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My own church, of course, was the Southern Methodist, but the revival meeting at which I was converted was a union gathering in the Northern Methodist edifice, which was about a block from Braun’s saloon and an even shorter distance from the county jail. We called it the Rock church because it was constructed largely of granite blocks. Its members were considered good enough people in their way, but they were hardly among the socially elect, for many of them lived south of the Post Office among the Catholics and the Lutherans, and in some circles it was suspected that they held, at times, intercourse with the Devil. Nevertheless, they were Methodists and Christians and first-class politicians, and by this time they have probably assumed control of the town.
All of the Protestant congregations of Farmington chipped in to pay the $600 demanded by Brother McConnell for his week’s work for the Lord. This was a goodly fee, but it was not considered exorbitant, as Brother McConnell was a professional devil-chaser with a national reputation, and it was felt that he, if anyone, could put Farmington on the right side of the heavenly ledger. There was considerable rivalry among our good people as to who should entertain the evangelist and pay for his fried chicken and other delicacies, and I do not recall who finally drew the plum. But the family whose bed and board he graced was considered very fortunate; it had practically assured itself of ultimate salvation, since the emissaries of the Devil would not dare to invade such a sanctuary of God.
Brother McConnell was an extraordinarily agile man. Throughout his service, and particularly after the collection had been taken up and found to be good, he bounded back and forth about the pulpit, chasing the Devil hither and yon, shaking his hair from his eyes, sweating at every pore and roaring charges about dens of evil that I, for one, was never able to find in Farmington, although I headed several exploring parties. He dealt largely in that sort of goods; to him, and to most of the other preachers that I recall, morality and goodness were nothing but chastity, and they never let an opportunity pass to insinuate that the finest men in our town whiled away their idle hours with scarlet women. Their insinuations, of course, had no basis in fact; to my knowledge there was but one professional scarlet woman in town, and there simply was not time. However, there were, to be sure, amateurs.
The church was crowded on the night I was told that Jesus had taken possession of my soul. I sat about the middle of the center section with my elder brother, a phlegmatic boy who was also converted but who would never talk much about it, while across the aisle were my sister and my younger brother. Every few moments the evangelist would stop shouting and sink back into his chair, gasping, wiping his brow and breaking into sobs as he bowed his head in a prayer that came in a throaty mumble from his lips. Here and there throughout the house was an echoing gasp and a strangled sob, utterances of tortured and frightened souls about to be swirled into a great wave of religious frenzy. And standing in the aisle and about the pulpit were Brothers and Sisters, experienced revival workers, eager retrievers for the Lord, their faces flushed with emotion and their eagle eyes roving the congregation in quest of just such persons.
The instant the evangelist sat down, his band leader popped up like a trained seal, and from the band and the augmented choir poured the lilting measures of a hymn.
Oh, that will be
Glory for me!
Glory for me,
Yes, glory for me!
When by His grace
I shall look on His face,
That will be glory,
Yes, glory for me!
The first hymn was usually something of this sort, a tune with a swing to it, to get the congregation swaying in rhythm, and to attract the uncertain sinners lounging about the door and looking in, unable to decide whether or not to enter. Usually they came in after hearing “Glory” and a song or two like “Bringing in the Sheaves” and “Jesus, Lover of My Soul.” Later the choir swung into the doleful songs like “Rock of Ages” and “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” The emotional appeal was terrific; after the first hymn or two the audience joined, bellowing the words with fanatical fervor. Murmurs began to arise as the evangelist alternately talked and prayed, and then suddenly the music stopped, the preacher shut off his talk and for an instant there was a silence. It was theatrical hokum, but effective as always. Then Brother McConnell leaped and lunged to the front of the pulpit, his eyes glaring and his hair streaming down before his eyes. He flung his arms wide.
“Come to Jesus!” he shouted. “Brothers! Sisters! Come to Jesus!”
He stood there trembling, imploring the sinners to abandon their hellish lives, and the choir boomed into song:
Lives there a friend like the lowly Jesus?
No, not one!
No, not one!
All over the church now there were cries of ecstatic agony as the victims writhed in emotional torture, and after a little while people began jumping to their feet and shouting:
“Glory! Glory to God! Hallelujah!”
The noise was deafening. People were shouting in every part of the audience, they were weeping and moaning. One old woman jumped to her feet, climbed onto her seat and began to yell:
“I see Jesus! I see Jesus! I see Jesus!”
She repeated it over and over again, “I see Jesus!” and finally she collapsed into her seat, mumbling and weeping. The evangelist took up the cry. He roared back and forth across the pulpit, shaking his hands above his head, calling on God to damn the sinners. His whole body quivered and he screamed at the top of his voice:
“Jesus is in this house! Come to Jesus! Give your heart to God!”
And above the roar of his voice and the rumble of the seething congregation rose the music. It ebbed and flowed, it beat against the rafters and rebounded from the floor, always that regular beat of a hymn, like tom-toms in the jungles of Hayti. Many of the choir members sang hysterically, their voices rising on the high notes into veritable shrieks, but there was no change in the steady thunder of the organ or the wail of the violin, and there was no escaping the emotional effect of the song:
“Bringing in the sheaves,
Bringing in the sheaves,
We shall come rejoicing,
Bringing in the sheaves.”
Then there was testimony. Old skinflints who had devoted their lives to cheating their neighbors, old women whose gossiping and backbiting were the talk of the town, hopped into the aisles and told how, at some previous meeting, God had entered their hearts and made them pure and holy. Their voices rose to shrieks; they grew red in the face from the fervor of their shouts, and one old man who had only that day cheated half a dozen men in a real-estate deal stood in the aisle with his hands raised toward Heaven and wept bitterly over the sins of the world. Tears streamed down their faces, and many who had only a few hours before dumped sand in the sugar groaned loudly in sympathetic torment, and shouted “Amen, Brother! Amen!”
By this time Brother McConnell’s collar hung limp about his neck, but his passion for the Lord was unchecked. He stopped the testimony when it appeared that everybody in the church wanted to say something; there was another hymn and he began calling for converts. He shouted that we were all wicked sinners and must come to Jesus.
“All who want to go to Heaven stand up!”
Naturally, everybody stood up. He told them to sit down; they obeyed, for he held them in the hollow of his hand.
“All Christians stand up!”
Everybody stood up except my sister, and as I think things over after the lapse of years I know that was what first caused me to suspect that she was, and is, a remarkably intelligent woman. She said afterward that she resented Brother McConnell’s holier-than-thou attitude, and thought he was an old windbag. She could not swallow his repeated assertion that he was a representative of God, and that the Lord had sent him to gather Farmington into the fold. She had, better than anyone else there, control over her emotions; she could not be stampeded. But for several years thereafter she was the target of a great deal of missionary zeal; even the Catholics tried their hands with her after it had become obvious that she would not subscribe to the beliefs of the Methodists, but all of it was unsuccessful. They could not feaze her even when they pointed her out as “that Asbury girl who wouldn’t say she was a Christian.”
Half the men and women in the church were sobbing while the band played, the choir sang its dismal tunes and Brother McConnell swayed back and forth in the pulpit and pleaded with them to get right with God and confess their sins.
“Oh, Brothers, come to Jesus!” he cried. “Let God enter your heart this night! Give your heart to Jesus!”
At the beginning of the moaning and groaning the Brothers and Sisters who were to act as procurers for the Lord scattered over the church, and as the services went on they picked out the ones who seemed to be most upset emotionally and therefore ripest for glory. They hung over these poor creatures, sniveling down their necks, exulting in their misery, exhorting them to march down the aisle and see God. These Brothers and Sisters, of course, had been converted many years before and were O.K. with the Lord.
“Oh, Brother!” they pleaded. “Come to glory! Give your heart to Jesus! Jesus died that you might be saved! He died on the cross for you! Brother, come to Jesus!”
And so on ad nauseam, with their continual repetition of Jesus and glory, glory and Jesus. There was no attempt at sensible argument, no effort to show the prospective converts that the Christian religion was better than the Mohammedan religion or the religion of Zoroaster; there was nothing but a continual hammering at emotional weaknesses. And finally the bewildered brains of the victims sagged under the strain and they stumbled into the aisles and were hauled and shoved and pushed down to the mourners’ bench, and presumably into the presence of God as embodied in His earthly representative, Brother Lincoln McConnell.