The sense of humor in me has never been converted, and there were occasions when it was best for me not to be too literally present when William was examining the spiritual condition of some puzzled soul. He had risen and provided her with a chair and sat down opposite, regarding her with a hospitable blue beam in his eyes. She had the fatal facility for innocuous expression common to her class. All the time I knew William was waiting like an experienced fisherman for a chance to swing his net on her side of the boat. The poor man did not dream that she was one of those unfortunate persons who has swapped her real soul for a Hindu vagary. But presently she let it out.
"Mr. Thompson," she continued, without a rhetorical pause to indicate the decimal points between her thoughts, "I was interested in what you said about immortality last Sunday. Now, I wonder if you know it is an actual fact that by breathing rhythmically thirty times, counting three while you inhale, three while you exhale and three while you hold your breath, you can actually get into touch at once with your astral shape?"
William fumbled in his pocket for his glasses, deliberately put them on and then regarded her over the steel rims. I could see the Jehovah crest of his spirit erect itself as he replied with divine dignity:
"Madam, I do not know what you mean by your astral shape, but I do not have to pant like a lizard to keep in touch with my soul!"
But she bore with him, showing far more calmness than he as she went on to describe the wonderful power of spirit she had developed. She had even gone so far, she said, as a matter of experiment, to "put her thought" upon the unborn child of a friend, and when the child came it was not like its own mother or father, but her exact image. Now, she declared, she was sure it was her own "thought" child. And what was more convincing still, she had at last attained to a "sky-blue aura"—she added this with an indescribable air of triumph. William tightened his spectacles on his nose, drew his face close and stared at her with the sort of scandalized sunsmile Moses must have worn the first time he caught sight of the golden calf.
"Madam," he exclaimed after a dreadful inquisitive silence, "I can see no signs of an aura, either blue or otherwise; but if you actually did try to steal another woman's child with your thoughts you have been guilty of an unimaginable meanness, and you should go down on your knees to Almighty God for forgiveness!"
But William was never at his best when he was brought into contrast morally or intellectually with the temporary illusions of modern times. They cast him "out of drawing" and gave him a look of the grotesque, as a great and solemn figure on a vaudeville stage suggests the comical. He belonged to a time when the scriptures of men's hearts had not suffered the moderation and sacrilege of the sense of humor. He had a mind illumined with the old Eden figures of speech, and loved to refer to the "thick bosses of Jehovah's buckler."
There were occasions, indeed, when I could not preserve a proper inner reverence for his favorite hymns, as, for example, when he would be standing during a revival season behind an altar heavily laden with "dying souls" who had come up for prayers. In order to interpret for them a proper frame of mind he would sometimes choose one of Watts' famous hymns. He would stand with his feet wide apart, his fingers interlaced, palms downward, eyes lifted in anguished supplication and sing in his great organ bass:
"Inspire a feeble worm to rush into Thy Kingdom, Lord,
And take it as by storm!"
Still, if you do not dwell upon the vision of the suddenly valorous worm, the words express a higher form of courage than that denoted in Matthew Arnold's famous poem, "The Last Word;" and I have seen many a "worm" rise shouting from the altar rail under their inspired meaning. The sense of humor has, in my opinion, very little to do with poetry or salvation. It belongs entirely to the critical human faculties, and I have found it one of the greatest limitations in my own spiritual development. And as time went on I was more and more convinced that this was an evidence of a lower imaginative faculty in me rather than in him. He had less humor, but he had infinitely more of the grace that belongs to immortality. He had a spirit that withstood adversity, hardship, failure, with a sort of ancient dignity and that could face tragedy with Promethean fortitude. And I love best to think of him in relation to the bare and awful sorrows that show so nakedly in the lives of poor, simple folk. I can see him now in the dismal twilight of one winter evening, as he started on that strange mission to Mrs. Martin, looking like an old, weatherbeaten angel breasting a storm. The wide brim of his black hat flared up from his face in the wind, his long, gray beard was blown over the shoulders of his greatcoat. He had started without his muffler. I ran out to fetch it and, winding it about his neck, I saw the blue bloom of Heaven in his eyes, that always turned young when he was on his way to roll the stones away from the door of some sinner's heart.