'Tis a sweet fashion of life which allows us always to have our own way! Nor is it to be denied that when the preacher stands before the flock, his disordered hair falling above his brow, his eyes flashing, his breath sobbing in his emotion; when he hurls out questions to which he knows there will be no answer; when he makes one assertion after another to which he knows there is to be no contradiction; when he rules, sways, expounds, glorifies, waxing greater in stature out of the very situation in which he stands—let us not deny that he is then in the way—the simple and forgivably human way—of coming more and more into the belief that he himself is as great as the doctrines which he expounds. There are martyrs in history because of human convictions which led them to contradict the church. There are other and far more numerous martyrs, made such because they dared not contradict it.
Given, then, a man of rawboned frame, of virile physical health, and of pronouncedly good opinion of himself, this is perhaps the very profession of all others which would be most apt to build up that man in his own eyes into a personage of considerable stature. Such a man might easily regard himself as set apart from his fellow human beings—a feeling which Christ Himself never had, nor any great man in or out of history before Him or after Him. It is understandable that such a man, of such a profession, might be the very one to find his philosophy feeding upon itself; with the net result of an inordinate, ingrown egotism. And this ingrown egotism in himself might, in the case of his son, become an egotism congenital. There are ministers of the gospel, and other ministers of the gospel. John Rawn, Senior, was of this particular and less desirable sort. We mention him, having promised our hero all the analysis and all the generations he may desire; and being, moreover, commendably anxious fully to account for him and his many noteworthy peculiarities.
V
Had John Rawn, our hero, been able in his childhood to figure out that, after all, God and the undying stars had no special grudge against him in assigning his birth to a humble inland village; had he been able to picture to himself his real value as a human unit; had he been able to understand his own explanation,—that is to say this explanation of him which we so patiently have given—had he been able to qualify his own mind as that of a congenital egotist, and hence to see himself naturally come by certain phases of his character—he might have smiled and have been different. He might one day have extended his hand to his fellow-man understandingly, might have gone through life much as other men indeed, dying simply and without much outcry about it, as most of us do, and living with small disturbance of the world's equilibrium, as most of us also do. But in that deplorable case there would have been no John Rawn as we know him, and no story about him worth the telling. Let us, therefore, beg to disagree even with him, and not hold it as entire misfortune that he was born in an unstoried spot, and of parents one of whom, by reason of his natural character and of his calling, was wont to consider himself the partner, and not necessarily the junior partner, of a Divine Providence.
CHAPTER II
PURELY INCIDENTAL
I
To be sure John Rawn had a mother, but that is merely an incidental matter for one who really was brooded among the spheres, and who accepted a mother only as a necessary means to incarnation. We need accord no more than scant time to a mere mother.
There was in the character of the elder Rawn's wife little to offset the tendencies transmitted by the father. Had she herself been a trace further removed from the blind submission of a jungle past in womanhood, it might have been that the offspring of these two had been accorded a better insight into the real situation of mankind, might perhaps even have been given a saving sense of humor, a better valuation of human affairs as pertaining to himself, and of himself as related to human affairs. The truth, however, is that Mrs. Rawn, the preacher's wife, was simply a preacher's wife. She was a machine for gratifying a certain part of her husband's nature, a well-nigh apogamic contrivance for rearing children, an appliance for tending tables and sweeping carpets, and going to prayer meetings, or perhaps—on rare and much-coveted occasions—for acting as witness in parsonage marriage ceremonies, the which might haply produce a fee from the bridegroom, temporarily generous; which fee, in a moment of aberration, might even pass from parson to parson's wife. It is decreed that the background of a ministerial life shall be of neutral hue, in order that the more brilliantly shall shine the central figure of the scheme. The minister himself, unctuous, bland, grows less unctuous and bland as he turns from some comelier sister to his own partner in life, colorless, silent, dutiful, devoted. There is but one family perihelion, and he is the one planet thereat. At most a pale and distant moon may circle about him, perhaps concerned with domestic tides, but not admittedly related to the affairs of night and day.
It is not known, nor is it important, whence Mrs. Rawn came, or how she happened to marry her lord, John Rawn, Senior, the Methodist preacher in the little Texas town. They were married when they arrived at this place, and had been for some years. No one knows whence they came, no man can tell whither they have gone. John was the first child granted to them as answer to his father's grumbling; the latter, very nobly and righteously, dreading what calamity the world must suffer did none come to perpetuate his race. He was a great preacher. He had swayed his multitudes. He had seen a hundred souls, as he termed them, grovelling upon the floor in the height of some revival when the grace of the Lord had moved itself mightily upon the people, thanks to him, partner upon the ground, whose voice had prevailed thereabout. It would cause any just man to shudder—the mere thought of such merit lacking progeny. But the prayers of the righteous avail much. He had, at last, a son, our hero; none less.