Crestlands Part 8

For some time he kept aloof from Oaklands; not only because of Abby, but because, when in Betsy's presence, certain tones of her voice when speaking to him, and a wistful look in her eyes, troubled him with a vague, half-conscious sense that she, young though she was, comprehended his trouble.

In July, Abby, taking advantage of the proffered companionship of a family who were returning to Virginia, went for a protracted visit.

After arriving in Norfolk, she decided to make her home with a cousin there. It was many a day before Abner Dudley saw her again.

CHAPTER IX.

THE GREAT REVIVAL

In the summer of 1801, Cane Ridge became a storm-center of the great religious agitation which at that time was sweeping over the Western States.

In the spring of that year, Barton Stone, leaving his Bourbon County churches for a time, had gone to southern Kentucky to attend a meeting conducted by McGready, McGee, and other noted revivalists, upon the edge of a barren tract in Logan County where mult.i.tudes encamped, and where worship was in progress in some parts of the grounds during the entire meeting, which lasted over a week.

This southern Kentucky revival was followed by others of a like nature throughout other portions of the State, and like a wind-driven fire through the dried gra.s.s of a prairie was the effect of such meetings.

In the prevalence of this excitement, sectarianism, abashed, shrank away, and the people, irrespective of creed, united in the services.

It was decided to hold a camp-meeting at Cane Ridge. The woodland slope surrounding the meeting-house was cleared of its thick undergrowth for a s.p.a.ce of several hundred yards, and three-fourths of this s.p.a.ce was soon covered with long rows of log seats with broad aisles between the rows. In front, a s.p.a.cious platform was erected, and over all was a roof of loose boughs supported by posts.

The meeting began Thursday night before the third Sunday in August.

Before sunrise on that Thursday, the roads were thronged with carriages, wagons, ox-carts, horseback riders, and persons on foot, all moving toward the woodland rendezvous. Many came from distant parts of Kentucky; many from the neighboring States. A Revolutionary officer, skilled in estimating large encampments, declared that the crowd numbered between twenty-five and thirty thousand people.

Enthusiasm gathered intensity with each succeeding hour. There was no fixed time for intermission. Each family cooked, ate, slept at any time its members chose, and returned to the services, which began at sunrise and continued until long after midnight. Sometimes several preachers were each exhorting a large audience in different parts of the ground at the same time, while singing, shouting, praying and groaning were the constant accompaniment of the fervid, chantlike exhortations.

At night the vast encampment, illuminated by scores of bear-grease lamps, hundreds of rush-lights, and thousands of tallow dips, presented a spectacle of weird sublimity. In the improvised auditorium lights suspended from overhanging boughs fell upon a concourse of earnest worshipers whose voices, rising in the solemn melody of a hymn, mingled with the fervid pet.i.tions of the preacher, the shouts of the newly converted, the sobs and shrieks of the newly convicted. Pine knots set in sockets upon the rostrum revealed in unearthly radiance the face of some impa.s.sioned speaker, silhouetting his form with startling distinctness against a background of forest. In the shadowy depths beyond the rostrum could faintly be seen, by the light of smoldering campfires, the long, ghostly line of tents and wagons, and here and there the fitful gleam of torches, like giant fireflies in the surrounding gloom. Enclosing all this was a black and seemingly illimitable expanse, from which could be heard the occasional hoot of an owl or the baying of a hound, mingled with the unceasing voice of the trees, now rising almost to a scream, now softly sighing, now wailing as in a dying agony.

In an environment of such great natural solemnity, and under the spell of tense religious fervor, it was not strange that the very atmosphere seemed surcharged with a mystical and awful force, and that many of the campers were soon the victims of those singular "manifestations"

called, in the parlance of the times, "the falling exercise," "the jerks," "the trance," and "the ecstasy." The various phases of this strange disorder attacked indiscriminately the credulous and the critical, the fervid and the frivolous, the religious and the reprobate. A strong man, while quietly attending to the exposition of some text; a young girl, while listening with blanching lips and quickening pulses to the impa.s.sioned appeal of the exhorter; or a careless onlooker, while laughing and jesting, might suddenly be affected by this terrifying malady. Some scoffer might perhaps at one moment be sneering or denouncing the demonstrations as demoniac, and the next be attacked with great violence. Nor were the campers alone affected. New arrivals, while yet upon the outskirts of the encampment, were sometimes seized with violent and inexplicable sensations. The air seemed charged with an irresistible electrical force.

Many farmers of the neighborhood attended the meeting, taking advantage of the comparatively leisure season between summer harvesting and fall wheat-sowing. Mason Rogers was among this number, his wife declaring that "the hull thing would likely fall through ef Mason warn't thar to holp lead the singin'. Ez fer me," she said cheerfully to her children, "I'll stay to home most o' the time to cook things fer you-all ter eat up thar et the camp. Some day when I kin spar' time, I'll be ovah to heah the preachin', an' ter see whut's goin' on. You kin go, too, Susan, ef you want to, seein' ez you air 't.i.tled to a leetle play-spaill arter wuckin' so spry all summah. You kin find a place to sleep with Betsy in Gilcrest's tent, or with Molly an' Ann Trabue. I reckon yer pap an' Henry an' Abner kin git a shakedown in some uv the wagon-beds, or else on the groun'; 'twon't hurt 'em this dry weathah.

No, Tommy, nary step do you go; you an' Buddy's gwintah stay right heah. Camp-meetin's hain't no place fer brats. Maybe, though, ef you're good, I'll tek you ovah with me some day; or I'll let you go 'long with Rache an' Tom some mawnin', when they tek the baskets uv vi'tuls fur the folks to eat."

CHAPTER X.

AFTERNOON IN THE GROVE

One afternoon toward the close of the revival, Betsy and John Calvin Gilcrest and Henry and Susan Rogers took their lunch-baskets to a shady grove near the big spring, with the intention of spending the afternoon in the woods.

"I'm completely worn out," declared Susan, throwing herself down upon a gra.s.sy knoll and tossing her bonnet aside. "I've had enough excitement for one while."

"And I, too," a.s.sented Betsy, as she uncovered her lunch-basket. "Every nerve in my body is on the war-path. We'll be having the 'jerks,' if this meeting lasts much longer."

"If you do," remarked John Calvin, as he attacked the wing of a fried chicken, "I suppose you'll think it an 'evidence of conversion,' as old Daddy Stratton shouted out this morning when Billy Hinkson fell to the ground foaming at the mouth."

"'Evidence of conversion,' indeed!" rejoined Betty. "I never felt further from it in my life. My head is like a ragbag stuffed to overflowing with all sorts of odds and ends of doctrinal wisdom, and when I want to get at any one sensible idea, out tumble a dozen or more that are of no use whatever."

"My head's all confused, too," acknowledged Susan. "Yesterday Dr.

Poague preached on 'Saved by Grace,' and showed that all we have to do is just to sit still and wait for the Lord's call. I felt real comfortable under that discourse. But last night old Brother Steadman's text was, 'Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,' and he made me dreadfully uneasy. Now, are there two plans of salvation, or only one?"

"Why, two, of course," said John Calvin, with laughing a.s.surance. "One teaches that if you mean to get to heaven, you must keep your horse everlastingly hittin' the road; the other, that the best way to get there is just to sit still. I like the 'sittin'-still plan' best, myself," he declared, with boyish frivolity.

"This is what puzzles me," said Betsy, ignoring her brother's irreverent summary of the two seemingly conflicting doctrines, "grace"

and "works": "if it be true, as so many of our learned brethren teach, that nothing good that one can do merits salvation, then it seems to me that, in accordance with every principle of justice, nothing bad that one can do ought to merit d.a.m.nation. Therefore, why should not I do the thing that pleaseth me best, whether it be good or bad? If I'm one of the 'elect,' nothing will keep me out of heaven, anyway."

"If you're of the elect, Betsy, you won't ever want to be wicked,"

Henry said gravely, speaking for the first time.

"Then, I fear I'm not of the elect."

"Oh, yes, I hope you are--only you're not yet converted. When you are, you'll see things differently." Henry was of a devout, reverent temperament, with a vivid imagination in spite of his quiet, self-contained manner. He had been greatly stirred by what he had seen and heard during the last ten days.

"But, Henry," began Betsy, argumentatively, "if I'm among the chosen at all, I'm as much chosen now as I will ever be; for I'm a sheep, not a goat--'Once a sheep, always a sheep,' you know."

"Well, sis," teasingly interrupted John Calvin, "if you're a sheep, you're surely one of the black ones; and it'll take a mighty heap o'

scrubbin', I tell you, to get you white."

"And you," rejoined his sister, playfully, "I fear must be a goat--judging by the way you're always b.u.t.ting in, and interrupting serious converse."

"Oh," answered John Calvin, lightly, "I ain't bad enough to be cla.s.sed with the goats, nor good enough to be a sheep, even a black one. That other parable about the wheatfield fits my case better. I reckon I'm just one of those useless tares."

His sister retorted: "The parable also declares that 'he who sows the tares is the devil,' and I hardly believe you are prepared to call your parents the devil, although they put you into the church by having you baptized in infancy." Then, resuming her conversation with Henry, she said, "If I am of the elect at all, Henry, I am elected already, before conversion, am I not?"

"To be sure," Henry replied. "G.o.d chose his people before the foundation of the world."

"Bosh!" exclaimed Susan, impatiently. "You don't know what G.o.d was doing before the foundation of the world, and I doubt if any of those wise brethren up at the camp do, either."

"Besides," added the irrepressible John Calvin, "the catechism says we're made of the dust of the earth; and before the foundation of the world, there wasn't any dust. So, the elect must mean some other folks--not us of this world, at all."

"Doubtless the inhabitants of Mars or Jupiter," observed Betty, laughing in spite of herself at John's flippant remark.

"Betsy," presently said Henry very earnestly, "I've watched you and Susan closely all during this revival, and I do believe that you both are really under conviction. The belief in your own wickedness and in the total depravity of the human heart is the first link in the chain--as Brother Weaver says."

"But I do not believe in 'total depravity,'" maintained Betsy, stoutly.

"If the human race was utterly depraved to start with, how could one keep growing worse and worse all the time?"

"Ah, Betty," said Henry, "I reasoned just as you do, once; but now I understand these things better. Although I am of myself utterly vile and worthless, the mercy of G.o.d has taken hold of me and clothed and hidden me in the righteousness of his dear Son, and now I----"

"Henry," interrupted Betsy, with sudden sweetness, for the time sobered by his earnest face and voice, "you mustn't feel hurt by anything I have said. You know I jest over the most solemn subjects, and see the ludicrous side of everything; but I can be impressed by real earnestness, and I have never doubted that you are sincere in all you say."

"Yes," said Susan, "I'd sooner doubt my own eyesight than your sincerity, Henry. I can understand and believe in that at least; but in other things I must be a bigger simpleton than even the 'wayfaring man'; for the way of salvation is anything but plain, if it includes the doctrines of our churches. I can't understand them at all."

"Understand them!" exclaimed Betsy. "Who can? Why, whenever one of our learned ministers is on the subject of 'reprobation,' 'predestination,'

or 'effectual calling,' his reasoning is so subtle and his logic so ingenious that it must puzzle the elect angels themselves to understand his arguments."