CHAPTER IV.
Friends in Need.
Through whatsoever ills betide
For you I will be spent and spend:
I'll stand for ever by your side,
And naught shall you and me divide,
Because you are my friend.
Perhaps one of the most noteworthy characteristics of "the people called Methodists" is the esprit de corps—the spirit of clannishness—which runs through the whole body. Is any sick, the rest are eager to pray; is any merry, the rest are delighted to sing psalms; and they will not only pray and sing in sympathy, which is comparatively easy, but they are ready to spend and to be spent for the brethren to any extent. Men may know that they are Methodists from the love they have one to another. And this love does not confine itself to the actual members of the Church, but extends to their descendants, to the third and fourth generation, even though these descendants may have forsaken the faith of their fathers, and embraced other forms of worship. This clannishness is not so much the spiritual bond of a common creed, as a more human—and so more indissoluble—bond, like the tie of country or of kinship; and therefore no variations in belief can break it.
If the children of Methodism, as they grow up and see the various phases of modern life, incline to a broader faith or a more ornate ritual than those which satisfied their fathers, their Mother-Church does not blame them as perverts nor brand them as apostates; they are still her children and she will be interested in them to the end. Though the daughter may forget her own people and her father's house, she herself is ever remembered in the old home, where there is no bitterness on account of her forgetfulness, such forgetfulness being but the fulfilment of a law of natural growth.
It is this spirit of kinship that accounts for the wonderful freemasonry among all Wesleyan Methodists; and their masonic sign—their Shibboleth, so to speak—is their pronunciation of their denominational name. If a man pronounces the word Wesleyan as if the s were a z, and puts the accent upon the second syllable, one may safely conclude that that man has never been inside this particular fold; but if he sounds the s sharply as if it were double s, and accentuates the first syllable of the word, all Wesleyans know that he is, or his father was before him, one of themselves, for his speech bewrayeth him.
When Paul had been at Oxford for upwards of two years, and seemed on the high road to success in all his undertakings, a sudden change came o'er the spirit of his dream. The bank in which Mrs. Seaton's fortune was invested stopped payment, and the heavy calls which her husband was obliged to pay left him with but a very small addition to his income as a "supernumerary". To many men of his age this would have been a crushing blow; but Mark Seaton's mind was so uniformly set upon things above, and so indifferent to all earthly considerations, that worldly misfortunes had little power to hurt him. But the stroke, nevertheless, fell heavily upon his wife; not that she was more worldly-minded than her husband, but because poverty always presses harder upon a woman than upon a man. Poverty meets a man face to face upon the battle-field of life, and he then and there either conquers or is conquered by it; but it waylays a woman in her home, lurking for her in the recesses of her wardrobe and jumping out upon her from her kitchen and her storeroom; and a secret foe is always worse than an open enemy.
The blow fell when Paul was down for the Long Vacation, and he saw far more clearly than his father did what it would mean to his mother and sister. With an intuition which was rare in so young a man, he realized how the daily struggle to make both ends meet—which hardly penetrated into the minister's study—would embitter Joanna's youth and render Mrs. Seaton's declining years but labour and sorrow to her; and with his accustomed decision he made up his mind that this burden must be lightened at all costs, even though the lightening taxed him to his uttermost farthing.
"Joanna," he said one day, when he and his sister were alone together, "I am not going back to Oxford."
"Not going back to Oxford, Paul? What do you mean?"
"Simply what I say. Instead of finishing my time there, I have decided to set about earning something at once, so as to make life a little less hard for you and mother."