Kentucky -- Fiction; Mothers and daughters -- Fiction
Then she saw that the stupidity, the grimness of all those watching
faces was gone as if by magic. They had become bright, eager, almost
tremulous with pleasure. The girl was touched. She understood why the
peddler had so insisted upon Philip's ability to start a hymn. Music,
such crude and simple music as came their way, meant to these starved
natures all that they knew of beauty, of higher things, perhaps of
religion.
In the hush that followed, Philip began: "The Lord is in His holy
temple. Let all the earth keep silence before Him."
It was a strange setting for the stately Episcopal service, simplified
as Philip made it for the occasion; a bare, log-walled room, lit by
smelling kerosene lamps, without altar, candles or cross, without
religious symbol of any sort. Only Jacqueline followed the service,
kneeling where the congregation should have knelt, making the responses
in her clear young voice, joining him in the prayers. But Philip was
aware of no incongruity. He gave them what he had to give, and felt none
the less a priest because of his flannel shirt and his shabby
riding-trousers. Cathedral or log-cabin, it was all one to him. He knew
that with Jacqueline's singing, the Lord had indeed entered into His
holy temple.
Presently he spoke to them as he would have spoken to his Sunday-school
classes at home, earnestly and very simply, with none of the
condescending blandness of the elder. Some of their homely phrases,
their very accent, had crept unconsciously into his speech, a remnant of
the impressionable days when he had lived for a while among mountain
folk. Jacqueline realized that this unconscious adaptability was the
secret of his hold on people, of their confiding trust in him. Whatever
they might be, he was for the moment one of them, looking at their
temptations, their failures, never from the outside but from their own
point of view.
Brother Bates, a little worried at first by the mildness of his
protégé's voice and manner, realized after a few moments the
people were listening to him as they had never listened to the
hell-fire-and-damnation preachers of their previous experience. Not a
man in that room, including Percival Channing, escaped the somewhat
uncomfortable feeling that the text, "Do unto others as ye would be done
by," had been chosen particularly for his benefit--which is perhaps the
secret of great preaching.
Jacqueline, gazing about with great pride in her friend, saw that not
only was the room crowded with listeners, but that others were standing
outside in the porch. One profile, outlined for a few moments against a
window, attracted her attention by contrast with those about it; an
elderly face, worn by evident illness or suffering, sensitive and
intelligent and refined, despite the gray stubble of beard on his cheeks
and the rough flannel collar about his throat. Jacqueline watched him
curiously, until her gaze drew his and he suddenly disappeared.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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