After observing William very carefully for thirty years I reached the conclusion that the wisest preacher knows nothing about the purely feminine soul, and the less he has to do with it the better. The thing, whatever it is, is so intimately connected with her nervous system that only her Heavenly Father can locate it from day to day.

And I have observed that the really good women are never guilty of the sacrilege of showing their immortality to preachers. I lived with William for thirty years, and had more than my share of spiritual difficulties. But I would have as soon asked him how to cut out my dress as what to do with my soul. No man's preaching benefited me more, but in so far as my soul was feminine and peculiar to me I took it as an indication that Providence meant it to remain so, and I never betrayed it, not even to him.

But I could not keep other women from doing so. There was a beautiful lady in the church at Orionville who gave "Bible readings" as if they were soprano solos. She was always beautifully gowned for the occasion, and had an expression of pretty, pink piety that was irresistible. She was "not happy at home" and candidly confessed it.

The lack of congeniality grew out of the fact that her husband was a straightforward business man who took no interest in her Bible readings. But he was about the only man in the church who did not.

And it is only a question of time when she would have betrayed William in the Second Book of Samuel if I had not intervened.

She had been coming to the parsonage regularly for a month, consulting him about her "interpretation" of these Scriptures. She asked for him at the door as simply as if I had been his office-boy. And William was always cheered and invigorated by her visits. He would come out of his study to tea after her departure, rubbing his hands and praising the beautiful, spiritual clearness of her mind, which he considered very remarkable in a woman.

Poor William! I never destroyed his illusions, for they were always founded upon the goodness and simplicity of his own nature. But when Mrs. Billywith began to spend three afternoons of the week with him in his study, with n.o.body but the dead-and-gone Second Samuel to chaperon them, and when William began to neglect his pastoral visiting on this account, I couldn't have felt the call to put an end to the "interpretations" stronger than I did if I had been his guardian angel.

The next time she came he was out visiting the sick.

"Come right in, Mrs. Billywith," I said, leading her into the study and seating myself opposite her when she had chosen her chair. "William is out this afternoon, but possibly I can help you with the kind of interpretation you ought to do now, better than he can." She stared at me with a look of proud surprise.

"You and William have spent a very profitable month, I reckon, on Second Samuel; but I've been thinking that maybe you ought to have a change now and stay at home some and try to interpret your own Samuel.

Your husband's given name is Sam, isn't it? He seems to me a neglected prophet, Mrs. Billywith, and needs his spiritual faculties exercised and strengthened more than William does. Besides----"

I never finished the sentence. Mrs. Billywith rose with the look of an angel who has been outraged, floated through the open door and disappeared down the shady street. William never knew, or even suspected, why she discontinued so interesting a study, nor why he could never again induce her to give one of her beautiful "Bible readings" on prayer-meeting nights.

You will say, of course, that I was jealous of my husband. But I was not jealous for him only as a husband, I was even more jealous for him as the simplest, best, most saintly man I had ever known. And the preacher's wife who does not cultivate the wisdom of a serpent and as much harmlessness of the dove as will not interfere with her duty to him in protecting him from such women--whose souls are merely mortal and who are to be found in so many congregations--may have a damaged priest on her hands before she knows it. And there is not a more difficult soul to restore in this world except a woman's. Ever after it sits uneasy in him. It aches and cries out in darkness even at noonday, and you have to go and do it all over again--the restoring.

Some one who understands real moral values ought to make a new set of civil laws that would apply to the worst cla.s.s of criminals in society: not the poor hungry, simple-minded rogues, the primitive murderers, but the real rotters of honor and destroyers of salvation. Then we should have a very different cla.s.s of people in the penitentiaries, and not the least numerous among them would be the women who make a religion of sneaking up on the blind male side of good men, without a thought of the consequences.

CHAPTER X

WILLIAM BECOMES A PRODIGAL

William never made but two long journeys away from home. One was to visit a brother minister; the other was a sort of involuntary excursion he made away from G.o.d in his own mind. And as the first trip led to the second I will begin with that.

There was a young man in William's cla.s.s at college named Horace Pendleton, who entered the ministry with him, and joined the North Georgia Conference at the same time. William had that devotion for him one often sees in a good man for just a smart one. He placed an extravagant value upon his gifts, and he was one of the heroes of our younger married years, about whom he talked with affectionate blindness.

And there is no doubt that Horace Pendleton had a gift, the gift of rising. You might have thought he was in the world instead of the church, he went up so fast. He had been ordained scarcely long enough to become a deacon before he was well enough known to be preaching commencement sermons at young ladies' seminaries and delivering lectures everywhere. He had that nave bravery of intelligence which enabled him to accept with dignity an invitation to lecture on any subject from "Sunshine" to the "Psychology of St. Paul."

I remember him very well in those days, a thin, long, young man with a face so narrow and tight and bright that when he talked in his high metallic voice one received the impression of light streaming in up his higher nature through a keyhole. I specify higher nature, because Pendleton never addressed himself to any other part of the spiritual anatomy. I always had the feeling when I heard him that he inflated each word, so that some of the weightiest and most ancient verbs in the Scriptures floated from his lips as lightly as if they had been the cast-off theological tail-feathers of a growing angel. His grandest thoughts (and he was as full of them as an egg is of meat) seemed to cut monkeyshines and to make faces back at him the moment he uttered them. Personally, I never liked him. He talked too much about sacrifice and was entirely too fortunate himself. Maybe I was jealous of him.

The contrast between his career in the ministry and that of William was certainly striking. He had been made a Doctor of Divinity and was filling the best churches in his Conference, while William and I were still serving mountain circuits. And it was not long before none of the churches in our Conference were good enough for him, so he had to be transferred to get one commensurate with his ability. Even then he had enough surplus energy to run a sideline in literature. I have always thought that if he had been a land agent, instead of a preacher, he could have sold the whole of Alaska and the adjacent icebergs in one quadrennium.

And I reckon I may as well admit that there was an invincible streak of meanness in me which prevented my admiring him, for, from start to finish, he was a man of impeccable reputation, and undoubtedly irreproachable character, as we use those words, and I could have admired him as anything else but a preacher. It was his shockingly developed talent for worldly success that revolted me. To this day, the gospel, the real "lose-your-life-for-my-sake" gospel sounds better, more like gospel to me if it is preached by a man who is literally poor. Maybe it is because I learned to revere this trait in William.

But in every way, always William could surpa.s.s me in the dignity of love. So he went on loving Horace Pendleton. He believed that the Lord was lavish in favors to him because of his superior worth, and this accounted for his good fortune, and I never interfered with any of William's idolatries; they were all creditable to him.

At last the time came when he received an invitation from Pendleton (who was now pastor of the leading Methodist Church in a flourishing city in another state) to visit him. They had always kept up a sort of desultory correspondence, and I am sure Pendleton never received finer laurels of praise than William sent him in his letters.

We were in a small town that year in the malarial district and William's health was not good. It was early spring, before the revival season opened, and it so happened that there was some kind of political convention on hand, which enabled him to secure special rates on the railroad. So one morning in April, I plumed and preened him in his best clothes and sent him on his happy journey. When he returned a week later William was a changed man. He talked with a breadth and intelligence upon many old and new subjects, that I had never observed in him before. Yet it seemed to me that something great in him had faded. He was stuffed to the neck with ethics as loose fitting morally as the sack coat of worldly-mindedness, and he did not suspect it. His very expression had changed. He looked, well, to put it as mildly as I can, William looked sophisticated, and it is as belittling a look as a good man can wear. There is a Moses simplicity about goodness that has never been improved upon by the wisest ape-expression of the smartest man that ever lived, and William's simplicity had been blurred.

"Mary," he said to me, as we sat at our evening meal the day after his return, "I must read and study more. This visit has been an eye-opener to me. I am sadly behind the times."

"Yes, William," I replied shrewdly, for I had never heard him talk so "fresh" before, "you must read and study more, for a preacher has something bigger than 'the times' on his conscience."

"What do you mean?"

"That the times are so transient, that a preacher is called to deliver a message about what is far more permanent."

"I think, Mary," he went on, a.s.suming the reasoning air that a man always takes when he thinks he is trying to make a woman think, but when he is only trying to make her agree with what he thinks, "I think one reason why Pendleton has gotten on in the Church and been of so much more service there than I have is because he has kept up with his times. He is a very learned man, and he preaches right up to the present moment. I'd scarcely have recognized some of the Scriptures as he interpreted them in the light of modern criticism and conditions."

"You are right, William, there is no doubt that Horace Pendleton has risen in the Church and been of more service to the Church than you have been because he knows so much better than you do how to make it worldly-minded and how to intone the gospel to the same tune, but _you_, William, are you going to begin to interpret the Scriptures just to suit your times and modern conditions? I thought Scriptures had nothing to do with mere 'times,' that they belonged to the ever-lasting Order of Things."

"I fear you are prejudiced against Pendleton, and incapable of seeing the good in what he says. Yet he showed a great interest in me, and he talked to me very seriously about the limitations of my ministry."

"What did he say?"

"For one thing, he said I was identified with a view of G.o.d and Man and the world such as no intelligent, healthy disciple of Christ after the fashion of John Wesley ever held."

"Could you tell what _his_ view of G.o.d was?"

"No, I could not. That was my ignorance. I could not keep up with him. He preached a very powerful sermon from one of the best texts in the New Testament the Sunday I was there. He couldn't have done that unless he had had a very plain view of G.o.d."

"Oh, yes, he could," I retorted. "You can preach a much more satisfactorily powerful sermon in a fashionable modern church if you don't see G.o.d than if you do."

Still William persisted. He began to read strange books that Pendleton had loaned him, and the more he read the gloomier he looked. His vocabulary changed. In the course of fourteen days, I remember, the word "salvation" did not pa.s.s his lips and I could have prayed as good a prayer as he prayed any night as we knelt together. The time came, indeed, when I seriously considered making him the object of special prayer on the sly, only William was so really good I was ashamed to show this lack of confidence in him to the Lord.

Meanwhile the Sabbath in June, when the protracted meeting usually began, approached, and I knew if things did not change it would be a flat failure. For William was in a blue funk spiritually.

"I cannot think what is the matter with me," he complained to me late one afternoon as we sat on the parsonage steps waiting for the prayer meeting bell to ring.

"You have backslid, William. That is what is the matter with you! You listened to the voice of Horace Pendleton till you cannot hear the voice of G.o.d. You no longer have the single eye. It has been bunged up, put out!"

That was the first and last sermon I ever preached to William. It was a short one, but it brought him forward for prayers, so to speak, and for the next few days we had a terrible time at the parsonage. He was an honest man, and he was not slow to recognize his condition once it was pointed out to him.

It is not so bad to lose the "witness of the Spirit," because you can still believe in G.o.d, and presently the witness is there again, but when you begin to read books that curtail the divinity of Jesus Christ and make your Heavenly Father just a natural force in the Universe, when you bud and blossom into rationalism, there is a good deal of mischief to pay. I do not say that Pendleton went this far, but the books he read and loaned to William did, and they unconsciously had a profounder effect upon William than they had on Pendleton, because William really had a soul. (I am not saying Pendleton did not have, you understand; I am an agnostic on that subject.) But to have a soul and to be without an immediate Almighty is to experience a frightful tragedy. If a man never recognizes this diviner part of himself, he may live and die in the comfort or discomfort of any other mere creature. But once you realize your own immortality (I make a distinction here between the self-consciousness of immortality and the loud preaching of it that a man may do just from biblical hearsay), you are a lonesome waif in a bad storm. This was William's fix. He was exposed, all at once, to the inclemencies of the Infinitudes. But I ceased to worry once he began to really pray and scourge himself, and I did not interrupt the chastening. Usually, when he insisted upon fasting all day Friday, I provided little intelligent temptations to food at the earliest possible moment. But this time I let him starve to his heart's content. I reckon I am a worldly-minded woman and always shall be, but I know another, higher minded man when I see one, and I have always been careful not to drag William down. Now I was equally determined that Horace Pendleton should not.

Once, during the dreadful time, he came out of his study and looked at me vaguely, pleadingly, as if he wanted help.

"Don't look at me that way, William," I cried, "I can't do anything but kiss you. I never did know where your G.o.d was, but you knew, and you'll just have to go back the way you came to Him. All I know for certain is that there is a G.o.d, your kind, or you could never have lived the way you have lived, nor accomplished the things you have accomplished. You couldn't have; you haven't sense enough. And for this reason you'd better not try to think your way back. If G.o.d is G.o.d, He is far beyond our little thinking. You had better feel your way to him. It is what you call Faith in your sermons!"

Something like this is what I said to him standing before him with my head on his breast, wiping the tears from my eyes. Really a spiritually sick preacher is about the most depressing thing a woman can have in the house. And when I looked at William, pale, hollow-eyed, with his mouth puckered into a penitential angle I longed to lay Horace Pendleton across my knees and give him what he deserved for disturbing a better man's peace.

About the middle of Sat.u.r.day afternoon, however, I knew that his clouds were breaking. I heard him in his study singing:

"How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, Is laid for your faith in His excellent word."

[Ill.u.s.tration: I Heard Him in His Study Singing.]

Later on, at bed-time, he chose a cheerful psalm to read and I heard the happy rustling of his wings in the prayer he made.

The next evening had been chosen for the initial service of the protracted meeting and I remember his text: