In the brush : $b or, Old-time social, political, and religious life in the southwestPierson, Hamilton W. (Hamilton Wilcox)
History
In the brush : $b or, Old-time social, political, and religious life in the southwest
Pierson, Hamilton W. (Hamilton Wilcox)
Missions -- Southwest, Old; Southwest, Old -- Social life and customs
"Where did you come from, stranger, and how did you get among these
hills, a man that has studied Greek a dozen years? Now let me own up. I
don't know a thing about Greek; never studied it at all. I don't know a
Greek letter from a turkey-track. I am a candidate for Congress, out on
an electioneering excursion. I knew everybody at the table but you, and
I saw that it was a Baptist crowd. I wanted to win their favor and get
their votes. I heard Parson Smith preach on baptism in the city last
winter, and I was giving them his Greek as well as I could remember it.
Now," said the Judge, with a jolly laugh at the ridiculousness of his
position, "if you let this out on me so that my opponent can get hold
of it before I am through this canvass, I'll never forgive you."
It is but simple justice to these Baptists to say that, had the Judge
chanced to dine and eat peaches-and-cream that day with a company of
adherents of the other champion, his predilections would have been
just as strong in favor of Parson Clarke, and he would have marshaled
his Greek just as positively in favor of "infants" as "subjects" and
"sprinkling" as the "mode."
I am sure I shall be pardoned if I interrupt the flow of my narrative
to speak of what seems to me the remarkable fact that, more than forty
years after the scenes I have just described, I am able to say that the
"Parson Smith," so named by the candidate as furnishing his Greek, was
a revered friend whom, until quite recently, I had not met for more
than twenty years; to whose hospitable home, cheered by the bright
sunshine of one of the noblest and the best of wives and mothers, I was
for years welcomed on my return from my long horseback journeys, with
a cordiality as warm, I am sure, as though I had been a member of his
own ecclesiastical fold or diocese, who, now in his eighty-eighth year,
resides in New York City, the honored and beloved senior Bishop of the
Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States.
And I take great pleasure in saying that no bishop or member of his
own Church or any other, who has not, as I have, often met him in
his parochial journeyings, traveled over thousands on thousands of
miles of the same indescribably rough roads, climbed on horseback
the same steep mountain-paths, and partaken of the rough but generous
hospitality of the same rude cabins, can possibly understand with
what patience, with what energy, with what unconquerable devotion, he
has thus toiled for wellnigh half a century for the dear Church and
the dearer Master he has so long loved and served with such pure and
glowing love.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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