"If I could have been put clean under the water when I j'ined and not had sech a little jest flung on my head, seems as if I'd feel safer now," she wailed. "And I've took the Lord's Supper with sinners and all kinds when it was in my conscience to be more particular and take it 'close communion' style like the Baptists. Besides, I have believed in the doctrine of election all my life, and I ain't noways sho' about mine now, although I've tried to do my duty." The fading eyes looked at us out of the old face sternly crimped with the wrinkles she had made working for God under an alien creed.
"My soul's never been satisfied, not for a single day, in your church with its easy ways and shiftless doctrines," she concluded faintly.
For once William was silenced. It was not an occasion upon which to vindicate Methodism in an argument. Neither did he have enough tautness of conviction concerning certain terrible doctrines to meet the emergency of her dogmatic needs. And so she passed unshriven to the mercies of a God who is doubtless sufficiently broad-minded to have such baptisms properly attended to somewhere in Heaven.
CHAPTER V
GOD'S ANNUALS
But the dying are not the only ones who suffer most from the sickness of their hopes. There are men with beautiful souls born with little devil seeds in them somewhere that grow like immoral perennials and poison the goodness in them. They are the people who backslide so often, who repent so thoroughly, and who flourish like green bay trees spiritually when they flourish at all. They are usually regarded as moral weaklings, and it is the fashion of saints to despise them. This is because some righteous people now, as in Christ's day, are the meanest, narrowest-minded moral snobs the world can produce. Many of them are too mean even to afford the extravagance of a transgression. And rarely, indeed, do you see one with courage enough to erect himself again, morally, once he has fallen or been discovered as fallen. But among the backsliders of the class I have mentioned you will find the bravest moral heroes of the spiritual world, men who have the courage to repent and try again with an enthusiasm that is sublime in the face of the lack of confidence expressed in them on all sides. They are a distinct class, and as we went on in the itinerancy I learned to call them God's annuals. And William never was more beautifully ordained or inspired than when he was engaged in transplanting one of those out of his sins again into the sweet soil of faith. He had a holy gardener's gift for it that was as naïve as it was industrious.
I recall one of these annuals on the Redwine Circuit. He was a slim, wild young fellow, with a kind of radiance about him; sometimes it was of angels and sometimes of the devil, but he always had it—an ineffable charm. He was brown and blue-eyed, with a level look that hero warriors have. And that was his trouble. He was made for emergencies, not for the long, daily siege of life. He was equally capable of killing an enemy or of dying for a friend, but he could not live for himself soberly and well for more than forty days at a time. Still, he had a soul. I never doubted it, though I have often doubted if some of the ablest members in our church had them, and if they were not wearing themselves out for a foolish anticipation if they expected eternal life.
It is possible for a man to behave himself all the days of his life without developing the spiritual sense. I do not say that such people have not got souls, but if they get to Heaven at all it will be in the form of granitoid nuts, and the angels will have to crack them with a Thor hammer before they can find the thing that they kept for a soul.
But Jack Stark, our Redwine annual, was too much the other way. His soul was not enough inside of him. It was the wind in his boughs that blows where it listeth. Periodically, he went on a "spree"; it was his effort to raise himself to the tenth power, because he had an instinct for raising himself one way and another. If, at the end of a week, he did not appear at the parsonage door, sober, dejected and in a proper mood for repentance, William went after him, plucked him up from somewhere out of the depths and proceeded at once to transplant him again in the right garden.