' Charge It ': Keeping Up With Harry Part 13

"'We think his sermons are fine. Everybody likes them but grandpapa.

He wants noise, you know--lung power and old theology. I hate it!'

"'He doesn't take to Robert?'

"'No; he calls him a calf. n.o.body is good enough for me, you know.

He'd like me to marry some man with a hoe, who would take me to church and Sunday school every sabbath morning, and for a walk to the cemetery in the afternoon, and down to the prayer-meeting every Wednesday night, and on a journey from Genesis to Revelations once a year. It's too much to expect of a human being. Then the hoes are in the hands of Poles, Slavs, and Italians. So what am I to do?'

"'Well, you are young--you can afford to wait a while,' I said.

"'But not until I am old and all withered up. I am going to marry the man I love within a year or so, if he has the good sense to ask me.

Don't you ever go to church?'

"'No,' I said.

"'Why not?'

"I tried to think. There were the ministers--two boys and three old men--dried beef and veal! Not to my knowledge had a single one of them ever expressed an idea. They were seen, but not felt. The Church! Why, certainly, it was founded on the sweetness, strength, and sanity of a great soul. I had almost forgotten that. It had grown feeble. It had got its fortunes entangled in psychological hair. It should have been correcting the follies of the people--their selfishness, their sinful pride, their extravagance, their loss of honor and humanity. Had I not seen, in the case of Harry and his followers, how the Church had failed in its work? Ought it not to have sought and saved them long ago--saved them from needless disaster? It should have been appealing to their consciences. If appeals had failed it should have stung them with ridicule or raised a voice like that of Christ against the Pharisees. The Church! Why, it was living, not in the present, but in the past. Here in Pointview the Church itself had become one of the greatest follies of the time.

"'I want you to go next Sunday and hear Mr. Knowles, as a favor to me--won't you?' Marie asked.

"'Yes,' I said. 'In the next five Sundays I shall go to every Protestant church in Pointview. I want to know what they're doing. I shall put aside my scruples and go.'"

XIV

IN WHICH SOCRATES DISCOVERS A NEW FOLLY

"Well, I went and saw the Reverend Robert Knowles sail between 'Silly and Charybdis.' He b.u.mped on both sides, but did it rather gracefully.

He reviewed the career of Samuel, who lived and died some thousands of years ago. The miraculous touch of Carlyle or Macaulay might easily have failed in the task of reviving a man so thoroughly dead. But the Reverend Robert entered this unequal contest with no evidence of alarm. The dead man prevailed. The power of his long sleep fell upon us. My head grew heavy. I felt my weight bearing down upon the cushions. A stiffness came into my bones.

"On our way to church Betsey had placed the young minister in my thoughts. The trustees had reckoned that he would revive the interest of the young people in Sunday worship; and he did, but it was the worship of youth and beauty.

"Well, the other churches were emptier than ever, and so the spiritual life of the community was in no way improved. In fact, I guess it had been a little embittered by the new conditions. As soon as it became known that Marie had won the prize of his favor the other girls had returned to their native altars, having discovered that the new minister was vain, worldly, and conceited.

"Lettie Davis, who had made a dead set at him, had been strongly convinced of that as soon as he began to show a preference for Marie, and the Davis family had left the church and gone over to the Methodists. The young man had been filled with alarm. He feared it would wreck the church. That old ship of the faith was leaky and iron-sick, and down by the head and heel, as they say at sea. She rolled if one got off or on her.

"Such was the condition of things when we entered the church of my fathers. We sat down in the Potter pew a few minutes before the service began. There were, by actual count, forty-nine people gathered around the altar of the old church, and behind us a great emptiness and the ghosts of the dead. In my boyhood I had sat in its dim light, with six hundred people filling every seat to the doors and a man of power and learning in the pulpit.

"Faces long forgotten were there in those pews--old faces, young faces. How many thousands had left its altar to find distant homes or to go on their last journey to that nearer one in the churchyard! My heart was full and ready for strong meat, but none came to me. The moment of silence had been something rare--like an old Grecian vase wonderfully wrought. Then, suddenly, the singing fell upon us and broke the silence into ruins. It was in the nature of a breach of the peace. There are two kinds of people who ought to be gently but firmly restrained: the person that talks too much and the person that sings too much.

"This young minister undoubtedly meant well. He's about the kind of a chap that I've seen in law-offices working for fifteen dollars a week--industrious, zealous, and able up to a point, and all right under supervision. He can be trusted to handle a small case with intelligence and judgment. But I wouldn't go to him for instruction in philosophy; and if I wished to relay the foundation of my life I should, naturally, consult some other person. As one might expect, he had searched the cellars of theology for canned goods, and with extraordinary success.

"The young man had so lately arrived in this world he couldn't be expected to know much about its affairs, and especially about those of Samuel. It was graceful and decorous elocution. The Deacon expressed his opinion of it in snores, and I longed to follow suit.

"The sermon ended with a dramatic recitation, and on our way out the minister met us at the door.

"'You must manage to keep these people awake,' I suggested to him.

"'How am I to do it?' he asked.

"'Well, you might have a corps of pin-stickers carefully distributed in the pews, or you could put the pins in your sermon. I recommend the latter.'

"We went away with a sense of injury.

"'Let's keep trying,' said Betsey, 'until you find some one you would care to hear. I would feel at home in any of our churches. These days there's no essential difference between Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians. I've talked with all of them, and their differences are dead and gone. They stand in the printed creeds, but are no longer in the hearts of the people.'

"'Then why all these empty churches?' I asked. 'Why don't the people get together in one great church?'

"'Don't talk about the millennium,' said Betsey. 'We must try to make the best of what we have.'

"Well, in the next four Sundays we went from church to church to get strength for our souls, and found only weakness and disappointment.

Immune from ridicule and satire, the sacred inefficiency of our pulpit had waxed and grown and taken possession of the churches. And one thought came to me as I listened. There should be a number of exits to every Christian church, plainly marked: 'To be used in case of fire.'

Ancient history, dead philosophy, soph.o.m.oric periods, bad music, empty pews, weary groups of the faithful longing for home, were, in brief, the things that we saw and heard. It was pathetic.

"I began to think about it. Here were five church organizations, all weak, infirm, begging, struggling for life. The automobile and the golf and yacht clubs had nearly finished the work of destruction which incompetence had so ably begun. There was not much left of them; yet their combined property was worth about one hundred thousand dollars.

They spent in the aggregate fifty-six hundred dollars for ministers'

salaries, and their total average attendance was only four hundred and forty-nine. I could see no more extravagant waste of time, work, and capital in any other branch of human effort. Some would call it wicked, but, though we speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, we had better have kept still.

"The Reverend Mr. Knowles came to me within a day or two and apologized for his sermon. He complained that he couldn't be himself--that he didn't dare speak his thoughts.

"'Whose thoughts do you speak?' I asked.

"'Well, I trail along in the wake of the fathers.'

"'Then you are feeding your flock on corned and kippered thoughts--on the dried and dug-up convictions of the dead. It isn't fair. It isn't even honest. The church here is dying of anemia for want of fresh food. The new world must have new thought to fit new conditions. Its outlook has been utterly changed. If a man who had never seen a locomotive or a motor-car or a tandem or a telephone or an electric light or the sons and daughters of a new millionaire or the home and crest of the same or a bill of a modern merchant were to come down out of the backwoods and try to tell us how to run the world, we should think him an a.s.s, and wisely. Consider how these things have changed the spirit of man and surrounded it with new perils.'

"'But think of the old fellows--the mossbacks--who hate your new philosophy,' said the minister.

"'And think of the young fellows who are so easily tossed about. The moss of senility is covering the bloom of youth and the honor of youth.'"

XV

IN WHICH HARRY RETURNS TO POINTVIEW AND GOES TO WORK

"Betsey and I were giving a dinner-party at our house. Mr. and Mrs.

Henry Delance and the Warburtons and Dan and Lizzie had come over to discuss a plan for the correction of the greatest folly and extravagance in the village--namely, the waste of its spiritual energy.

"At first we had to discuss a fact related to another folly, for the Delances told how Harry's pet collie had come up to the back door that day with a human skull in his mouth. Of course I knew that Harry's Bishop had returned, but held my peace about it. To them it had suggested murder, and they had consulted the chief of police.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "HARRY'S PET COLLIE HAD COME UP TO THE BACK DOOR WITH A HUMAN SKULL IN HIS MOUTH"]

"'How do you know that it is not one of your ancestors dug up in a back pasture,' I said.