CHAPTER XVIII
CONSCIENTIOUS SCRUPLES ABOUT THE CHURCH
I had thought that these letters were finished, but I am adding this postscript to say that I leave New York to-morrow for the little house between the hills on the Redwine Circuit. This resolution is not in keeping with some views and sentiments I have written in these pages, but, being a woman, I thank God I can be as inconsistent as is necessary to feminine peace of mind. I reckon I'll never be satisfied now in the world or in the church without William. I can't seem to settle into any state of being of my own. I am not saying that I have not had a good time here, but, after all, I do not belong with the people of the world, either.
Since I have been with Sarah I have had constantly to resist the temptation to speak to her about her soul, just from force of habit. I have never seen, in all my years with William, a woman of her age so youthfully, cheerfully unconscious of having a soul. And that is not the worst of it: I can feel the moral elbows of mine sticking out in every conversation, as if Heaven had made all my thoughts angular. It is a sort of horned integrity that grows up in a woman who follows the Gospel flag of the Methodist itinerancy. I am sure it is often embarrassing to Sarah and the girls, especially when they have company—not the kind of company William and I had, thinly-bred missionaries, and Bible pedlers, and tramps, and beggars, and occasionally, toward the last a little, sweet-faced, pod-headed deaconess—but Lilith ladies and one or two that William would call Delilahs, and handsome, sleek, intellectual men who appeared to be as ignorant of God as I am of natural history. I am not saying that they are not decent people, but they are not all there. I miss something out of them. If they have ever had souls they have had them removed, probably by a kind of reasoning surgery quite as effective as the literal surgery with which so many of them have their poor appendixes removed.
I have told Sarah, and while she expresses regret I am sure she feels relieved. It is straining to have a person in the family who belongs to a different spiritual species. And now I have just finished packing my things. I am thankful I told the neighbors that I was going on a visit. I came suddenly to the conclusion to-day that it was only a visit because of a thing that happened. I have not been offended morally by anything I have seen in the theaters or other places of amusement, but I have had conscientious scruples about the churches here!
This would be the Sabbath day far away in the country, where the hills are at prayer and the pine trees swing their shadows over the graves in Redwine churchyard. But here in New York it is merely the day when you change your occupations and amusements. Still, there is preaching for those who are not drunk, or asleep, or in the parks, or at Coney Island, or giving week-end parties at their country places, or planning the millennium without God along socialistic scantlings of thought and barb-wire theories of the brotherhood of man. And I went with the girls to a fashionable church. And this is how the morals in me that William planted came to take offense, and how I reached the conclusion that I had best go back home, where life is indeed made too hard for the spirit, but where at least one may be decently conscious of having one according to the Scriptures.
The church we attended was nearly as grand-looking inside as a theater. Every pew was filled, and there was no misbehavior on the back benches, such as William contended with to the last. We had a plush-covered one near the front, and a stool to put our feet on, and a library hooked to the back of the pew in front of us, containing a bulletin of the church's news. I didn't have time to find the "society column," but I was looking for it when the preacher came in. I expected to hear a perfectly-scarifying sermon, he looked so much like a tintype of the prophet Jeremiah; but he took his text from Mark about the healing of the man with the withered hand, and preached on the hypnotism of Jesus. He made a clean sweep of the miracles in the most elegant, convincing language you ever heard. And I sat and cried to think of what he'd done to Scriptures William would have died to preserve. The girls were mortified at the scene I was making. I don't reckon anybody had ever cried in that church before, and I am sure no man was ever convicted of his sins there.
When we reached home I told Sarah about going back to Redwine, first thing. Then I came on upstairs and had it out with William in a very few words, while I was pulling out the dresser drawers and putting my things in the trunk.
"William," I said, kneeling down on the floor with my back to his picture on my dresser, laying my collars in the tray, "you were right. There is something wrong with the church system, something wrong with the institutional religion that the church is propagating; but there is nothing wrong with the truth of God for which you stood and made me stand for thirty years, and I am going back where some of the people know it, whether they know anything else or not.
"Up here the best, the wisest people don't know what the truth of God is; they think they can find it in science. Faith is for fools who cannot think. They are not trying to reconcile God to man, but man to God, and trimming down the Holy Ghost to suit his scientific bug faculties."