A Circuit Rider's Wife

by Corra Harris

WILLIAM BECOMES A PRODIGAL

William never made but two long journeys away from home. One was to visit a brother minister; the other was a sort of involuntary excursion he made away from God in his own mind. And as the first trip led to the second I will begin with that.

There was a young man in William's class at college named Horace Pendleton, who entered the ministry with him, and joined the North Georgia Conference at the same time. William had that devotion for him one often sees in a good man for just a smart one. He placed an extravagant value upon his gifts, and he was one of the heroes of our younger married years, about whom he talked with affectionate blindness.

And there is no doubt that Horace Pendleton had a gift, the gift of rising. You might have thought he was in the world instead of the church, he went up so fast. He had been ordained scarcely long enough to become a deacon before he was well enough known to be preaching commencement sermons at young ladies' seminaries and delivering lectures everywhere. He had that naïve bravery of intelligence which enabled him to accept with dignity an invitation to lecture on any subject from "Sunshine" to the "Psychology of St. Paul."

I remember him very well in those days, a thin, long, young man with a face so narrow and tight and bright that when he talked in his high metallic voice one received the impression of light streaming in up his higher nature through a keyhole. I specify higher nature, because Pendleton never addressed himself to any other part of the spiritual anatomy. I always had the feeling when I heard him that he inflated each word, so that some of the weightiest and most ancient verbs in the Scriptures floated from his lips as lightly as if they had been the cast-off theological tail-feathers of a growing angel. His grandest thoughts (and he was as full of them as an egg is of meat) seemed to cut monkeyshines and to make faces back at him the moment he uttered them. Personally, I never liked him. He talked too much about sacrifice and was entirely too fortunate himself. Maybe I was jealous of him.

The contrast between his career in the ministry and that of William was certainly striking. He had been made a Doctor of Divinity and was filling the best churches in his Conference, while William and I were still serving mountain circuits. And it was not long before none of the churches in our Conference were good enough for him, so he had to be transferred to get one commensurate with his ability. Even then he had enough surplus energy to run a sideline in literature. I have always thought that if he had been a land agent, instead of a preacher, he could have sold the whole of Alaska and the adjacent icebergs in one quadrennium.

And I reckon I may as well admit that there was an invincible streak of meanness in me which prevented my admiring him, for, from start to finish, he was a man of impeccable reputation, and undoubtedly irreproachable character, as we use those words, and I could have admired him as anything else but a preacher. It was his shockingly developed talent for worldly success that revolted me. To this day, the gospel, the real "lose-your-life-for-my-sake" gospel sounds better, more like gospel to me if it is preached by a man who is literally poor. Maybe it is because I learned to revere this trait in William.

But in every way, always William could surpass me in the dignity of love. So he went on loving Horace Pendleton. He believed that the Lord was lavish in favors to him because of his superior worth, and this accounted for his good fortune, and I never interfered with any of William's idolatries; they were all creditable to him.

At last the time came when he received an invitation from Pendleton (who was now pastor of the leading Methodist Church in a flourishing city in another state) to visit him. They had always kept up a sort of desultory correspondence, and I am sure Pendleton never received finer laurels of praise than William sent him in his letters.

We were in a small town that year in the malarial district and William's health was not good. It was early spring, before the revival season opened, and it so happened that there was some kind of political convention on hand, which enabled him to secure special rates on the railroad. So one morning in April, I plumed and preened him in his best clothes and sent him on his happy journey. When he returned a week later William was a changed man. He talked with a breadth and intelligence upon many old and new subjects, that I had never observed in him before. Yet it seemed to me that something great in him had faded. He was stuffed to the neck with ethics as loose fitting morally as the sack coat of worldly-mindedness, and he did not suspect it. His very expression had changed. He looked, well, to put it as mildly as I can, William looked sophisticated, and it is as belittling a look as a good man can wear. There is a Moses simplicity about goodness that has never been improved upon by the wisest ape-expression of the smartest man that ever lived, and William's simplicity had been blurred.