A Circuit Rider's Wife

by Corra Harris

CURIOUS FACTS ABOUT THE NATURE OF A PRIEST

What we call history is a sorry part of literature, confined to a few great wars and movements in national life and to the important events in the lives of a few important people. The common man has never starred his rôle in it. Therefore, it has never been written according to the scientific method. It is simply the spray—the big splash—humanity throws up as it goes down in the sea forever. It is what most of us do and what we think perishes with us, leaving not a record behind of the little daily deeds and wingflappings of our spirits that really make us what we are. This is why we make so little progress. The history of the great majority is never compiled for reference. We are always bunched in a paragraph, while the rest of the chapter is given to his Excellency the President, or some other momentary figure of the times.

Nobody knows exactly how the planters of Thomas Jefferson's day lived. We must depend upon fiction to give a sort of romantic impression of it. And fifty years from now no one will know how the farmers and brickmasons, grocers and merchants, managed their affairs in our own times. We shall be obliged to accept the sensational accounts left by a few wild-eyed, virus-brained socialists.

I do not know that I ought to pretend to rescue the class to which William belonged from the same kind of oblivion. But by keeping memories of the little daily things in life a preacher's wife learns some curious facts about the nature of a priest—facts that should enable the reader to make profitable comparisons between those of the old and those of the new order, and to determine which is the real minister and which is not.

One thing I discovered was that you cannot domesticate a preacher like William on this earth in this life. A woman might get married to him and hang like a kissing millstone about his neck; she might sew on his buttons, bear children for him, teach him to eat rolled oats, surround him with every evidence, privilege and obligation of strong earthly ties and a home; but he will not live there in his spirit. He belongs neither to his wife, nor to his children, nor to the civilization of his times. He belongs to God, and not to a god tamed and diminished by modern thought, but to The God, the one who divided the light from darkness, who actually did create Adam and Eve and blow His breath into them, who accepted burnt offerings sometimes, and who caused flowers to bloom upon the same altars between times.

So William never really belonged in his own house with his own body, his own wife and his breakfast, though he often rested there and seemed to enjoy the latter. He was more at home in the Psalms. I will not say he went so far as Jehovah, but when he was in a Leviticus frame of mind very few of the minor prophets satisfied his cravings for the awful. The gentle springtime of his heart was when he took up with Saint John in the New Testament. He never professed the intimate fellow-feeling I have heard some conceited preachers express for Saint Paul. He was not a great man; he was just a good one and too much of a gentleman to thrust himself upon a big saint like Paul, even in his imagination.

And I do not know which has been the greatest influence in making me what I am: the sense of reverence I had for him and his high Bible company, or the sense of bereavement I had when, having fed him and warmed him, he was still "not at home" with me, but following some pillar of cloud in his thoughts toward his great God's far eternity. A woman is a very poor creature. I think she hankers more for just love than she does for Heaven. I don't know how she will get on in a place where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. It's bound to be hard on her if the Lord does not give her something more than a harp and a golden crown with which to fill the aching void she is sure to have somewhere under her breast feathers.

But no one can say that I did not stand by William through the entire widowhood of my marriage. I was the world compass of his life, always sitting in his amen corner with my attention fixed anxiously upon the spiritual pulse of the congregation, always giving him the most nourishing food our limited means afforded, always standing between him and sordid dickering with the butcher and candlestick maker, always making myself a Chinese wall to separate him on sermon-making days from the church public.

Many a time I have taken my hands out of the biscuit dough to meet a steward who was determined to see him about the increased foreign mission assessment, or it might be the Sunday-school superintendent come to discuss the May picnic. I could usually pacify the steward and put off the superintendent, but if it was a messenger from some remote neighborhood on the circuit come to say that Brother Beatem was dead and the family wanted Brother Thompson to conduct the funeral services next morning at the nearest Methodist church I would be obliged to give in, even if William was in the very heat of spiritual constructions. For a funeral is a thing that cannot be put off. The corpse will not endure it, nor the family, either, for that matter. They want the preacher to be on hand promptly with all the laurels of language to bestow upon their dead in the funeral wreath discourse.

And this brings me to mention a peculiarity of "surviving relatives" as a class. They demand that the pastor of the dead man or woman shall furnish him his titles to mansions in the sky, whether he deserves them or not. Even if Brother Beatem was a mean man who neglected his wife and children, cheated his neighbors, abused his horse and failed to support the church, he must have a funeral that praised him for a saint. And if the pastor failed to do this the surviving relatives whom the dead man had victimized every day he lived would be the first to resent it.