And as Tommy turned to the book again, Mr. Bayliss stole away down the path, convinced that this was not the time to make his presence known. On his homeward way he pondered deeply the scene he had just witnessed. Its significance moved him strongly, for he saw a ray of hope ahead for the success of his ministry among this people. Five years before, when he was a senior at the Princeton Theological Seminary, he had chanced upon an open letter in a mission magazine which stated that for miles and miles along this valley there was not a single minister nor church, and that hundreds of people, from year-end to year-end, never heard the Word of God. He had decided that this should be his field of labor, and so soon as he had been ordained he had journeyed to Wentworth. At first he had held services in an old cabin; gradually he succeeded in interesting charitable people in his work, and finally secured enough money to build a small church, and to purchase and consecrate a piece of ground behind it for a burying-place.
But in matters of religion, as in matters of education, he had found the people strangely apathetic. They came to him to be married, and sent for him sometimes in sickness; it was he who committed their bodies to the grave: but marriages and deaths aside, he had small part in their lives. He had thought sometimes that the reason of failure must be some fault in himself, and had his moments of discouragement, as all men have; but the scene he had just witnessed gave him a clue to one cause of failure. He saw that some degree of education must come before there could be deep and genuine spiritual awakening. He had realized the truth of this more than once in his ministry, but most deeply shortly after his arrival, when he had undertaken to distribute some Bibles among the squalid cabins on the hillside.
“We-uns don’t need no Bible,” said the woman in the first house he entered.
“Do not need one?” he echoed. “Why? Have you one in the house already?”
“No, we ain’t got none. What could we-uns do with one?”
“Do with it? Read it, of course.”
“But we can’t read,” said the woman, sullenly. “They ain’t no chance t’ learn. It’s work, work, from sun-up t’ dark.”
Mr. Bayliss stood for a moment nonplussed.
“Not read!” he repeated at last. “But, surely, some of the miners or their families can read.”
The woman shook her head.