Christian fiction; Circuit riders -- Fiction; Domestic fiction; Spouses of clergy -- Fiction
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 naively 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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