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 rôle 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 naïve 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."