In the little weather beaten country church, up the river, his small audiences consisted of aged ladies and pious old settlers, who were already saved, and did not need the rescuing hand. He preached Calvinistic damnation in the belief that fear of hell was a more potent factor in human redemption than hope of reward.
His principal authority on hell was Jonathan Edwards, a fiery divine, who glowed in Massachusetts about two hundred years ago. During his eruptive period, Edwards’s sermons on damnation blistered and enriched the sectarian literature of his time. Dismal Dan frequently resurrected and reheated these old printed sermons, and hurled the sputtering embers at his inoffensive listeners.
He had not made a convert for many years. Of late his powers of spiritual persuasion had languished, and, like his hearers, had become atrophied.
He was a revivalist who did not revive. He needed new and pliant material, and when Muskrat Hyatt had told his errand he was welcomed as one who had fled from among the Pharisees. Out of the wilderness of sin a lowly suppliant had come.
The Reverend Daniel Butters
They talked of the mysterious and unknown light that had illumined the heavens the night before, and the terrifying sounds that had come over the waters. Dismal Dan pronounced it all to be a “manifestation.” He had long expected signs and angry portents in the skies as a warning to sinners. Probably his biased mind would eagerly have ascribed divine origin to any natural phenomenon that shooed fish into his ministerial net.
They spent many days and nights in prayer and assiduous scriptural readings. A far away look came into Hyatt’s eyes, and an elevation of brow that did not seem to be of this world. The spiritual calm of the neophite within cloistered walls was his. He had laid a contrite heart upon the altar of his fears, and on it rested celestial rays.
He interrupted the period of his reconstruction with a trip down the river to visit Malindy Taylor. Just what passed at the duck farm was never known, but, after three days, Malindy opened her heart of stone to the penitent. They came up the stream in the canoe, and, as the enraptured township correspondent of the county paper expressed it, “they were united on the front porch in the sacred bonds of holy matrimony, by the Reverend Daniel Butters, on the afternoon of Thursday, the bridegroom being attired in conventional black, and the bride with a bouquet of white flowers.”
Rat betook himself to the duck farm with his bride. He removed all his traps from the marsh, for he now considered the problem of his future earthly existence solved, without the necessity of very much hard work.