of all his powers never attains. The great change was that he took on a melancholy attitude to reality.



CHAPTER XVI

IN THE LITTLE GRAVEYARD BEHIND REDWINE CHURCH

William was too dazed by the misfortune of his superannuation to think or plan for the future. For him there was no future. He sat in the chimney corner, following me about the house with his vacant eyes, but really grieving for one of the choice, hard circuits, with its dried-fruit salary, such as he had received for years, or remembering the good pastoral times he had upon one in this or that year.

I have sometimes wondered what would be the moral effect upon a church community if an old and helpless preacher like William should be sent to it with the understanding that the church should minister to him instead of his ministering to the church; that every saint and sinner should be invited to contribute to his peace and comfort, even as for years he had labored for them. There would be less preaching, of course, but more development in real Christian service. An old preacher treated in this manner would become very dictatorial, a perfect autocrat about ordering charities for the poor and prayers for the penitents, but would it be so bad for the church?

However, that was not my consideration now. The Redwine Circuit was only twenty miles distant; the little house between the two green hills that had been the Methodist parsonage thirty years before was long since abandoned for a shiny, green and yellow spindle-legged new parsonage at Royden. And while William, who had always had his home dictated to him by the Conference, showed a pathetic apathy about choosing one for himself, I hankered for the ragged-roof cottage with its ugly old chimneys that had first sheltered our life together. So within a month the horse and buggy were sold, the cottage at Redwine rented, and we settled in it like two crippled birds in a half-feathered nest.

Now, for the first time since I left Edenton, a happy, thoughtless bride, I had leisure to think just of ourselves, of our sum total, as it were. And I found that we were two human numerals added together for a lifetime which made a deficit. Yet we had not been idle or indifferent workers. For thirty years William had been in the itinerancy, filling nearly every third and fourth class appointment in his Conference. He had preached over three thousand sermons, baptized more than four hundred infants, received nearly four thousand souls into membership. He had been untiring in his efforts to raise his assessments, and had paid more pastoral calls than half a dozen doctors need to make in order to become famous and wealthy.

Time changed us; we grew old. I abandoned my waist-line to Nature's will and my face settled into the expression of a good negative that has been blurred by too long exposure to a strong light. Toward the end William looked like the skin-and-bones remnant of a saint. His face was sunken and hollowed out till the very Wesley in him showed through. His beard was long and had whitened until it gave his Moses head the appearance of coming up out of a holy mist.

So, I say, we aged; but we went on from circuit to circuit with no other change except that when we saved enough money William bought a new horse. It is a terrible treadmill, and we could expect no reward or change in this world, no promotion, no ease of mind except the ease of prayers, which I never enjoyed as much as William did. I had feelings that prayers did not put down the desires that they did not satisfy. There were times when I almost hated prayers, when I had a mortal aversion to Heaven and wished only that God would give me a long earth-rest of the spirit.

We found the same kind of sinners everywhere and the same defects in all the saints. Sometimes I even wished some one would develop a new sort of wickedness, a kind that would vary the dreadful monotony of repentance and cause William to scratch his theological head for a different kind of sermon. But no one ever did; whether we were in the mountains or in the towns, among the rich or the poor, the people transgressed by the same mortal "rule of three" and fell short of the glory of God exactly alike.

At last I came to understand that there is just one kind of sin in the world—the sin against love—and no saints at all. I can't say that I was disappointed, but I was just tired of the awful upward strain of trying to develop faculties and feelings suitable to another world in this one. And to make things worse, William took on a weary look after his superannuation, like that of a man who has made a long journey in vain. This is always the last definition the itinerancy writes upon the faces of its superannuates. They are unhappy, mortified, like honorable men who have failed in a business. They no longer pretend to have better health than they really have, which is the pathetic hypocrisy they all practice toward the last when they are in annual fear of superannuation.

So, I looked at our deficit and knew that something was wrong. Still, I went about the little old house and garden, trying to reconstruct the memory of happiness and planning to spend our last days unharassed by salvation anxieties. I have never doubted the goodness of God, but, things being as they are, and we being what we are, it takes a long time for Him to work it out for us, especially in any kind of a church. Meanwhile, I tried to find some of our old friends, only to discover that most of them were dead. I planted a few annuals, set some hens and prepared to cultivate my own peace. But William was changed. He had lost his courage. Whenever the rheumatism struck him he gave in to it with a groan. Then he took up with Job in the Scriptures, and before we had been back long enough for the flowers to bloom he just turned over on his spiritual ashheap and died.



He is buried in the little graveyard behind Redwine Church, along with most of the men and women to whom he preached in it thirty years ago.

I can feel that I am not setting things down right, not making the latitude and longitude of experience clearly so that you may see as I can when I close my eyes the staggering tombstones in the brown shadows behind the little brown church. But when one has been in the Methodist itinerancy a lifetime one cannot do that.

I used to wonder why Paul, passing through all the grandest cities and civilizations of his times, never left behind him a single description of any of their glories, only a reference to the altar to An Unknown God that he found in Athens; but now I know. Paul lost the memory of sight. He had absent-minded eyes to the things of the world. So it is with the itinerant. The earth becomes one of the stars. I cannot remember roads and realities. I recall most clearly only spiritual facts, like this: Timothy Brown was a bad man, soundly converted under William's ministry; but how he looked, on which circuit he lived, I have forgotten long ago.

In spite of a really well-settled, worldly mind William prayed away its foundations during those thirty years, until now the very scene of his passing floats a mist in memory. I know he lay in the same house where he had brought me on our wedding day. Through the window in the pearl light of the early morning there was the same freshness upon the hills, the same streams glistening like silver maces between; there was the same little valley below, fluted in like a cup filled with corn and honey and bees and flowers. The same gray farmhouses brooded close to the earth, with children playing in the dooryards. It was all there the morning he died, as it had been that blue and glad morning thirty years before; but I could not see it or feel it with him lying stretched and still upon the bed, with the sheet drawn over his face, and the people crowding in, whispering, shuffling, bearing the long, black coffin among them. I say, it is dim and blurred and I cannot think it or write it properly. There seemed a rime upon the window-panes; the hills were bare, and the cup of the valley lay drained and empty before me, with the shadow of death darkening all the light of the day.

A very old woman, bent, shriveled down to her hull and bones, with her thin lips sucked in between her gums, came and tugged at my sleeve. I recognized Sister Glory White, wearing the same look of rapacious cheerfulness upon her bones that she used to wear upon her fat face when she had a "body" to prepare for burial.

"Come, Sister Thompson, you must git up and go out. We air ready to lay him out now."

"Oh, not him!" I cried; "you have laid out so many. Let some one else do it!" For I could not forget the frightful pleasure she had taken years ago in her ghoulish office.

"And why not him? I've helped to put away every man, woman and child that has died in this settlement since I was grown, and I ain't goin' to shirk my duty to Brother Thompson—not that I ever expected to do it for him." She babbled on, gently urging me from the room, where her presence was the last blinding touch of horror for me.

* * * * * *

So far, my autobiography has been mixed with William's biography, just as my life seems to mingle with the dust in his grave. But I came to an experience now of my own; unglorified by William, so strange that I cannot explain it unless there is what may be called a reversion to type in spirit, like this: that a person may be absolutely dominated for years by certain influences and not only feel no antagonism to them, but actually yield with devotion and inconceivable sacrifices, yet, when the influence is removed and there is no longer the love-cause for faithfulness the illusion not only passes, but the person finds himself of his original mind and spirit, emancipated, gone back to himself, what he really was in the beginning before the domination began. Such at least is as near what happened in my own case as I can tell it.

I remained in the little house between the hills, walking about, attending to my few wants, receiving an occasional visitor in a sort of trance of sorrow. William had always meant more to me than Heaven. I had endured poverty, prayers, persecutions and revivals for his sake. And now I had lost him. The very thought was immeasurable. I wore it for mourning. I missed him when I looked down the bridle path into the valley, and I missed him when I looked at the stars. Nothing meant anything to me without him. Then suddenly the veil lifted. I seemed at last to have conceded him to what is beyond the grave. At once my own mind came back to me, not the humble, church-censored mind I had during his life, but my very own, and it was like another conversion. I remembered scenes and thoughts and faces that I had not recalled since girlhood. The innocent gayety of my youth came back to me, and I recalled distinctly with what naive, happy worldliness I faced the world then, and not the Kingdom of Heaven that I have been staring at since through William's eyes for thirty years.

The next Sunday I went to church as usual, but I did not go up near the front, which had always been my custom. It occurred to me that now I did not have to sit in the saint neighborhood, but might sit back with the honester human beings. The preacher was a young man of the progressive new order, who sustained the same relation as pastor to the church that an ambitious foreman sustains to a business that must be renovated and improved. He was taking up his foreign missionary collection very much after the manner of an auctioneer:

"Five dollars, five dollars, five dollars: who gives five dollars that the Gospel may be spread in China and Siam? Who gives five dollars that there may be light in India and to save women from casting their innocent babes into the Ganges? Thank you, Sister Tuttle. The women are leading off, getting ahead of you, brethren. Put down five dollars from Sister Tuttle. Now, who will give four dollars?" and so on down till even the sinners on the back benches subscribed a rattle of dimes. I listened with comfortable indifference. I thought of how William died without enough oil in him to grease his joints. And how many more like him had died too weak and depleted to have even "assurance" of their own salvation. I remembered how I wished toward the last that I could afford a few delicacies, for William liked cordials and real cream which might have strengthened and cheered him. Then and there I resolved never to give another cent to foreign missions. I am not opposed to foreign missions, you understand. William and I did without much that the heathen might have missionaries, and the gospel preached to them. But that is just it. We did without too much. I am not saying that anyone else ought to lessen their contribution to this cause. Let them give even more. But I am certain they ought to treble their contribution to old preachers. There is something fearful in the Bible like this:

"But if any provide not for his own, and especially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith and is worse than an infidel." That Scripture expressed my feelings exactly as I listened to the preacher take up his foreign missionary collection and remembered William's dreadful poverty. So, I say, I made up my own private mind that there is something wrong with the way church collections are distributed, and that if I ever had any spare money it should be devoted to purchasing a taller tombstone for William.

Immediately I felt my own "I am," sitting up in me and taking courage. It was a grand sensation. For so many years I had not belonged to myself. I was simply a prayer-meeting numeral, William's personal dynamo at the women's societies. Suddenly it came to me that I was a free moral agent for the first time in my life—widows are the only women who are. The scandalous reflection took hold of me as I listened to the collection and reflected that never again would I have to worry lest William fail to raise all his "assessments," that I should never be anxious now for fear his sermons might not please the "prominent" members of his church. But the most refreshing, rejuvenating of all was the thought that at last I could be a little less good. I looked at the slattern-formed men and women sitting in still rows across the little church, with their faces lit like candles from the preacher's face, and I experienced a peaceful remoteness from them and from the pulpit light.



CHAPTER XVII

BACK AGAIN TO THE WORLD

The carnal man never dies in us, nor the carnal woman, either, for that matter. We only say so in our prayers and rituals because we do not know yet how to be spiritually truthful about our own flesh and blood. But God, who knew very well what He was about when He made us carnal, sees to it that in spite of our egregious pretensions we remain honest Adams and Adamesses to the end. So, for years, without acknowledging it to myself, I had been homesick for the world and the things of the world. I did not want to "sin," I simply longed to be natural; to live a trifle less perpendicularly in my soul. There had been so many prayer-meeting nights when I would rather have been at the grand opera. Not that William's prayer-meeting talks were not the very bread of life—they were; but there is such a thing as losing one's appetite for just one kind of bread. I have always thought one of the notable things about the Israelites' journey through the wilderness was the amazing fortitude with which they accepted their manna diet. Anyhow, it is not in the power of words to tell how I pined for the real laughter and lightness and play of life.

William had needed them no less, but the difference was he never knew it. When he felt world-hungry he thought it was a sign of spiritual anaemia and prayed for a closer walk with God—as if God was not also the God of the world even more than He is the caste Deity of any church or creed. I am not reflecting on William in saying this—I'd sooner reflect upon one of the Crown Jewels of Heaven, but I am reflecting upon his understanding. It was not sufficiently earthly—no good priest's is. Still, I had been his faithful wife for thirty years and a consistent member of a church which forbids nearly every form of amusement that cannot be taken at a Sunday-school picnic, a church festival or at an Epworth League convention.

I did not wait to speak to the people after the sermon, the way a preacher's wife must do to show her friendliness and interest. I hurried out and around behind the church to where he lay folded deep beneath the pine shadows. And there I had it out with him, as sometimes we had it out together in other days, I doing all the talking, and he no less silent than usual there in his holy grave. We had never quarreled as man and wife, because he would not do his part of the contending. I untied my bonnet strings, took it off and laid it on the grass, sat down by his headstone and cried—not so much for him as for fear he would not understand. He never had.



William's greatest limitation as a minister was his firm conviction that the world was a drawback to Heaven. He fought it and abused it to the last, as if God had not made it and designed it to furnish properly-chastened material for His higher Kingdom. And somehow, as I wept and talked down to him in his dust I felt wonderfully like the young woman that had loved him and feared him during those first rebellious years when I was still so much the Episcopalian and so little the Methodist.

The next day I sent a letter to my sister Sarah, a widow living with her two grown daughters in New York. For years I had kept up no relations with my own family. They were of the world, prosperous, and I felt that they could not understand William nor the soul-steepling way we lived. But now I was writing to accept the invitation Sarah sent me just after William's death, to make my home with her.

A week later I packed my things, borrowed my church letter, locked my door and took the train at Royden for New York. I told the neighbors I was going for a visit to New York, but really I was on my way to find the world again. And I found it. You cannot find anything else in New York.

Sarah and the girls met me at the Grand Central Station and they spent more kisses welcoming me than I had received since my bridal days. Sarah is two years older than I am, but she looks ten years younger, and there is not the mark of a prayer on her smooth face, while I feel as if I might have the doxology stamped in wrinkles above my eyebrows.

Everything is different from the way it is at home. We do not have dinner till supper-time, and there is no mantel or fireplace in my room, although the furniture is grander than anything I ever saw. I set William's photograph on the dresser, and I can tell by the way he looks at me all day long that he would not approve of the way I am carrying on. But I cannot help it; I must have a little spell of world life. That other in which I qualified with him for Heaven was too stretching to something in me that grew mortally tired of stretching. I have set myself with all diligence to enjoy the things of this world in the time that's left me. The more I think of it the more nearly certain I am that they were meant for us.

One thing alone troubles me—that is, the thought of William going up and down these thirty years just preaching and praying and bearing other people's burdens and never once having the right to step aside and rest his soul from being just good; never once having a natural human vacation in the natural human world; always praying and preaching and fasting that he might pray and preach better, always scrimping that he might be able to pay more to the cause of missions, always a little threadbare, and often a little breathless spiritually, but always persistently stalking Peter and Paul and the angels through the Scriptures up the high and higher altitudes of his own beautiful imagination. No matter how rested he is now in Heaven, no matter how much he may be enjoying himself, my heart aches for him because of the innocent happiness he missed here.

Sometimes, when I am with Sarah's girls at a play like Sudermann's "John the Baptist," as the curtain rises and falls upon the great scenes I sit and think of him and what it would have meant to him if in all those poverty-stricken years of his ministry he could have had such a vision of his dear Bible people at home in Judaea. It's foolish, of course, but I still long to do something for him, something to make up for the weariness and blindness through which he passed with such simple dignity up to God, who never meant for him to make such a hard journey of it. No one knew it, probably, save a few of the angels, but he was a great man.

Since I have been here where everybody and every thought of everybody is so different from him and his thinking, I can see him plainer, understand him better than I did living side by side with him. This is why I have been spending my time between tea parties and lectures on art and evolution, and receptions and theaters, writing these letters as a memorial of him.

I used to wish I could have a portrait of him painted by a great artist as he looked sometimes on a Sabbath day when he had a baby to baptize, or when he'd be bending above an altar full of penitents. There was a grandeur in William's faith that gave him an awful near likeness to immortality even in his flesh at such times. But, of course, we could never think of the portrait, so in these letters I have tried to draw a likeness of him. Every line and shadow of it is as true as I can make it to what he really was. I reckon plenty of people back there on his circuits will recognize it, although I have changed names so as not to be too personal. They will remember him, although he was not what is known as an up-to-date preacher.

I have often thought about it since I have been up here, what William didn't know or dream of. I never heard him mention evolution. His doubts were not intellectual and his troubles were just spiritual. He never suspected that there were two Isaiahs, never discovered that David did not write his own Psalms, or that Genesis was considered a fable, never noticed anything queer about the way Moses kept on writing about himself after he was dead and his death certificate properly recorded by himself in the Scriptures. He was a man of faith. All of his ideas came out of that one little mustard seed. I doubt if he'd have been surprised if some day he had come upon a burning bush along one of the bridle paths of his circuit.

As for me, I do not care what they say here in New York, or even in the Pentateuch, I'd have a sight more confidence in that Scripture of the burning bush if William had recorded it instead of Moses—I never set much store by Moses as a truth teller. He may have been a good hand at chiseling out the Ten Commandments in the tables of stone, and he may have been strong enough to tote them down by himself from Sinai, but Moses was too much of a hero to tell the truth and nothing but the truth about himself. I never knew a hero who could do it. Their courage gets mixed with their imagination.

Then again, you can see that I could not write about a man like William in the modern forked-lightning literary style, as if he was a new brand of spiritual soap or the dime-novel hero of a fashionable congregation. The people he served were not like those in New York, who appear to have been created by electricity, with a spiritual button for a soul, that you press into a religious fervor by rendering an organ opera behind the pulpit. Or, maybe the preacher does it with a new-fangled motor notion that demonstrates a scientific relation between some other life and this one.

The people William served were backwoods and mountain folk, for the most part, who grew out of the soil, as much a part of it as the red oaks and the hills. They were not happy nor good, but they were Scriptural. The men were in solemn bondage to Heaven. Religion was a sort of life sentence they worked out with awful diligence. And the women seemed "born again" just to fade and pray, not as these women of the world fade, utterly, but like fair tea-roses plucked for an altar, that wither soon. In Heaven you will not find them herded in the Hosannah Chorus with the great, good women of history, like Jane Addams and Frances E. Willard, but they will be there in some dim cove of the celestial hills, sweetly sorrow-browed still, spinning love upon the distaffs of Heaven, weaving yarn feathers for the younger angels.

I say, it is impossible to write of such a preacher and such people as if they were characters in an electric religious fancy. Walking to and from church here in this city I have almost wondered if they were ever real. Thinking of them sets me to recalling stanzas from Watts's hymns. I smell the thyme upon their hills. It seems as if my adjectives were beginning to grow like flowers upon William's grave. I can see the candles lit for evening services in Heaven, and him sitting in the amen corner away from the flashing-winged, fashionable saints, comparing notes with Moses and Elijah in his deep organ undertones.

The trouble with William was that he was the hero of another world in this one, handcuffed by a Church Discipline. And the trouble with the average New York preacher is that he is barely a foreigner in this world, who is apologizing continually to his congregation for half-way believing in his own other country. But now I have finished this poor drawing of William's character. If I could have made it enough like him it might have been fit for one of the family portraits of the saints in Heaven. And I have often wondered why the monument builders have never thought to raise a statue to the Methodist circuit rider. The D. A. R.'s and the other daughters of this and that raise monuments to men who were only brave, but no one has thought yet to erect a statue to the memory of the Methodist circuit riders, who are not less brave, but who have doubtless broken some Heaven records in simple goodness and self-sacrifice.



CHAPTER XVIII

CONSCIENTIOUS SCRUPLES ABOUT THE CHURCH

I had thought that these letters were finished, but I am adding this postscript to say that I leave New York to-morrow for the little house between the hills on the Redwine Circuit. This resolution is not in keeping with some views and sentiments I have written in these pages, but, being a woman, I thank God I can be as inconsistent as is necessary to feminine peace of mind. I reckon I'll never be satisfied now in the world or in the church without William. I can't seem to settle into any state of being of my own. I am not saying that I have not had a good time here, but, after all, I do not belong with the people of the world, either.

Since I have been with Sarah I have had constantly to resist the temptation to speak to her about her soul, just from force of habit. I have never seen, in all my years with William, a woman of her age so youthfully, cheerfully unconscious of having a soul. And that is not the worst of it: I can feel the moral elbows of mine sticking out in every conversation, as if Heaven had made all my thoughts angular. It is a sort of horned integrity that grows up in a woman who follows the Gospel flag of the Methodist itinerancy. I am sure it is often embarrassing to Sarah and the girls, especially when they have company—not the kind of company William and I had, thinly-bred missionaries, and Bible pedlers, and tramps, and beggars, and occasionally, toward the last a little, sweet-faced, pod-headed deaconess—but Lilith ladies and one or two that William would call Delilahs, and handsome, sleek, intellectual men who appeared to be as ignorant of God as I am of natural history. I am not saying that they are not decent people, but they are not all there. I miss something out of them. If they have ever had souls they have had them removed, probably by a kind of reasoning surgery quite as effective as the literal surgery with which so many of them have their poor appendixes removed.

I have told Sarah, and while she expresses regret I am sure she feels relieved. It is straining to have a person in the family who belongs to a different spiritual species. And now I have just finished packing my things. I am thankful I told the neighbors that I was going on a visit. I came suddenly to the conclusion to-day that it was only a visit because of a thing that happened. I have not been offended morally by anything I have seen in the theaters or other places of amusement, but I have had conscientious scruples about the churches here!

This would be the Sabbath day far away in the country, where the hills are at prayer and the pine trees swing their shadows over the graves in Redwine churchyard. But here in New York it is merely the day when you change your occupations and amusements. Still, there is preaching for those who are not drunk, or asleep, or in the parks, or at Coney Island, or giving week-end parties at their country places, or planning the millennium without God along socialistic scantlings of thought and barb-wire theories of the brotherhood of man. And I went with the girls to a fashionable church. And this is how the morals in me that William planted came to take offense, and how I reached the conclusion that I had best go back home, where life is indeed made too hard for the spirit, but where at least one may be decently conscious of having one according to the Scriptures.

The church we attended was nearly as grand-looking inside as a theater. Every pew was filled, and there was no misbehavior on the back benches, such as William contended with to the last. We had a plush-covered one near the front, and a stool to put our feet on, and a library hooked to the back of the pew in front of us, containing a bulletin of the church's news. I didn't have time to find the "society column," but I was looking for it when the preacher came in. I expected to hear a perfectly-scarifying sermon, he looked so much like a tintype of the prophet Jeremiah; but he took his text from Mark about the healing of the man with the withered hand, and preached on the hypnotism of Jesus. He made a clean sweep of the miracles in the most elegant, convincing language you ever heard. And I sat and cried to think of what he'd done to Scriptures William would have died to preserve. The girls were mortified at the scene I was making. I don't reckon anybody had ever cried in that church before, and I am sure no man was ever convicted of his sins there.

When we reached home I told Sarah about going back to Redwine, first thing. Then I came on upstairs and had it out with William in a very few words, while I was pulling out the dresser drawers and putting my things in the trunk.

"William," I said, kneeling down on the floor with my back to his picture on my dresser, laying my collars in the tray, "you were right. There is something wrong with the church system, something wrong with the institutional religion that the church is propagating; but there is nothing wrong with the truth of God for which you stood and made me stand for thirty years, and I am going back where some of the people know it, whether they know anything else or not.

"Up here the best, the wisest people don't know what the truth of God is; they think they can find it in science. Faith is for fools who cannot think. They are not trying to reconcile God to man, but man to God, and trimming down the Holy Ghost to suit his scientific bug faculties."

Then I reached back, snatched up his photo, laid it bottom upward on top of the collars. I didn't feel that I could look him squarely in the face till I had it setting back on the mantel in the house at Redwine.

I have got the first out-and-out orthodox Methodist feeling of being backslid I ever had in my life. And it was not going to the theaters and tea parties that brought it on. It was going to church every Sunday and hearing some preacher explain away the Divinity of Jesus, or reduce His miracles to scientific formulas. I do not wonder that so many men and women go wrong in New York. They are orphans, deprived of their Heavenly Father by the very preachers themselves. And it's very hard for orphans to behave themselves. They know what is right, but righteousness does not appeal to them, because it has never been sanctified by love. That is what is the matter with these people. They do not love God, they do not care, or know, or believe that He loves them. They are so sensible, so profoundly reasonable that they are sadly damned already by their own little intelligences. They have theories, views and knowledges that are not going to show up well in the next generation. And that is their crime, to propagate ideas that will destroy the integrity of those who will come after them.

THE END