This report sounds like a piece of clerical humor; grim, maybe, but harmless and meaning nothing. Would to God this were true! Then perhaps the picture of these 30,000 shepherdless flocks might turn out to be only a nightmare. I tried to shake the thing out of my mind; but immediately the long line of my ministerial acquaintances passed unwillingly before me; and I solemnly affirm that, with a few princely exceptions, these men after being plunged into their ministry, coming up for air, as it were, faced toward the city parish as flowers turn toward the light; from the country, they struck out for the village; from the village, they struck out for the town; from the town, they struck out for the city; from the city, they struck out for the metropolis.
The Preacher’s Flight
The more I struggled to free myself from a conclusion on this matter, the deeper into conviction I sank. I recalled, much against my inclination, a bad half-hour several years ago at the headquarters of one of the great religious bodies of America. The occasion was the meeting of the National Social Service Commission of that denomination. I had just finished reading a report, which expressed the idea that we might look forward to the day when country parishes would be put up in packages containing people enough supporting one church, so that churches in the country would be as powerful, ministers in the country would be as influential, as city churches, on the one hand, and city ministers on the other. A captain of city industry was a member of the commission. During my paper, hands in pockets, he paced the floor up and down—somewhat to my discomfiture as I recall. When I concluded reading, he broke out with:
“Bosh! All bosh! The country church will always be of little account. It gets culls for ministers—it always has; it always will. Just as I left the farm for the city to improve my lot, so every country minister who can will leave the country parish for the city parish to improve his lot.”
That I suffered a shock as if by lightning may easily be imagined. The steel-blue tone of this man did something to my heart; did something to my faith in human nature hard to define. This captain of industry—and I suspect that this is what did the damage—never seemed to question the legitimacy of the preacher’s flight. Representing, as he did, the leading laymen of his denomination, quietly accepting the exodus of country preachers as perfectly normal—because running true to the economics of good business instinct—he appalled me with his cynicism. And it took me many a month, I confess, to get back my belief in humankind. But it came back, and came back strong in the following manner:
Around the Glover’s Cot
By accident, one summer, I made a find; in one of the 30,000 pastorless parishes, a man lying prone on a cot; the cot standing on a stone-boat; the stone-boat lying close to a deep pool in the bend of a little river, in the shade of a great elm-tree; the man all alone, flat on his back, silently whipping the trout-pool with his fly. I came to believe in this helpless fisherman, and again all things good and beautiful seemed possible. I got the story from his sister, but can give only hints of it here.
As a boy on the farm he had made up his mind to get an education. At sixteen he was looking forward impatiently to beginning his courses of study, when one day in the woods a tree which the men folks were cutting down fell on him and broke his back. He never walked again, nor, in fact, ever again sat up. Doomed to lie on his back, all his hopes blighted, he asked for something to do with his hands. They gave him needle and thread, shears and a piece of buckskin. He made a pair of clumsy buckskin gloves. He made a less clumsy pair. He made pair after pair, better and still better. Then dozens of pairs, until his skill built up a small business. But his ambition mounted with success, and he asked whether he couldn’t study something.
“Can’t I study law?” he pleaded.
They got him law-books. He read law, he made buckskin gloves; he made gloves, he read law. He was admitted to the bar. He became justice-of-the-peace in his backwoods settlement. Men got to coming for miles to the glover’s cot to tell their troubles and look into his deep eyes, hear his counsel, and feel his glad hand. He was a real peacemaker under the guise of a lawyer. His ethics backed up to and rested upon the Sermon on the Mount. He bought land, hired it tilled, built himself a better house, and settled into the character of a country squire. He was of the little church flock, and the rest of the flock came to set great store by his good sense, his wholesome cheer, indomitable activity, and, withal, his straight reliance on God. In fact, the helpless glover’s dwelling was the meeting-place for the flock about as often as the church building; for everybody said, “We get new strength to keep a-going when we meet around the cot.”