Again I nodded.
“An’ didn’t ta pray, as tha nivver prayed afore, that if that lass wint East the Lord ’ud surely turn thi footsteps West?”
“I can’t say I did.”
“Weel, if tha hasn’t sense for thissen, folk mun ha’ sense for thee. Aw’st put thi father up to it, an’ if he’ll noan tackle th’ job aw know one o’ th’ Methody preichers at will. Four hundred pun’!”
Pole Moor Baptist Chapel stands in about as wild, bleak, and exposed a spot as a religious community could well have chosen for a place of spiritual communion, and the stranger passing that way must often have wondered whence its pastor drew his flock. I’ve heard my father tell that his church had its small beginnings in the very heart of Slaithwaite, worshipping in an upper chamber of “The Silent Woman,” an inn whose sign depicted a female form bereft of head and so of tongue and speech. But the Earl of Dartmouth of that day owned all Slaithwaite and being, of course, a Churchman staunch and true, and, equally of course, a Tory the good old school, and believing, as Churchmen and Tories will believe despite long and bitter experience to the contrary, that the surest way to convince people of the error of their way and to convert them to the only true faith is to persecute and harry them, set about, or suffered his creature, the curate of St. James’s, to persecute and harry the deluded worshippers at “The Silent Woman”—“hardbedders” they were called, because, I suppose, of the unbending and uncomfortable nature of their doctrine. They were driven from that snug hostelry and sought in vain within the domain of the Earl for land on which to build their little Bethel. So they were fain to erect their chapel on the moor edge, and many and steep and rough were the weary miles the elect must plod to reach their shrine. But plod them they did by the score, bringing their dinners with them, aye, and their teas, too, eating their meals, in the summer time, seated on the gravestones that soon began to dot the little graveyard of the chapel.
They were a dour and uncomfortable lot, these fathers in Israel, “orthodox, orthodox sons of auld John Knox,” pitiless in their logic theologic, hard as granite and unbending as the oak, but just, terribly just. And argue! Oh, Lord! the times I’ve heard them after service, as they smoked their pipes by the fire in the schoolroom in the winter or under the glad sun in the summer, descant upon predestination and effectual calling; capping text with text. They were the “elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ”; elect “to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled… reserved in heaven” for them. They were of those “ordained to eternal life,” feeding on the sincere milk of the Word. They hugged to their souls that hard saying of St. Paul: “Whom he did predestinate them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified” They had very vivid conceptions, too, of the lot of the unregenerate. Hell was very real to them, and about the tortures of the damned they had no doubt. And there were so very few that weren’t damned, damned from everlasting to everlasting. In my early youth, whilst still under the influence of this very literal interpretation of the Scriptures. I came to the conclusion that I could reckon on my fingers the elect of the Lord, pruning the elect of Pole Moor, making election of the very elect.
Now will it be credited that my father, who shepherded this ungentle flock, was of all men that ever I have known the meekest and the gentlest—to be sure there were those of his congregation who in their process of winnowing the chaff from the grain had winnowed out my father himself, perchance he, even he, was not of the truly chosen. But elect or non-elect, better man never trod shoe leather, none juster, none truer in speech and deed, none more charitable. We lived miles from the abodes of many of his church—yet in season and out of season, rain or shine, he made his visitations, trudging at dead of night, by the light of moon or lanthorn, across the wild, bleak, oft sodden moors, through hail, and sleet, and snow, and mire, to some distant homestead to pray by the bedside of the sick and dying; “in perils of waters, in perils by his own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness,… in perils among false brethren; in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness.” No man ever had a greater heart in so small a body—for truth to tell, he was but small of stature and lean withal as lean he might very well be considering how little he ate of the bread that perisheth and how ill he used his spare frame. He simply did not know fear, and, whilst all the countryside trembled and cringed before those godless Burnplatters, he bearded them in their very den, and so cowed them by the grandeur of his spirit and the sanctity of his life that they who were said to fear neither God, man, nor devil, came to reverence my father, and let it be known among all and sundry that to wrong him was to wrong them, and woe betide the evil-doer who should forget it.
Now at this time my sister Ruth kept my father’s house, my mother, whose sweet face I scarce remember yet seem at times to catch a glimpse of in my dreams, being many years dead, though living till enshrined in my father’s heart. Picture a maiden, “sweet and twenty,” just as high as a tall man’s heart, light of foot, soft of voice, with wavy auburn hair, dark-brown, soft eyes, yet not without their roguish twinkle, tempting lips, teeth of pearl, a neat waist, a neater ankle, a rounded bust, a shrewd, common-sense mind, a soft heart, and a ready tongue—and that was Ruth. A ray of sunshine in the house? Pooh! Ruth was spring and summer all in one, my father’s darling, my own torment and delight, the spoiled pet of the grave elders of the church, and the idol of their grown sons, whose assiduousness at the Sunday services and the weekly prayer meetings I very much fear must be set at least as much to Ruth’s score as to our father’s.
Now considering how awful were the terrors which the faithful at Pole Moor escaped ’tis sad to think how lightly they appraised the services of their pastor, if their appreciation must be measured by the stipend they afforded him. ’Tis true he lived rent free, had grazing for a cow, a mistal, a potato patch, pew rents, and the proceeds of an occasional collection—benefits the pillars of the church enumerated with unction as they reminded themselves that they did not muzzle the ox that trod out the corn. But they ever seemed to forget, and my father was the last to jog their memories, that no one came for alms to Pole Moor and went empty away. So if we had high thinking at the Manse we’d low living, and we seemed to thrive on it. We kept no servant now Ruth was grown, and my father foddered his cow fed his pig “mucked out” the mistal and stye, mowed his meadow, and dug his garden himself: and Ruth’s firm little hands milked the cow, tended the poultry, made the butter, made the bread, cooked our rare joints, and kept all as clean as a new ha’penny.
And so it chanced that as Jim and I drew near the little enclosure walled off from the moor, which served as our kitchen garden, we came upon the reverend pastor of Pole Moor, dressed in a long blue linen smock, his feet shod, in the homely clog, his bare and bald head perspiring freely as he thrust the prongs of a fork into the earth and, turned up the soil and threw the gathered potatoes into a small round basket.