XI.
MR. BLACKMAN.
“I am ready to preach the gospel to you that are at home also, for I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.”
“I hope the c’mmittee’s satisfied now,” sputtered Maybee. “They’ve got a degraded school, with me in one room and Tod in another. I don’t care! Mr. Blackman’s gone to the ’cademy, and we have wimmins to teach us. Mine has curls, and Tod’s hasn’t, and mine prays a real nice little prayer before she says ‘Our Father.’ Mr. Blackman never said only that, quick’s ever he could,—Amen! ring-a-ling-a-ling, right along together, as if it didn’t mean nothing ’tall.”
Maybee was right. “Our Father” had no meaning to Mr. Blackman.
Dick and Will, who were both trying to be Christian boys now, were talking it over one day. “It isn’t so much what he says,” Dick remarked, “as the feeling he gives you that the Bible and such things are of no account, anyhow.”
“Yes, and then it sounds so grand,” Will rejoined, “when he talks about the Good and the True and Beautiful,—how they of themselves will help men up, and how Reason teaches us all we need to know, and about matter and law and evolution. I couldn’t understand it any more than I could father’s free agency and election, but it made me feel easier, and didn’t say do anything in particular, so I liked to think it might be true. Queer, wasn’t it, Bill Finnegan should be the one to open my eyes? but queerer yet, as he said, that I or anybody could ever forget or not care that Christ died for us.”
Dick looked thoughtful. “It seems stranger anybody can believe there is a God, and not care to know about Him or try to please Him, than it does not to believe in Him at all, like Mr. Blackman. I wonder if he reads the Bible? He never goes to church. Would you dare ask him to?”
“To go to church? Mr. Blackman? No, indeed!—that is, I shouldn’t like to. He is so much older, and he turns up his nose,—that is, he makes you feel as if it was all nonsense.”
“But it ought not to make us feel so. If he should turn up his nose at the sun, we shouldn’t think any the less of it. I’ve a good mind to. It would come a little tough to say anything of that sort to him, but—I guess I could.”
“I do wish you would, then. Oh, dear! you are so much braver than I, Dick, about these things.”