The Story of Waitstill BaxterWiggin, Kate Douglas Smith
General
The Story of Waitstill Baxter
Wiggin, Kate Douglas Smith
Fathers and daughters -- Fiction; New England -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction; Sisters -- Fiction
“What a picture of splendid audacity he must have been,” wrote Ivory,
“when he entered the orthodox meeting-house at a huge gathering where
he knew that the speakers were to denounce his teachings. Old Parson
Buzzell gave out his text from the high pulpit: Mark XIII, 37, 'AND WHAT
I SAY UNTO YOU I SAY UNTO ALL, WATCH!' Just here Cochrane stepped in at
the open door of the church and heard the warning, meant, he knew, for
himself, and seizing the moment of silence following the reading of
the text, he cried in his splendid sonorous voice, without so much as
stirring from his place within the door-frame: “'Behold I stand at the
door and knock. If any man hear my voice I will come in to him and will
sup with him,--I come to preach the everlasting gospel to every one that
heareth, and all that I want here is my bigness on the floor.'”
“I cannot find,” continued Ivory on another page, “that my father or
mother ever engaged in any of the foolish and childish practices which
disgraced the meetings of some of Cochrane's most fanatical followers
and converts. By my mother's conversations (some of which I have
repeated to you, but which may be full of errors, because of her
confusion of mind), I believe she must have had a difference of opinion
with my father on some of these views, but I have no means of knowing
this to a certainty; nor do I know that the question of choosing
spiritual consorts' ever came between or divided them. This part of the
delusion always fills me with such unspeakable disgust that I have never
liked to seek additional light from any of the older men and women who
might revel in giving it. That my mother did not sympathize with my
father's going out to preach Cochrane's gospel through the country, this
I know, and she was so truly religious, so burning with zeal, that had
she fully believed in my father's mission she would have spurred him on,
instead of endeavoring to detain him.”
“You know the retribution that overtook Cochrane at last,” wrote Ivory
again, when he had shown the man's early victories and his enormous
influence. “There began to be indignant protests against his doctrines
by lawyers and doctors, as well as by ministers; not from all sides
however; for remember, in extenuation of my father's and my mother's
espousal of this strange belief, that many of the strongest and wisest
men, as well as the purest and finest women in York county came under
this man's spell for a time and believed in him implicitly, some of them
even unto the end.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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