The Modern Wolf a Playful Cub?
See how I got back my faith? The prone fisherman on his stone-boat was a godsend to me. I saw that personal life is so rich that no one can be broken in body to the point where, in case he “layeth down his life for the sheep,” he will be making a mean gift. I half suspect that God raises up out of the ground, as it were, in many of these pastorless communities a proxy for the parson that, beholding the wolf, leaveth the sheep and fleeth to the city—a proxy, like the glover-lawyer, who is no quitter. And in some parishes where the preacher still sticks (his face set, however, toward the city) I fancy a man or a woman or a child can be found who is naïvely scaring off the wolf.
Norris Shepardson was such a man. Farmer, poet, refined spirit, he went about his work making everybody believe that a new day is fresh from God. Ambrose Brimmer, a member of the community, didn’t happen to be much of a churchman, and his Sunday haymaking teased the parson mightily. I remember well one perfect trout day, when Ambrose was showing me the holes in a stream strange to my rod, that we got to talking about preachers.
“I don’t care a damn if the parson does see me haying on Sunday,” said Ambrose; “but if I get a sight of Norris Shepardson driving up the road, I skedaddle and hide, you bet! You know Norris Shepardson. Well, Norris Shepardson is a Christian and no quack.”
And Ambrose was right. Norris Shepardson was a Christian from his eyelashes to his finger-tips; and his sweet belief in you put you straightway under obligation to goodness when he cast a glance your way.
It is probably true that I have been something of a modern-life fan. But when I try to think of the Master’s parables of the shepherd, the sheep, and the wolf, and of the one sheep that was lost while the ninety and nine were safe in the fold, I confess that I am troubled about my modern-life philosophy.
Are modern sheep any the less in need of a downright shepherd because they are modern?
Isn’t there a wolf any longer in times that are modern? Or may he perhaps be just a playful cub? Or possibly, by this time, a toothless, plain, doddering beastling?
Has the age of lofty heroism in religion—the age of sheer contempt of some of the traditional goods of life—clean passed away? And does economics furnish the better clue in modern days to those who are called of God to preach?
Do we need any 30,000 more preachers in the country trenches? Do we need any shock troops at all? Isn’t it perfectly orthodox pacifism in these days for all the picked soldiers in the war on the devil to fall back into comfortable winter quarters?