Chapter I: Part 1

ASBURY / UP FROM METHODISM

HERBERT ASBURY

UP FROM
METHODISM

ALFRED · A · KNOPF

_NEW YORK_

1926

_Copyright 1926 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc._

_Manufactured in the United States of America_

_TO_
_STANLEY WALKER_

_CHAPTER I_ [_Page_ 3]
HOME LIFE OF A BOY DESTINED FOR HEAVEN

_CHAPTER II_ [_Page_ 25]
THE MACHINERY OF SALVATION

_CHAPTER III_ [_Page_ 36]
TABOOS OF THE LORD’S DAY

_CHAPTER IV_ [_Page_ 56]
AGENTS OF GOD

_CHAPTER V_ [_Page_ 98]
A BAD BOY COMES TO JESUS

_CHAPTER VI_ [_Page_ 115]
NOTES ON A SAINTED RELATIVE

_CHAPTER VII_ [_Page_ 129]
DIVERSIONS OF AN ABANDONED SINNER

_CHAPTER VIII_ [_Page_ 168]
CONCLUSIONS OF A MAN GONE TO THE DEVIL

ASBURY / UP FROM METHODISM

HOME LIFE OF A BOY DESTINED FOR HEAVEN

1

On my father’s side, according to my family belief, I am related to Cotton Mather; on my mother’s side to Roger Williams. My great-great-uncle was Francis Asbury, the first Bishop of the Methodist Church to be ordained in America; his elder half-brother was my great-great-grandfather, Thomas Asbury, who, disowned by his father for various sins, ran away from the family cottage in England and went to sea. Later he kidnapped Susan Jennings and married her, and then settled in Virginia and so escaped the fate of the Bishop, who doubtless went to the Methodist Heaven.

My great-grandfather was the Rev. Daniel Asbury of Fairfax County, Va., an early pillar of Methodism and one of the great organizers of the Church in the South. When a young man he went to North Carolina, and in 1791 founded, in Lincoln County, the first Methodist church west of the Catawba River. Later he was a Presiding Elder and labored valiantly for the Wesleyan God. When but a boy he was captured by the Indians and kept a prisoner for several years, and is said to have converted the entire tribe to Christianity. Throughout his whole life Sunday was his great day--he was born on Sunday, converted on Sunday, captured by the Indians on Sunday, released on Sunday, reached home on Sunday, was ordained as a minister on Sunday, and on a Sunday married Nancy Morris in Brunswick County, Va. His first child was born on Sunday and he died on Sunday.

My grandfather was the Rev. William Asbury of North Carolina, a local preacher who, for some reason that I have never known, quit raising souls to Heaven and moved over into Mississippi, where he had equally poor success raising coons and cotton. He married Susan Lester Marks, member of an equally religious family. Several of his seven sons were Methodist preachers, and my father, too, would have assumed the cloth had not the Civil War come along. He enlisted in the Confederate Army and became an officer of infantry, and infantrymen do not make good preachers. At the close of the War he studied Civil Engineering and then moved to Missouri, and settled in Farmington, where I was born. He was county Surveyor of my home county of St. Francois for more than thirty years, and City Clerk of Farmington for twenty years. The exigencies of local politics compelled him to attend services and take an active part in church work, but I have no recollection of him as a religious man, although he imposed religion upon his home and impressed upon his family the necessity of Christian salvation.

I first suspected that he might not be as religious as reported when I whacked him across the shins with a broomstick as he sat in the yard one day nursing his rheumatism. He did not turn the other shin. This was not long after we had moved from the cottage across the street from the Masonic and Catholic cemeteries to our new house on the other side of the town, near the mansions of our first families, the Webers and the Cayces. Curiously enough, these graveyards were side by side, although their occupants presumably went to different Heavens. There was a high fence between them, and it was not easy to dispose of the border-line burial plots; the Protestants felt that a few Catholic demons might be able to crawl through or under the fence, and the Catholics did not wish to have their mortal remains so close to those of such benighted heathen as the Methodists and the Presbyterians.

My mother’s people, the Prichards and the Blues, came originally from North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee, and were for the most part devout Baptists, believing that in immersion alone was true salvation. The strength of their religious convictions may be seen in the fact that many of them never forgave my mother for marrying a Methodist and transferring her letter to my father’s Church, forsaking the austerities of her family faith. They considered the Methodists too liberal! The true Baptist of those days was in a constant emotional upheaval; his religion was a canker that ate deeper and deeper, and he was able to find no relief; the more religious he became, the more miserable he was. On the other hand, the Methodist enjoyed terrific and periodical emotional explosions, and thereafter was generally able to live for a few days in comparative calm. But the Baptist was wrapped in gloom from the moment of his conversion until he was called home to Jesus.

When my mother’s forbears came up from the South they settled within a radius of twenty miles of Farmington, many of them in the vicinity of Hazel Run and French Village. They were farmers, with a sprinkling of small storekeepers, preachers and country doctors. My mother’s father, Joseph Prichard, was a farmer, but he was very religious and was renowned throughout the countryside around French Village for his exploits as a faith healer; he could cure toothache, remove warts and stop the flow of blood. His method was merely to say: “It will be gone by the time you get home,” and generally it was. He frequently removed warts from my own hands; at least they vanished within a reasonable time after he had looked at them and pronounced his incantations, and I regarded him with awe.

There was a tradition in our family that my grandfather boasted Indian blood in his veins, and although I do not think it was true, at the time it gave me great pride and satisfaction; it invested me with authority at such times as we played Indian and Wild West games. He made a two-year trip overland to California during the 1849 gold rush, without conspicuous success, and brought back with him the musket with which we were given to understand he had slain innumerable Indians. Two or three times a year his children and his grandchildren, a vast horde all told, held family reunions at his French Village farm, and the big moment of the day came in the afternoon when all of the grandchildren trooped into the woods behind the barn to watch Grandpa kill a squirrel. We stood in a half-circle, almost overcome by awe, while my grandfather loaded his gun with great care, pouring the correct amount of powder from his powder horn and dumping the bullets from his pouch into the palm of his hand, where he counted them carefully. And then he killed the squirrel, while we stood behind him and marveled. He never failed; he was an excellent rifle shot; in his ninety-first year, three years before he died, he knocked a squirrel from a tree as easily as Davy Crockett could have done it.

As a young man in Georgia and later in Missouri my grandfather Prichard was famous as a leader of Baptist sing-songs. His favorite hymn was “The Prodigal Son,” which he was wont to bellow with fanatical fervor as he sat bolt upright in an uncomfortable, straight-backed chair and directed the singing with a stick. He sang from an old hymn book which had been in his family for many years, a curious volume with the music printed in square notes. Many of the hymns expressed sentiments that to-day, even in religious circles, would be considered obscene. I recall one that said: “Oh, sinners! My bowels do move with desire!”

I was constantly under the influence of my mother’s people, who did what they could to overcome the pernicious influence of the Methodists; they prevailed upon me to visit them and attend their revivals and other religious meetings, and otherwise attempted to oversee and assure my eventual salvation. Some of my father’s people, too, had come up from the South, from Virginia and North Carolina and Mississippi, and had settled around Farmington. Many of them were excessively pious, although it is my recollection that they did not carry their love of God and man into the conduct of their temporal affairs; religion was not permitted to interfere with business. Between them and my mother’s people there was a constant, although not open, fight for my soul, and the souls of my sister and brothers. The bout appears to have been a draw.

2

We were a musical family. My elder brother and I played the harmonica, or French harp, as we called it then, and my sister performed capably upon the organ, the guitar and the mandolin. She was particularly adept upon the guitar, and enjoyed an enviable reputation for the way she whanged out the fandango pieces and the tune descriptive of the Battle of Sebastopol, which requires much banging and thumping and difficult fingering. My father was a fiddler. He did not know one note from another, but he could tuck his fiddle under his chin, tap the floor with his foot and play with great spirit such tunes as “Fisher’s Hornpipe,” “Billy in the Low Ground,” “Turkey in the Straw” and “The Arkansas Traveler.” But his muse was dumb if he could not pat his foot. I could also beat a snare drum passably, and later I learned to play the violin, the cornet and the alto horn, so that we had quite a family orchestra, and our house was frequently filled with music. Anyhow we played these instruments.

But not on Sunday. Our Preacher assured us that music on Sunday, except in church, was sinful and an affront to the Heavenly Father, and on Saturday night, after a final orgy of melody, my mother gathered up the guitars and mandolins, the fiddles, the drums and the harmonicas and all of the other musical instruments, even the jew’s-harp, and put them under lock and key until Monday morning. We could not even play a comb on Sunday, although on rare occasions, usually when the Preacher was there and gave permission and absolution from sinful consequences, I was permitted to bring out my big harmonica, from which I could produce the sonorous tones of an organ, and play church hymns such as “Rock of Ages” and “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” But I was forbidden to play “Turkey in the Straw” or “The Mocking Bird” with variations. The latter was my favorite tune, because by jiggling my hand over the harmonica I could produce a very effective trill which I fondly believed was as beautiful as the singing of a canary, but if I launched into such a tune on Sunday I had debauched the Sabbath, and my harmonica was taken from me. And frequently I myself was taken into the woodshed and taught a proper respect for the Lord’s Day.

Under no circumstances could we play the fiddle in our house on Sunday, because of all music, that which came from the fiddle was the most sinful. It was the Devil’s instrument. No fiddling on Sunday had been a cardinal rule of my father’s family since Colonial days in Virginia, and later in Mississippi and in North Carolina my grandmother had compelled her Negro slaves to put up their musical instruments from Saturday night to Monday morning. Eventually I took lessons from the music teacher in Farmington and learned to call the fiddle a violin, and as I grew older I played when I pleased, although not very successfully. But so long as the instrument remained a fiddle it was played in our house on Sunday on only one occasion. And then the performance was a neighborhood scandal, and only the fact that the instrument had been played by a Preacher saved us from getting into trouble with God and His representatives in Farmington.

This tweaking of the heavenly nose occurred during a District Conference, when the visiting preachers were parceled out among the faithful of the local Methodist church. Two came to us, one a young man filled with good works and a constant, fretful worry over the low estate of the human race, and the other an old man who had been a wicked sinner in his time and who had never been able to resist an occasional temptation to have a good time. He was a Virginian and an accomplished fiddler, but he could play nothing but dance music, which the darkies had taught him. The first Sunday they were at our house my father admitted that we had a fiddle, and the old Preacher demanded that it be brought out for him to perform upon. My father and mother were in terror all afternoon for fear that the neighbors would hear the wailing of the fiddle, although they prevailed upon the old man to use a mute and the music could hardly be heard outside the room. We were particularly afraid that a devout Sister, who lived next door to us and whose principal occupation was going to church, might hear it; if she had it would have been nothing short of a catastrophe, for the tale would have been all over town before nightfall. So we closed the windows and the doors, muted the fiddle and put the old Preacher in the parlor, where he fiddled until he had sinned enough. But even then several people passing along the street heard it, and I do not think that we ever quite lived it down. We could convince no one that the fiddle had been played by a Man of God. Everyone knew better; Men of God did not do such things.

3

Every Wednesday night we attended prayer meeting, and on Sundays we went to Sunday school and twice to church. And on Sunday afternoon, and on week days, there were the sessions of the various church organizations. We had grace before meat in our home, and when the Preacher came to dinner he delivered long-winded prayers on the universal theme of “gimme.” We did not have that emotional orgy called family prayer, but I did not escape it; I encountered it in many Farmington homes and in the houses of almost all of my relatives.

It was particularly oppressive in the home of an oppressively devout kinsman whom I called uncle. He was not actually my uncle; he was related to my father by marriage, and I do not believe there was any blood kinship, but I thought of him as uncle, and he had a certain measure of authority over me, so that to a considerable extent I was under his control and subject to his influence until I became intelligent enough to have an occasional thought of my own.

My uncle was an extraordinarily pious man, an official of our church and of our Sunday school, and a leader in every movement designed to entice the sinner from his wicked ways and lead him to the true religion of the Wesleyans. He was intent upon salvation for everyone, and let no opportunity pass to serve the Lord. He frowned upon laughter, and although he had a very charming family, there was little joy in his home; a laugh seemed to make him uncomfortable and start a train of dismal religious thought, and I gathered the impression that all mirth was a direct and studied affront to God.

Every night after dinner, or supper, as we called it then, his living room was given over to family prayer. I frequently spent the night with his youngest son, my chum for many years, and was compelled to attend with the others and absorb my nightly dose of religion, and listen to a solemn account of the fearful things that God would do to us if we strayed from the path of righteousness. There was no laughter, and there were no jokes; the whole atmosphere of the house turned gray and gloomily oppressive when my uncle rose from his seat, glanced sorrowfully at his family, and announced:

“We will now have prayers.”

He turned and with bowed head passed into the living room. We sat at the supper table for a moment in silence, myself seeing goblins and fearsome avenging creatures of God leering at me from every shaded corner of the room, and my mind racing madly over the day’s activities to discover what I had done that required an alibi. In a few moments my aunt arose and went slowly into the other room, and then one by one the others. We marched solemnly, with downcast eyes; we might have been going to a funeral. Indeed, it seems to me now that we must in truth have been going to a funeral; here was a fine house built for the warmth of human happiness, turned into a forbidding mausoleum by the mere mention of God.

In the living room Uncle awaited us, standing beside the small table on which, always, there was nothing but the Family Bible. He waited in silence until we had taken our places, and then he laid reverent hands upon the Book and began fumbling with the pages, glancing sharply over his spectacles to make sure that everyone was undergoing some sort of emotional upheaval, and looking particularly for some sign of revolt from his son and myself. I doubt if he ever knew it, but when I attended family prayer in his house I did not think of revolt. I was in an agony of fright; I felt as if something was crushing me, and that something was my uncle’s God, an avenging monster ready to devour me for my sins. God was in the house and I was afraid.

The most uncomfortable chairs in the house were used for family prayer, and we perched upon their edges, afraid to sink back and relax, because we had been told many times that discomfort and righteousness were well-nigh synonymous. God would have been scandalized and indignant had we made ourselves comfortable to listen to His Word. And then my uncle read from the Bible. He read without joy; he held in his hand the Book which in his eyes was the sole hope of humanity, the Book that contained the glad news that for all mankind there was salvation, but he read it as if it were a sentence of death, slowly and solemnly, dwelling with horrible clarity upon those phrases that promised punishment. The Bible seemed to have no effect upon him but to make him gloomy and miserable.

At the conclusion of his reading, he slowly closed the Bible and placed it upon the table. He then stood for a moment in profound thought, his chin resting upon his breast. I assumed that he was overcome by contemplation of the sins of a wicked world. Those of us who were young began about this time to itch with that devilish itch which invariably afflicts a youngster when there is a penalty for scratching. We itched and itched, but we were afraid to scratch because God was in the room, and we knew as well as we knew anything that He would punish us if we moved. And finally my uncle stared at the ceiling and said:

“Let us pray.”

With almost the precision of automata we knelt by our chairs, our knees grinding into the hard carpet, while my uncle’s voice soared in a sonorous appeal to the Lord to give us some of this and some of that, to bless us and make us prosperous, and, in effect, to hell with such infidels as Jews, Catholics and Presbyterians. And then he rose slowly to his feet and passed from the room, without speaking. We followed, and scattered about our various affairs, but it was a long time before we could shake off the effects of the religious debauch and play with any zest. And nearly always I awoke some hours later in the throes of a nightmare, pursued by fiends and demons shrieking that I was to be boiled and fried and cooked in the fires of Hell.

Every night year after year this sort of thing went on in houses all over Farmington, and for that matter all over the United States. It would be interesting to know how many hours were wasted in the course of a year by such senseless appeals to the Heavenly Father, by this constant reiteration of “gimme, gimme, gimme.”

4

Many of my relatives on my mother’s side attended Colony Church, about three miles from Farmington. This was a hard-shell Baptist congregation, the members of which took their religion with the utmost seriousness and were constantly on the lookout for sin to rear its reptile head. If it did they assailed it with glad cries. There was no organ in this church; indeed, for many years none of the Baptist churches in and about Farmington would permit any sort of music at their services, holding that music was an invention of the Devil designed to entice Christians from respectful contemplation of the mercies and graces of the Lord, and that no devout Christian could hear music and still keep his mind on God and his heart true to the faith. Their attitude toward the organ was exactly that of the good Sister of whom Will Carleton sang in his Farm ballads:

I’ve been a Sister good and true
For five and thirty year;
I’ve done what seemed my part to do,
And prayed my duty clear.
But death will stop my voice, I know,
For he is on my track;
And some day I to church will go,
And nevermore come back.
And when the folks get up to sing,
Whene’er that time shall be--
I do not want no patent thing,
A-squealin’ over me.

In later years, of course, the Baptists became almost civilized and most of their churches bought organs; in some there were even pianos. But in few of the churches of the Farmington countryside, in my early youth, was there more fervent religion on tap than at Colony Church. There were frequent revivals, and many basket dinners, when the farm women brought huge quantities of food to the church early in the morning, and all day long the congregation gave itself up to an orgy of eating and saving souls. At most of these revivals there were foot-washings; they were usually announced at the morning service for the afternoon, and then there was a great scurrying home or to the nearest creek, or crick, as it was generally called, where the feet were washed vigorously with soap and made presentable for public exposure in the aisles and around the pulpit of the church.

One of the most famous of the Colony Church foot-washings, one that is still talked about when the good Brothers and Sisters get together in that neighborhood, ended the enmity of a widow, Sister Letts, and a lawyer whose name I do not recall. For years there had been great bitterness between them, and although the congregation had prayed for them and had exhorted them to forgive, the Lord had not entered their hearts, and so they continued to treasure their hate. But at length, on a Sunday morning during a revival, the preacher announced that there would be a foot-washing that afternoon, and the Brother rose and spoke:

“I have opened my heart to God,” he said, “and He has instructed me to forgive Sister Letts. This afternoon I shall wash her feet.”

There was a murmur of enthusiasm all over the church, and one leather-lunged Brother popped to his feet and shouted: “Amen, Brother! Glory to God!” And then Sister Letts bounced to her feet and cried that she, too, praised the Lord and would wash the feet of the Brother.

That afternoon the church was crowded. Almost every family of the countryside was on hand to see God end this bitter quarrel which had come so near to disrupting the congregation. The service proceeded as usual, opening with some such catchy hymn as “Bringing in the Sheaves,” and then through the sermon to the slow, solemn songs like “How Firm a Foundation” and “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Then came the foot-washing, when the Brothers and Sisters proved their humility and showed that when it came right down to brass tacks they were no better than Jesus Christ. It was felt that the legal Brother and Sister Letts should have the honor thus to show off first before God, and so for a little while no one moved when the Preacher announced that the time had come, and that basins of water and towels would be provided.

But at length the Brother got to his feet and marched stiffly down the aisle to the pulpit, where he procured a pan and a towel. With these in hand he paraded back up the aisle toward the last row, where Sister Letts rocked back and forth and murmured in ecstasy:

“Praise the Lord, Brother! Praise the Lord!”

Moving slowly to a chorus of amens and unintelligible mumblings of piety, the Brother was some distance up the aisle when Sister Letts started to meet him. Halfway between the back door and the pulpit they stopped, facing each other. And then a new difficulty arose. They had by now thoroughly given themselves to God and were suffused with a wonderful glow of self-appreciation at this proof of their humility, but each wanted to prove it first. Each appeared to feel that the one who first washed a foot would receive the greater amount of kudos from the Lord.

So they began to argue, and the heat of the discussion spread all over the congregation, and here and there Brothers and Sisters became so upset by the spirit that they jumped to their feet and began shouting loudly, bouncing up and down and flinging their arms about. My sister, a small child, was practically overcome by curiosity, and added to the excitement by leaning too far from her seat and falling into the aisle, so eager was she to see the ceremony. She was promptly spanked and put back in place by my Aunt Ophelia, and several devout persons near her intimated strongly that she was a sinful, blasphemous little wretch.

It seemed for a time that there would be a deadlock, as neither Sister Letts nor the Brother was willing to give in. So the congregation sang a hymn while they stood staring at each other, and then the Preacher prayed to the Lord to make a decision as to who should wash whose feet first. And apparently God said Eeney Meeney Miney Mo and picked Sister Letts to be It, for the Brother suddenly surrendered and sat in a chair which had been pushed into the aisle for him. He bared his foot, and Sister Letts dropped to her knees and poked it into the basin of water. I do not know if the Brother wriggled his toes. Having laved him, Sister Letts plied her towel vigorously to a groaning chorus of “Amen!” that arose from all parts of the church, and then she sat in the chair and removed her shoe and stocking and the Brother performed the ceremony. The congregation, everyone filled to the bursting point with emotion, then stood and sang quaveringly “How Firm a Foundation.” Sister Letts and the Brother returned to their seats. It was generally agreed that by washing each other’s feet they had practically assured themselves choice seats in Heaven.

5

I was fallow ground for all these seeds of piety, for I was a highly emotional and excitable boy. I wept when I heard slow music, I shivered with fear over the ghost stories and the frightful tales of Hell that were told to me with such regularity, and it was usually I who saw the spooks when we played or hunted for bumblebees among the tombs of the Masonic cemetery. There is no telling what I might have seen had I ever been able to summon sufficient courage to enter the Catholic cemetery at night. I did go as far as just inside the gate once, and immediately there arose in front of me an apparition that to my mind could be nothing less than the Devil himself. And this was not surprising, for I well knew that the Catholics were worshipers of a false God, and it was quite likely that their graveyard was the abode of evil spirits.

Because of my temperament, which impelled me to believe everything I was told, and because from time to time I had shown indications of being a bad boy if restraint were not exercised, I received more religious instruction than my sister or my brothers. Again, there was the matter of ancestry. Our family connections, especially my father’s people, were very proud of our relationship to the Bishop and our direct descent from the Rev. Daniel Asbury, and they settled on me to carry on the family tradition. There was much talk of sending me to a theological school, and I appeared to be destined for the Church, so that I was always waiting for the call to preach, though conscious of a vague hope that it would be delayed.

But I had no idea that I should escape such a fate, for I accepted as a basic fact of life that in every generation at least one Asbury should be a Methodist preacher. Wherever I went I encountered the assumption that I was to succeed the Bishop and the Presiding Elder, and become a Methodist Messiah howling in the wilderness of sin and shoving souls into the heavenly hoppers with both hands. Everyone seemed to take it for granted, and when I talked to a stranger he invariably said:

“Well, well! So your name is Asbury?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Kin to the Bishop?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, well! I suppose you will be a preacher, too?”

“Yes, sir. I guess so.”

If the person to whom I talked was himself a Preacher, or a Brother, he would smile gently, pat my head with a moist palm and say: “God bless you, my boy,” and pad on down the street. I can recall but one person who did not make some such senseless remark. He was a hardware drummer from St. Louis, a fat, waggish person in flashy raiment, doubtless a sinner, who stopped me as I marched proudly past Doss’s barber shop carrying a string of fish, one of which was as large a bass as was ever taken out of the St. Francis River. He tried to buy the big fish, and when I refused to sell he asked me my name and the inevitable conversation followed. But when I said to him: “Yes, sir, I guess so,” he wrinkled his nose and said: “Don’t be a damned fool, kid.”

I felt a sudden rush of affection for this outspoken person, although I shuddered at the thought of what would happen to him if a Preacher or a Brother heard him using profanity and told God about it. I proffered him one of my string, a fine crappie, which he accepted gratefully and on which he feasted later at the St. Francis Hotel. Later in the evening I met him as he swung blithely through the doors of Perringer’s Saloon, and he jovially invited me in to have a glass of beer. I thought he must be crazy; I would no more have entered a saloon then than I would have committed mayhem upon the Preacher. In later life, of course, I did enter saloons, but have never been able to bring myself to bite a preacher, although at times I have been sorely tempted. But it was a long time before I understood what the drummer meant when he said, as we parted:

“Well, look out, kid, and don’t let them put that Bishop stuff over on you.”

THE MACHINERY OF SALVATION

Farmington was about eight or ten miles from the lead-mining district of Southeast Missouri, where a great number of low foreigners were employed, but God did not permit any ore to be found near us and so kept our town holy and undefiled by their presence. We did not greatly concern ourselves with their evil ways, because we knew that foreigners were little if any better than the beasts of the field, and that God had put them on earth for some inscrutable purpose of His own, with which we were not to meddle. Even the Preachers and the amateur devil-chasers in such towns as Flat River and Bonne Terre devoted their activities principally to spreading the Gospel among the home-bred and let the Hunkies carry on whatever nefarious practices pleased them best. We didn’t want them in our Heaven, anyhow.

Our town nestled in the foothills of the Ozarks, some eighty-six miles from St. Louis and two miles from the De Lassus station on the Belmont branch of the Iron Mountain Railroad. But the civilizing influences of the city seldom touched any of us except a few wealthy families who could afford the railroad fare for frequent trips. We had then some 2,500 inhabitants, the vast majority of whom were devout workers for the Protestant God, especially on Sunday. During the week many of them put sand in the sugar and weighed their thumbs with the sausage, and otherwise engaged in legitimate and profitable business enterprise, but on Sunday they praised the Lord.

There were but two or three Jewish families in town then, and I do not recall that they ever attempted to practice their religion; certainly not in public. Doubtless our God would have destroyed them if they had thus flaunted their sin in our faces, and mocked us with their heathen rites. It is my recollection that they attended the Presbyterian church, but if so it was for business or social reasons. The Catholics had a church, but they were not numerically strong, and did not amount to a great deal in the town’s scheme of things, although they occasionally captured a city office or did a bit of proselyting among the backsliders of the Protestant congregations. They labored earnestly one whole summer trying to ensnare my sister after her allegiance to the Methodist Father had wavered, but they were unsuccessful. She could not swallow the Pope, or the holy images and the like. Nor could she learn to cross herself properly, although I became much interested and helped her; we used to go behind the barn and practice in all seriousness, but we invariably found ourselves giggling at the rite. And few things can destroy religion quicker than a hearty giggle.

The Protestants of Farmington made little if any effort to induce the Catholics to abandon their debaucheries and embrace the true religion; generally we considered them benighted heathens and crazy people and let it go at that, confident that in due time God would blast them with His wrath, destroy their churches and perhaps send their young women to Heaven to be virgin angels in a Protestant paradise. I was very eager to see this wholesale destruction, and waited patiently for many years, hoping that God would furnish advance information to His intimate, our Methodist pastor, so we would be able to view the performance. I strongly favored an earthquake and a bolt of lightning, as being more spectacular. But I am sorry to say that nothing ever happened, although one night lightning struck the steeple of the Catholic church and there was some talk about town that God was limbering up His muscles and getting ready to show what He could really do.

Some of our most advanced thinkers conceded that perhaps the Catholics and the few nondescripts who professed religion for the sake of business but who would not attend church, had their own God, quite different from ours and unquestionably a very inferior Deity. But people who held this view were considered entirely too charitable; it was all right to admit that God might, in the fullness of time, and out of that loving mercy which keeps half the world constantly at the throats of the other half, relent and permit a few Catholics to enter Heaven as low menials, but to say that they might have a Heaven of their own was going a bit too far. Both socially and spiritually they were on the other side of the railroad tracks. They were simply not in our set, and when any of them attended our parties, as sometimes happened despite every precaution, it was a matter of very great concern. Things may be different now, but when I was a boy cringing before the threatening lash of the Methodist God, there was grave doubt that anyone who lived south of the Post Office would ever amount to anything spiritually.

All of the reigning sects of the Protestants had churches in our town. There was also a Lutheran Church somewhere down by Schramm’s Ice Plant, but its congregation was made up of Germans and what not, who ranked scarcely higher than the Catholics and the Jews. For some time during my final year in high school I was devotedly attached to a young Lutheran girl, and this attachment was the cause of considerable concern among some of my relatives. It was, then, my intention to marry her, although I quickly abandoned it after I had tentatively broached the matter to one of my aunts.

“She is not a Christian girl,” my aunt protested.

“She is a Lutheran,” I said. “They are Protestants.”

“But some of their services are in German! How can they be Christians?”

She was perfectly sincere. She believed firmly that God understood no language but English, and that, having no knowledge of German, He could not look with favor upon a Lutheran. But it developed that this particular Lutheran could not look with favor upon a Methodist, which was probably an insult to our Methodist God. It was a great many years before I overcame my surprise that God did not do something about it, yet He seems to have done nothing but make her happy and her husband prosperous.

Most of the churches in our town were on Columbia Street, the principal thoroughfare, and they and their subsidiary schools were so numerous that we proudly called Farmington “The City of Schools and Churches,” and enjoyed great renown throughout Southeast Missouri for municipal piety and Christian education. On this street worshiped the Presbyterians, the Southern Methodists--this was the church of the Asburys and enjoyed special favors from the Lord--the Northern Methodists, and the Christians or Campbellites. The Baptists had a church in another part of town, in Doss’s Addition. Each of these churches had a great many interlocking organizations, including Home Missionary Societies, Foreign Missionary Societies, Ladies’ Aid Societies and other holy groups.

The Ladies’ Aid Societies of the Middle West have become famous, and they deserve their renown. When I was a boy they were in truth most noble organizations. They rotated their meetings at the homes of the members, performing at each house about once every two weeks, according to the number of women who belonged. Their sessions were excessively sanctimonious; they opened and closed with prayer, and frequently some good Sister would at other times feel the spirit of the Lord working within her, and she would pop up from the quilting frame or the shirt on which she was sewing for the heathen and yelp an appeal to God to give her something or damn somebody. There were also Bible-readings at these meetings; in fact every time a member of our church called on another member, a verse from the Bible was read and a prayer was offered. And curiously enough these devout Christian Sisters displayed a greater liking for the books of the Old Testament than for those of the New.

In all of our congregations there were many special societies for young people, to which the children of the godly had to belong and whose meetings they had to attend. Their number was great, and the majority of their titles escape me, but I recall such outfits as the Christian Endeavor, the Loyal Temperance Legion, the Epworth League, the Baptist Young People’s Union, and the Sunshine Brigade. The Legion was a union organization of juvenile foes of rum, and we used to meet on Sunday afternoons in the Presbyterian or Southern Methodist church and hear lectures on the evils of drink, after which we would stand, raise our right hands and shout in unison:

We hate Rum!
We hate Rum!
We hate Rum!
Our bodies will never be ravaged by drink!

The Sunshine Brigade was another union organization, in which all of the churches combined, and was composed of boys from eight to twelve or thirteen years of age. We met two or three times a week, in the evening after supper, generally on the spacious lawn of Merrifield Huff, the lawyer, and first we heard a Bible-reading and a prayer. Then we drilled, in military fashion, under the command of older boys who had been away to military schools. Then there were more verses from the Bible, another prayer, and we were sent home with unctuous commands to be good boys and think often of the mercy of the Lord. They called us “Little Soldiers of the Lord,” and “Our Group of Manly Little Fellows.” There was nothing we could do about it.

The activities of the Epworth League and the Baptist Young People’s Union are too well known to require comment; they persist to this day, and there seems to be no likelihood that the present generation will make an intellectual advance sufficient to laugh them out of existence. Fortunately Farmington was spared the Young Men’s Christian Association, and I had no contacts with that remarkable agency of salvation until I went to France with the American Army. Of my many encounters with the Y. M. C. A. abroad, two stand out in my memory. One occurred when I wanted a toothbrush, while in command of a platoon of infantry in the support line on the Vesle river front, between Fismes and Bazoches. I walked the eight miles or so back to division headquarters with a five-franc note in my pocket, all the money I had in the world.

The Y. M. C. A. canteen was open there, and after the secretary in charge had greeted me sweetly as Brother and inquired after the condition of my immortal soul, he produced a toothbrush, for which he wanted two francs, then about forty cents. I said I would buy it, there being no Red Cross hut near where I could have got one for nothing, and laid down my five-franc note. But the Y. M. C. A. man could not change it, nor could we find anybody else around headquarters who could do so. The Y man said that he could not let me have the toothbrush without payment and put it back in the case, and I walked the eight miles back to my command without it, rejecting his offer of a free pocket Bible with the observation that the line was one hell of a place for a Bible.

The second encounter with the Y. M. C. A. occurred a week or so later, at La Pres Farm, on the same front and on the road between Mont St. Martin and Chery Chartreuve. I had about two hundred sick and flat-footed infantrymen there, waiting for gas masks and other equipment so they could be moved to the front, and they had nothing to smoke. Neither did they have any money, because they had not been paid for months. To the farm came a Y. M. C. A. man laden with boxes, and when I asked him what they were, he said cigars. He showed them to my platoon sergeant and myself; they were fine, fat, handsome smokes.

I suggested that he lay out his stock, and that I would have the sergeant march the troops past in columns of twos, so that each man could have a cigar.

“That’s fine,” said the Y man, “they’re fifteen-cent cigars, but the boys can have them for ten cents.”

I told him that to my knowledge there was not ten cents in the whole outfit, and suggested that he give the cigars to the soldiers and look to Heaven for payment. But he would not; he said that he had brought the cigars to the line to sell and that he had to have the money for them. So I did the thing that seemed best under the circumstances. I took his cigars away from him, the sergeant headed him for Division Headquarters, and I kicked him as hard as I could in the pants. The last I saw of him, he was stumbling down the hill toward the crossroad vowing vengeance. But I paid little attention to him; I was busy handing out free cigars, and a few minutes later everybody at the farm was puffing happily.

We had also in Farmington three denominational schools, Elmwood Seminary, a girl’s college with primary and grammar departments for both sexes, operated by the Presbyterians across the street from their church; Carleton College in the lower end of the town, a Northern Methodist institution, and Baptist College, near the Baptist church. Carleton and Baptist were coeducational. I was educated--God save the mark!--at Elmwood and Carleton, and at both there was much emphasis on religious teaching. Carleton, of course, since it was run by the Northern Methodists, was frankly a mill for grinding out workers for the Lord, and they poured out of the hopper in large numbers for many years. Gawky country boys came from the farms around Bull Run, Hazel Run and French Village, and down-state toward Libertyville and Fredericktown, and entered Carleton College, to emerge a few years later rip-snorting evangelists hot on the trail of the Devil. Those who did not become professional Satan-chasers developed, in the course of time, into pussyfooting Brothers with keen ears for scandal, gimlet eyes for boring searchingly and suspiciously into all amusement and pleasure, and wagging tongues for scattering seeds of holiness. And God made their teeth very sharp, for backbiting.

Curiously enough, the Presbyterians in Farmington comprised the liberal element, in so far as we had a liberal element. This was because our wealthy families, or at least our social leaders, were apparently Episcopalians at heart and perhaps belonged to the Presbyterian congregation only because we had no Episcopal church. They were able to go to St. Louis frequently, and did, and consequently acquired a bit of metropolitan polish, and rubbed off some of our small-town intolerance and roughness. From time to time rumors were afloat that some of these people had been seen entering Episcopal churches in St. Louis, but I have never heard that they were verified.

But for many years this element had a virtual monopoly of such sinful practices as playing cards, dancing and buggy-riding on the Sabbath. I have heard several Brothers and Sisters, and more than one doleful and sorrowing Preacher, speak regretfully of the unholy spectacle of a young man of one of these families driving a spanking pair through the heart of the town on Sunday afternoon, with an abandoned young woman beside him and neither apparently caring one single damn about the fate of religion. It was prophesied that they could come to no good end. But the germ they planted multiplied enormously.

TABOOS OF THE LORD’S DAY

1

Sunday should be a day of gladness, and of light and beauty, for it is then that the forthright religionist is closest to his God, and when he is, if ever, in communion with the Holy Spirit and presumably receives instruction with which to confound the wicked during the ensuing week. But in small communities which suffer from the blight of religion it never is, and when I was a boy in Farmington Sunday was a day of dreadful gloom; over everything hung an atmosphere of morbid fear and dejection. In the morning the whole town donned its Sunday suit, almost always black and funereal and depressing, and therefore becoming to religious practice, and trudged sorrowfully and solemnly to Sunday School and to church, there to wail doleful hymns and hear an unlearned man “measure with words the immeasurable and sink the string of thought into the fathomless;” and beseech the Lord upon the universal prayer theme of “gimme.” Then the village marched, in mournful cadence, back home for Sunday dinner. But before the meal was eaten the juvenile members of the religious household were commanded to remove their sabbath raiment, and were not again permitted to assume the habiliments of the godly until after supper, when the family clutched its Bibles and wandered forth despairingly to evening service.

These excursions, with attendance upon the various meetings of the young people’s societies and other church organizations, comprised almost the sum total of the Sunday activity of our town’s inhabitants. In recent years the young folks there appear to have gone wholeheartedly to the Devil, and are gallivanting about the country in automobiles, listening to radios, dancing, attending baseball games on the Sabbath and otherwise disporting themselves in a sinful manner, but in my youth we had to observe a very definite list of Sunday taboos, in addition to the special don’ts laid down by the more devout families, according to their fear of God and the fervor of their belief.

We could not play card games on Sunday. Regulation playing cards of course, were taboo at all times in the best and most religious families, for God, we were told, had informed the Preacher that cards were an invention of the Devil, designed to lure true believers into sin; but on Sunday we could not even play such games as Lotto, Old Maid and Authors. On week days these were considered very amusing and instructive pastimes, although in some quarters it was felt that they caused too much laughter, but if anyone so much as thought of them on Sunday he was headed for Hell.

The taboo against drinking was in effect every day in the week for the godly and their children, not on account of the possible harmful physical effects of liquor, but because God objected. And even the Town Sot hesitated to take a drink on Sunday, for he knew that every Preacher and every Brother and Sister would be howling to God to damn his immortal soul and make a horrible example out of him. And how they did love horrible examples!

No indoor games were permitted. This taboo was in force against “Drop-the-Handkerchief,” “Puss-in-the-Corner,” “Ring-Around the Rosy,” and “London Bridge is Falling Down;” in fact, it included everything the Preacher could think of except games founded on the Bible. That is, we could play games in which questions of Biblical history were asked and answered, but they had to be conducted in a very solemn and decorous manner. At the first laugh, or at the first question based on the more ribald portions of the Scriptures, such as Numbers and Deuteronomy, the game was stopped and everyone went home in disgrace. One of my young friends who once asked what happened to Laban’s household idol was soundly thrashed, as was another who requested a young lady to enumerate the ingredients of Ezekiel’s bread. The curious may learn what the Holy Prophet ate by consulting Ezekiel 4:15.

We could have no outdoor games; in many families, indeed, it was considered irreligious to go out of doors at all except to church. Restless boys were sometimes permitted to walk around the block, and once in a great while to play, if they did so quietly and remained in the back yard, where, presumably, the Lord could not see them. Anyhow, the neighbors couldn’t.

Parties and teas were forbidden, and we could not visit on Sunday, as a general rule, except among relatives. And such visits were usually turned into holy sing-songs, but since most of the hymns were either pornographic or slightly Sadistic, there were thrills galore in this sort of thing.

Walking along the main street of the town on Sunday was a sin of the first magnitude. Occasionally a group would obtain permission to stroll sedately down to Old Maid’s Springs and take kodak pictures in a refined and genteel manner, but a young man and a girl caught ambling along Columbia street were the objects of much unfavorable comment. It was generally agreed that they were no better than they should be, and often a Preacher, or a Brother or Sister, would stop them and order them to cease desecrating the Lord’s Day by such frivolous conduct.

“Go home,” they would be told, “and pray to God to forgive you.”