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.