Pedigreed Austerity Better Than Ignorance
Human life at its best is no mere accident which may happen anywhere under any conditions. The best has its pedigree. It is the result of infinite pains with children as with crops and animals. Even the austere, narrow-gaged leadership having a pedigree is far better than this ignorant, illiterate type.
I remember well as a lad how my father, a country minister, collegebred and trained in the theological school of his particular denominational stripe, stood rock-like in his parish for temperance. It was a grape country, with several wine distilleries. My father taught abstention from wine-drinking and preached against the distilleries. One church pillar was in the wine business and furnished the sacramental wine. My father finally carried his logic to the point where he made announcement:
“Next Sunday at the Communion we shall not use fermented wine.”
Sunday came. A larger congregation than usual assembled. There was a tenseness of silent emotion in the stiff Sunday-dressed village and farmer folk, which I can feel yet, after forty years.
The communion-table was set. I see my father now, as he picked up the flagon of wine and poured into the chalice. He paused—on his face a sudden look of bewilderment. Then slowly he poured the chalice of wine back into the flagon, strode to the door, and emptied the contents on the ground. Quietly resuming the ceremony he said:
“We will commune without wine to-day.”
The distiller had done his dirty work and put one over on the country parson. But the parson, although he caused a sense of consternation to creep over the church folk,—akin to the horror in the multitude when Count Antonio, in Anthony Hope’s tonic story, laid hands on the Sacred Bones in midstream,—by this daring act helped plug the bung-holes and spike the spigots in the cellars of that county. And the whole countryside, be it said, responded to the resolute will of my father to make God known to a community steeped in wine.
My father probably shared the narrow-mindedness of his particular pedigree, but he certainly hewed to the line like a prophet of old. His crop of young converts came usually in winter; but the snow and ice had no deterring chill for him. He never thought of postponing the baptismal rite till summer. He had a large hole cut through in the little river near by, for water helped mightily in his system of doctrine. He didn’t spare me either. At eleven years of age, he led me, as he did my country playmates, out of the sleigh, down the snowbank, into this ice-water. There was no softening of the ideals of life in that parish, I can tell you. And the God of Daniel was known and acknowledged there in fear and trembling.
When, in after years it fell to my fortune to live on the Skims and to woo sleep with logging, stumping, and “scratching” the land, I saw what a real Sunday-school would do even in a submarginal community for the children of the pine cut-over. There was the farmer widow woman with the man’s hands. What would have been her chances of rearing her seven children to usefulness and self-respect without that weekly community-school under good leadership?