He stood in the little dim pulpit, the summer evening was fading, the lamps in the church had not been lighted, and the faces of the village folk were softened, sweetened in the gentle Sabbath gloom. He drew a picture of Paul in prison at Rome, old and in anticipation of his end. William never knew how to use words fancifully, therefore they used to gather together truthfully in his sermons, as if he had wove them in. And so now we had not an elegantly-painted portrait of St. Paul, but we saw him really, the man who actually had counted all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus—so out of his bonds in the spirit. It takes a rare preacher to portray one "found in Christ." He cannot do it with the best theological vocabulary, nor the finest scientific terms. But William, I cannot tell how he did it—all I know is that every time he put his sentences together, they cast again the image of the Saviour upon every heart before him. He stood like a man who has his hand upon the latch-string of the door of his Father's house, counting over one by one the things to be lost and gained there. Nothing remained but a few simple things like loving one another. He removed the world and the cares of it and set our feet in the way of life like a wise man guiding little children.
If Horace Pendleton had put all he knew into one discourse, garnished it with a thousand terms taken from the "new theology," he could not have approached the awful simplicity and the high sweetness of that sermon.
But one thing I must remember to tell; as long as he lived William loved and honored this man with perfect devotion. That is the wonderful thing about being good. You see it always, your eyes are happily holden to evil. On the other hand, I had occasion to learn after William's death that Pendleton regarded him with good-natured derision. He thought him a stupid man bound down to the earth by a meager theology. He even wrote an obituary notice of William that must have made his guardian angel long to kick him—all a grand toot to show the contrast between a preacher like himself and a foolish old stutterer like William.
CHAPTER XI
FINANCES AND FASHIONS
It is curious what things are revealed to us as we go along. I used to wonder, because William wondered, where, in what year, Paul did this or that which is recorded in Acts. I remember how William used to get down his commentaries and squint everywhere along margins for dates to discover exactly where he was in the spring, say, of 54 A. D. At the time it was passing strange to me that no exact record of dates was taken concerning the doings of a man who occasionally turned the world upside down as he went through it. But now it is perfectly clear. Those who wrote never specified whether it was the first or second Sunday that Paul said thus and so at Antioch. The record was merely of the timeless truth he uttered, because Paul and the rest of them engaged in this Scripture-making and doing back there were already out of time in their consciousness. They were figures in Eternity making the great journey by another calendar than ours.
Since I have been writing this poor record of William, it is not time that matters to me. I forget to tell of his years in each chapter, or to describe the changes in his appearance. The things he did, the prayers he prayed, the faith he exercised, these crowd the memory—all so much alike, as one day resembles another day, and as one prayer resembles another prayer. But the dates have long since faded from my mind. I cannot recall, for example, when his shoulders first began to stoop, nor when he ceased to go clean-shaven, nor the year it was that his hair and beard whitened, nor when the hollows deepened to stay beneath his eyes. All I remember for certain was the changeless spirit of him, and the unconquerable courage he showed about getting ready to put off his mortality and the definite curious vividness with which he anticipated immortality.
And in other ways I have unusual difficulty in telling here what he said and did. The activities of a minister's life differ so widely from the activities of any other life that even to set them down requires a peculiar vocabulary. One cannot find the right kind even in church reports and statistics, but they must bear some great likeness to the words used in the Acts of the Apostles. I do not know how to describe them, but every man knows them when he hears them, for the language of Christianity is the one language that never changes. It gets a new translation now and then, but it is always informed with the same spirit, the same lofty pilgrim-phrases and prayer-sounding verbs. And the minister learns them because he needs them in the world where he moves.
I make an exception here of those preachers who develop a gift for church enterprise, for getting up funds for "improvements" of one sort and another. The account they give of their stewardship is not very different from that of any other business man. And they are needed. They do the greater part towards keeping the church housed, conspicuously steepled and visible to the world that passes by. They are the preachers in every Conference who are sent to "works" where a new church or a new parsonage is needed. And some of them have heroic records in collecting for these purposes. I would not take a single dollar from the sum of their renown. But this is a memorial to William, and he was not one of these. He was really an excellent preacher, a devoted pastor, but he had more spiritual intuitions than common sense about managing the practical details of the pastorate. I recognized this deficiency in him as we went along together in the itinerancy, and feeling that it was important for the Presiding Elder to have a good opinion of him in every way, I must have perjured myself to every one of them year by year, singing William's praises as a business man when I knew he was as innocent of business as the angels in Heaven. If he had been the kind of man I represented him to be, he would have been a sort of hallelujah cross and crisscross between Daniel Webster, John D. Rockefeller and St. Paul. And I remember the genial patience with which the gray-headed elders used to listen to my Williamanic paeans. But they could not have believed me, for he was never sent to a place where visible mortar and stone work had to be accomplished for the advancement of the church. And now, when it is all over, when the violets are blooming so much at home above his dear dust, I feel at last that I can afford to confess his beautiful limitations.