Of course I never questioned the Father's religious dogmas. I did not even know that they might be questioned. But two things troubled me persistently.
I had been taught that our Saviour was the Prince of Peace, that His chief commandment was the law of love. But when adults got together there was always talk of the war. I do not think there was any elder or deacon in our church who had not served. How often I listened to stories of the wave of murder and rapine that had swept through our mountains only a few years before!
I remember especially the placing of a battle monument just outside our village and the horde of strangers who came from various parts of the state for the ceremony. The heroes were five men in gray uniforms, all who were left of the company which had stood there and had been shot to pieces. One was an old man, three were middle aged, and one was so young that he could not have been more than sixteen on the day of the fight. The man who had been their captain stayed at the parsonage. After supper the principal men of the village gathered in our parlor. I stood by the Father's chair and listened wide-eyed as, in his cracked voice, the Captain told us all the details of that slaughter. I remember that in the excitement of his story-telling the old soldier became profane, and the Father did not rebuke him.
Somehow I could not feel any romance in modern warfare, there seemed no similarity between these men and the chivalric heroes of The Round Table. Perhaps if Launcelot had been a real person, there in the parsonage parlor, and had told me face to face and vividly how he had slain the false knight Gawaine, had made me see the smear of blood on his sword blade, the cloven headed corpse of his enemy, that also they might have seemed abhorrent.
As a little boy I could not understand how a follower of Jesus could be a soldier. I did not know that grown men were also asking the same question. Years afterwards I remember coming across Rossetti's biting sonnet—"Vox ecclesiæ, vox Christi"—
"O'er weapons blessed for carnage, to fierce youth
From evil age, the word has hissed along:—
Ye are the Lord's: go forth, destroy, be strong:
Christ's Church absolves ye from Christ's law of ruth."
I do not know what the Father would have thought of those words, for, like some of the Roundhead leaders of Cromwell's time, he had been Chaplain as well as Captain of his company. If the war had broken out again, as the "Irreconcilables" believed it surely would, and if Oliver had refused to enlist on the ground that he was studying for Christ's ministry, I think the Father would have cursed him.
The other thing which worried me was a "gospel hymn," which we sang almost every Sunday. It had a swinging tune, but the words were horrible.
There is a fountain filled with blood,
Drawn from Emanuel's veins;
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains.
Such a gory means of salvation seemed much more frightful to my childish imagination than the most sulphurous hell.