The Brentons

by Anna Chapin Ray

Later, Saint Peter's became far wiser in its generation. Its policy had been to extend a cordial welcome to all men of whatever creed, and its early fathers had felt that it was surer to attract the more unstable of its neighbours, if it held its threshold at the common level of them all. In course of time, however, wisdom dawned and broadened to a perfect day of psychological common sense. A theological reaction, of whatever sort, was bound in the last analysis to be a matter of a sudden leap, not of a deliberate slide. One either took a veritable ski-jump into the next church but three, or else one merely stayed where one was, and fretted about the details of the service.

It was now a good twenty years and more since Saint Peter's had abandoned its old barracks of a church and moved up town into its new quarters. As a matter of course, it had settled down as close as possible to the campus. A student congregation might be a bit unstable, taken as a parish; but it was distinctly lucrative, when it came to the point of counting up the offertory. Furthermore, as result of its Sunday-morning habits of arising, it was prone to turn in at the first church door that offered.

Nowadays on Sunday mornings, Saint Peter's rector had no monopoly of surplices. The choir, discreetly garbed and outwardly reverential, warbled early English settings to the hymns, the while they came striding slowly up the aisle in a species of churchly goose-step that demanded a pause on each foot, to prevent the physical march outrunning the musical one. Nowadays, too, there was daily celebration; that is, when any one was sufficiently energetic to get up and get into church in time. What happened upon those other days, when the rector was abandoned to the rows of empty pews, was still a matter of profane conjecture. Discussed in whispers, it was agreed to be a subject best left to the disclosing hand of time.

Into this elaborate and decorative harness, Scott Brenton was now breaking his young strength, his young ambition. In his old parish in the hills, it had been a question of preaching the best sermons that he could and looking out for his people in the intervals, rather than of forms and ceremonies and intonations of the Nicene Creed. In accepting the Bishop's intimation that Saint Peter's Parish would extend to him a welcoming hand, he had thought singularly little about the outward trappings of his priesthood. Catia knew it all; but she held her peace. The Bishop also had held his peace, and a little bit for the same reason that Catia had done. He knew the theological history of Scott Brenton; he knew that, like all half-broken colts, he easily might shy at first sight of the harness; yet, once with the harness on and fitted to his back, he would fall to work in earnest and pull steadily with the best of them. And it was the pulling that the Bishop wished, not the mere jingling of the farthingale. Under the last incumbent, Saint Peter's had been running down a little. It was not in all respects an easy parish; and Brenton, young, earnest and as magnetic as he was self-distrustful, was the very man to build it up. Nevertheless, the Bishop saw to it that Scott Brenton should never attend a service at Saint Peter's, until his acceptance of the parish was settled past all gainsaying.

From the first morning of his reading service at Saint Peter's, Brenton had been aware that he was opening a fresh chapter of his life. In the old hillside parish, there had been things to do and souls to save. Here, it seemed to him that all the souls had been saved prenatally. As for the things to do, these people were too critical, too self-reliant to take kindly to the intimate sort of ministrations in which, of old, he had delighted. For the future, it would be the quality of his sermons that counted most, rather than his personal contact with his people.

The congregation seemed to him conglomerate, a jumble of conflicting elements. There were the old, old residents and their offspring, people who squabbled violently among themselves as to whose ancestor came aboard the Mayflower first, and which in what capacity. There were the mediæval spinsters who always reach their best development in the semi-small New England town, spinsters who have clubs and theories, and yet play golf, and frivol delightfully above their luncheon tables. And there were college girls in hordes, alert young things, critical alike of evil and of good, of the hang of the back of a surplice where the shoulders stoop a little, and of the turning of the final phrases that naturally lead up to the And now—To Scott Brenton, looking down upon the students in the congregation, his first Sunday morning at Saint Peter's, their befeathered hats and their intent young faces seemed to him the masking labels upon a store of frozen dynamite. Thawed, it might serve for any amount of useful tunneling; it might go off explosively in the open, at almost any given instant.

Taken all in all, it was upon the student fraction of his congregation that Brenton looked with greatest interest; it was to them, in greatest measure, that the best of his sermons preached themselves. The phrase is no slipshod inversion of the fact. The best of all sermons do preach themselves, both in their original inception and their ultimate delivery. All the so-called preacher does about it is to give the intermediate polishing to his projectile, and then to hold himself still, while it is going off, and watch what happens, by way of preparation for aiming his next shot.

As a matter of course, with a target so unstable as a student audience, Brenton by no means hit the bull's-eye every time. That he did hit it occasionally, however, argues no mean ability, no paltry knowledge of youthful human nature. Over their Sunday dinners, the girls discussed his sermons with increasing vigour. The echoes of these discussions, coming to Brenton's ears, set him to preaching with increasing conscientiousness. However, there still was salvation for him; it was his sermons that he took so much in earnest, and not himself, the preacher.

But, although it was upon his student hearers that Scott Brenton tossed down, broadcast and unsaving, the best of all he had within himself, it was among the permanent residents of Saint Peter's that his real work was supposed to be done. He did that work most faithfully; he showed himself both tireless and tactful in his arrangement of the parish mechanism, in his gathering up and straightening and knotting here and there the threads his predecessor had flung down in a tangled heap. Nevertheless, his heart was in the other end of his work, not for any individual interest in the different girls; but because his whole instinct told him that here was the dynamic force of the whole organization, that the rest of it was curiously static. Under those befeathered hats were eager brains which weighed their theology and measured it, not took it ready made. It was for him to serve it out to them in such a guise that, weighed, they should not find it wanting.

Catia, on the other hand, looked upon the student end of her husband's parish with disapproving eyes. The girls annoyed her by their cocksure alertness, their little air of being primed, ready for any emergency that chanced to offer. They vexed her by their manifest absorption in her husband; they vexed her yet more by their inexplicable lack of interest in herself.