A Singular Life

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

The church was thronged. Citizens and strangers jostled each other in the porch, the vestibules, and the aisles. It was one of those religious festivals so dear to the heart of New England, and so perplexing to gayer people. No metropolitan play could have collected a crowd like this in Windover.

The respectability of the town was out in force. The richest fish firms, the largest ship-owners, and the oldest families shed the little light of local glory upon the occasion. Most of them, in fact, were members of the parish. Windover had what an irreverent outsider had termed her codocracy. The examination—to be followed that evening by the ordination—of the new minister was an affair of note. Windover is not the only town on the map where the social leaders are fond of patronizing whatever ecclesiastical interests are dependent on the generosity of their pockets and the importance of their names. Nothing tends to the growth of a religious sect so much as the belief that the individual is important to it.

Upon the platform, decorated by the Ladies’ Aid Society with taste, piety, and goldenrod, sat the Council called to examine and to ordain Emanuel Bayard to the ministry of Christ. These were venerable men; they drove in from the surrounding parishes in their buggies, or took the trains from remoter towns. A few city names had responded; one or two of them were eminent. The columns of the “Windover Topsail” had these already set up in display type, and the reporters in the galleries dashed them off on yellow slips of paper.

As the minister-elect, panting with his haste, ran up the steps and into the church, the first thing that he perceived was the eye of one of his Cesarea Professors fastened sternly upon him. It gave him the feeling of a naughty little boy who was late to school. This guilty sensation was not lessened by a vision of the back of his uncle’s bald head in an eminent seat among the lay delegates, and by the sight of the jeweled Swiss repeater, familiar to his infancy, too visibly suspended from Mr. Hermon Worcester’s hand. The church clock (wearing for the occasion a wreath of purple asters, which had received an unfortunate lurch to one side, and gave that pious timepiece a tipsy air) charitably maintained that Bayard was but seven minutes late. The impatience of the Council and the anxiety of the audience seemed to aver that an hour would not cover, nor eternity pardon, the young man’s delay. He dropped his valise into the hand of the sexton, and strode up the broad aisle. The dust of the street fight still showed upon his fashionable clothes. His cheeks were flushed with his fine color. His disordered hair clung to his white forehead in curls that the straitest sect of the Pharisees could not have straightened. Every woman in the audience noticed this, and liked him the better for it. But the Council was composed of straight-haired men.

Somebody beckoned him into the minister’s room to repair damages: and as he crossed the platform to do so, Bayard stooped and exchanged a few whispered words with the moderator. The wrinkled face of that gentleman changed visibly. He rose at once and said:—

“It is due to our brother and to the audience to state that your minister-elect desires me to make his apologies to this parish for a tardiness which he found to be unavoidable,—morally unavoidable, I might say. And I should observe,” added the moderator, hesitating, “that I have been requested not to explain the nature of the case, but I shall take it upon myself to defy this injunction, and to state that an act of Christian mercy detained our brother. I do not think,” said the moderator, dropping suddenly from the ecclesiastical to the human tone, “that it is every man who would have done it, under the circumstances; and I do not consider it any less creditable for that.”

A sound of relief stirred through the house as the moderator sat down. The audience ceased twisting its head to look at the tipsy clock, thus enabling the Ladies’ Aid Association to get that aster wreath for the first time out of mind. Mr. Hermon Worcester’s watch went back to its comfortable fob. A smile melted across the anxious face of Professor Haggai Carruth of Cesarea. The minister-elect reappeared with plumage properly smoothed, and the proceedings of the day set in, with the usual decorum of the denomination.

It is not a ceremonious sect, that of the Congregationalism of New England; and its polity allows much diversity upon occasions like these, whose programme depends a good deal upon the preference of the moderator. Bayard’s moderator was a gray-haired, kind-hearted, plain country minister, the oldest man in the Council, and one of the best. It was not his intention to subject the young man to one of the ecclesiastical roastings at that time in vogue, and for the course of events which followed he was not responsible. This was a matter of small moment at the time; but Bayard had afterwards occasion to remember it.

He listened dreamily to the conventional preliminary exercises of the afternoon. His mind was in a turmoil which poorly prepared the young man for the intellectual and emotional strain of the day. That scene in the street flashed and faded and reappeared before him, like the dark lantern which an evil hand brings into a sacred place. The blow of the man’s fist upon the child seemed to fall crashing upon his own flesh. Across the crescendo of the chorus of the hymn the cry of the little boy ran in piteous discord. The organ rolled up the oaths of the wharves. While the good, gray-haired moderator was praying, Bayard was shocked to find that the song of the street girl ran through his burning brain. The gaunt Madonna in the window of the drunkard’s home seemed to be stamped—a dark photographic letter-head—upon the license to preach the Christian religion which he was required (with more than usual precision) to produce.