Christian fiction; Circuit riders -- Fiction; Domestic fiction; Spouses of clergy -- Fiction
The church we attended was nearly as grand-looking inside as a theater.
Every pew was filled, and there was no misbehavior on the back benches,
such as William contended with to the last. We had a plush-covered one
near the front, and a stool to put our feet on, and a library hooked to
the back of the pew in front of us, containing a bulletin of the
church's news. I didn't have time to find the "society column," but I
was looking for it when the preacher came in. I expected to hear a
perfectly-scarifying sermon, he looked so much like a tintype of the
prophet Jeremiah; but he took his text from Mark about the healing of
the man with the withered hand, and preached on the hypnotism of Jesus.
He made a clean sweep of the miracles in the most elegant, convincing
language you ever heard. And I sat and cried to think of what he'd
done to Scriptures William would have died to preserve. The girls were
mortified at the scene I was making. I don't reckon anybody had ever
cried in that church before, and I am sure no man was ever convicted of
his sins there.
When we reached home I told Sarah about going back to Redwine, first
thing. Then I came on upstairs and had it out with William in a very
few words, while I was pulling out the dresser drawers and putting my
things in the trunk.
"William," I said, kneeling down on the floor with my back to his
picture on my dresser, laying my collars in the tray, "you were right.
There is something wrong with the church system, something wrong with
the institutional religion that the church is propagating; but there is
nothing wrong with the truth of God for which you stood and made me
stand for thirty years, and I am going back where some of the people
know it, whether they know anything else or not.
"Up here the best, the wisest people don't know what the truth of God
is; they think they can find it in science. Faith is for fools who
cannot think. They are not trying to reconcile God to man, but man to
God, and trimming down the Holy Ghost to suit his scientific bug
faculties."
Then I reached back, snatched up his photo, laid it bottom upward on
top of the collars. I didn't feel that I could look him squarely in
the face till I had it setting back on the mantel in the house at
Redwine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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