Chapter XIII: William Wrestling with Traveling Angels

I have had little to say about the joy of William, although he was one of the most joyful men I have ever known. The reason is I never understood it. His joy was not natural like mine (in so far as I had any)--it was supernatural, and not at all dependent upon the actual visible circumstance about him. It used to frighten me sometimes to face the last month before quarterly conference with only two dollars, half a sack of flour and the hock end of a ham. But then it was that William rose to the heights of a strange and almost exasperating cheerfulness. He could see where he was going plainer. Our extremity gave him an opportunity to trust more in the miracles of providence, and that afforded him the greatest pleasure. He was never weary of putting his faith to the test. He was like a strong wrestling Jacob, going about looking for new angels to conquer. And I am bound to confess that his Lord never really failed him, although he sometimes came within five minutes of doing so.

One Sabbath, I remember, he had an appointment at a church ten miles distant where he was to begin a protracted meeting. At the last moment his horse went lame. It so happened that some weeks previous William had overreached himself in a horse trade. He had swapped an irritable crop-eared mare for a very handsome animal who proved to have a gravel in one of his fore feet. This horse would lay his tail over the dashboard and travel like inspiration for days at a time up and down the long country roads; then, suddenly, if there was a hurried message to go somewhere to comfort a dying man or preach his funeral, the creature would begin to limp as if he never expected to use but three legs again. I believe William suspected the devil had something to do with this diabolical gravel, for he never gave way to impatience as a natural man would have done in such a predicament. Upon the occasion I have mentioned, he helped the old hypocrite back into the stable with a mildness that exasperated me as I watched with my hat on from the window, for it was already past the time when we should have started.

"Silas is too lame to travel to-day," said he a moment later as he entered the kitchen.

"But what will you do, William?" I exclaimed, provoked in spite of myself at his serenity. "It will be dreadful if you miss your appointment at the beginning of the meeting."

"I can do nothing but pray. Mine is the Lord's work. Doubtless he will provide a way for me to get to it," he answered, withdrawing into the parlor and closing the door after him.

I knew that meant wrestling with one of the traveling angels, and held my tongue, but the natural temper in my blood was not so easily controlled. I flopped down in the chair, laid my head upon the window sill and yielded to tears. I was far along in my middle years then, but never to the end did I get accustomed to the stubbornness of William's faith. I always wanted to do something literal and effective myself in the emergency. I seemed to be made so that I couldn't look to God for help until I had worn myself out.

While I sat there, in a sort of tearful rage with William and the horse, there was a sound of wheels at the front gate. I arose, hastily wiping my eyes, and was just in time to face William's smiling countenance in the parlor doorway.

"Mary, Sister Spindle is not well, and Brother Spindle has driven by to offer us seats in his carriage."

Brother Spindle was the only man in the community who owned a carriage and horses. I flung my arms around William's neck and whispered:

"Forgive me, William, I never can get used to it that the Lord is illogically and incredibly good to you. But I am glad to tag along after you in His mercies."

He had a gentle way of enjoying these triumphs over me. He would cast the blue beam of his eye humorously over me, and then kiss me as if I was still young and beautiful.

Never in all our married life did he get the best of me in an argument. His arguing faculty was not highly developed. It was easier to silence him than to stir him into opposing speech. But whenever he entered the sacred parsonage parlor and closed the door after him, I always knew he would have the best of me one way or another when he came out.

But it was not this faith in prayer that confused me most, it was the answers that William, and others like him, received to their prayers. We never went to any church where there was not at least one man or woman who knew, actually knew, how to reach his or her empty hands up to God and get them filled. And they were always people of rare dignity in the community, although some of them bordered on the simplicity of childhood mentally.

I recall in this connection Sister Carleton. She was a very old woman who seemed to have settled down to be mostly below her waist. Her shoulders were thin, her bosom flat, but she widened out in the hips amazingly. Her face was the most beautifully wrinkled countenance I ever beheld. Every line seemed to enhance some celestial quality in her expression. And she had the dim look of the very old after they begin to recede spiritually from the ruthlessness of mere realities. She had palsy and used to sit in the Amen Corner of the church at Eureka, gently, incessantly wagging her lovely old head beneath a little black horseshoe bonnet that was tied under her chin with long black ribbons. Sabbath after Sabbath, year after year she was always to be seen there, sweetly abstracted like an old saint in a dream. She had one thought, one purpose left in life. This was to live to see all of her "boys saved." These were three middle-aged men, all of whom had been wild in their youth. Her one connection now with the church was expressed, not by any personal interest in the preacher or his sermons, but in this thought for her children. Some time during every experience meeting we always knew that Sister Carleton would rise trembling to her feet, steady herself with both hands on the bench in front of her, look about her vaguely and ask the prayers of "all Christian people" that her boys might repent and be saved from their sins. They were already excellent and prosperous citizens and remarkable for their devotion to her, but she was not the woman to mince matters. They had not been converted, therefore she prayed for them as if they were still dead in their trespasses and sins.

The first year of William's ministry in this place the two younger sons were converted and joined the church, but the oldest still "held out," as the saying was. In fact, he stayed out of the church literally, never coming to any service.

The next year Sister Carleton had grown very feeble, but at a consecration meeting held one afternoon before the regular revival service at night, she appeared as usual. Before the closing hymn she arose, clasped her old hands over the back of the bench in front of her and made her last petition for the "prayers of all Christian people."

"Brother Thompson," she concluded in the deep raucous voice of extreme age, "I have prayed for my youngest boy fifty years, and for my second boy fifty-two years, and for my oldest son nearly sixty years. The two youngest air saved now, but t'other is still out of the fold. I ain't losin' faith, but I'm gittin' tired. Seems as if I couldn't hold out much longer. But I can't go till Jimmy is saved. I ain't got nothin' else keepin' me but that." She paused, looked about her as if she felt a memory brush past. "When he was jest a little one, no higher 'an that, he was afeerd of the dark. I always had to set by him till he was asleep. And now, seems as if I couldn't leave him for good out in the dark. I want to ast you to pray, not that he may be converted, but that he may be converted this very night. I ain't got time to wait no longer--seems as if I'm jest obliged to git still and rest soon."

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 naïvely 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.