A Circuit Rider's Wife

by Corra Harris

I never knew but one pastor who told the truth in a funeral sermon, and he had to be "moved" immediately by his presiding elder. The whole community regarded it as one of the most brutal outrages that had ever been perpetrated in their midst. As for William, there was something sublime in the way he permitted his mind to skip the facts and stir his imagination when he preached a funeral. The curious part of it was, he believed what he said, and generally by the time he had finished nearly everyone else believed it. There were occasions, of course, when he was disgracefully duped by the "surviving relatives." However, I pass over a thousand little epitaphs of memory and come to our last years in the itinerancy. And it is curious how life winds itself into a circle, like the trail a lost man makes in the desert. After a few years as pastor of village churches, William was sent back to the country circuits. He was failing some, and, of course, younger and more progressive men were needed in the villages—preachers who could keep up with the committee-meeting times in modern church life. And I am obliged to admit William was a poor church committeeman. Occasionally he would go off to see an old sick woman or some barren fig-tree man who was not even a member of the church, and forget all about an important committee meeting on the brotherhood of man. This would give offense to some of the people in the church, who, in turn, would complain that he was not sufficiently interested in spreading the gospel.

As I have said before, William was a good man, but he was neither brilliant nor enterprising, as we understand these terms nowadays. He never did get it into his head that salvation could be furnished a dying world through a thorough organization of it into committees that furnished not only the salvation, but also the goat districts which had to receive this salvation as fast as it was offered. It was as simple as commerce and as naïve as a rich man's charity, but William couldn't see it. Somehow, he was secretly opposed to it. He was for catching every goat separately and feeding him on truth and tenderness till he turned into a lamb. It was no use to argue that this required too much time and would take an eternity to get the world ready for Heaven. He refused to think of immortal souls as if they were bunches of heathen cattle, or slum cattle, that must be got into the salvation market on the hoof as soon as possible.

As he grew older, more set in his ways, he became a trifle contrary about it, like a thorny old priest who has received private orders from his God to go on seeking his lost lambs one at a time. Once he insulted a man who came to him about the Laymen's Movement which is organized to convert the world to Christianity in this generation and probably before Christmas.

"We can do it if we have faith enough!" said he.

"No, you can't!" retorted William. "Not unless the heathens get faith enough to believe, and faith is a thing you cannot send out through the mails as if it was sample packages of patent medicine!"

Such talk as that sent him back to the circuits, where there were the same old fashions in sleeves and headgear for women, and where he could take his text from Jonah's gourd if he chose, without exciting the higher critical faculties of his congregation.

It was harder on us in some ways. I never could understand why the old preachers who have got rheumatism in their knees, and maybe lumbago besides, should be sent back to the exposure of all weathers on the circuits, while the young ones with plenty of oil in their joints fatten in the more comfortable charges. And I am not the one to say with resignation that it is "all right." Still, the good God evens things up in wonderful ways.

William got so stiff in his legs toward the last that he had to stand up to pray; but we had come back to the region of simplicities, where there were just three elements to consider and put together in his sermons—Man, his field and his God, and they were only separated by a little grass, a few stars and the creation light and darkness of days and nights. When a man gets as near home as that he does not mind the pains in his mere body. At least William never complained.

Looking back, I think he was at his best about the time he went back to the real circuit itinerancy. He had the glory of presence. Faith, I think, gave him a halo. You could not see it, but you could feel it, and in this connection I recall an illustration of the difference between such a halo and the "aura" we hear so much about these days from people who think they are interested in psychic phenomena, but who are really psychic epileptics.

We were on a circuit which included a summer resort, and the varieties of diseases among patients in a sanitarium are as nothing compared to the mental, moral, spiritual and physical disorders to be found among the class who frequent "springs." To this place came a "New Thoughter" who was always in a spiritual sweat about her "astral shape." She manifested a condescending interest in the Sunday services at our church, which finally led her to call on William one afternoon at the parsonage. She was a dingy little blonde, with a tight forehead and a thin nose. William was sitting alone in the peace of his spirit behind the morning-glory vines on the front porch. Providence had wisely removed me to the sewing-machine inside the adjoining room.