A Conversation with Two Ministers.
It is the custom in the American Church for the clergyman of the parish to spend a great part of every morning in a room annexed to his church. I always found this room fitted up as his library and study, with a fire in winter blazing on the hearth, and the minister himself seated at the table at work. This arrangement has great advantages both for the clergyman and for his parishioners. He can study, and prepare for his pulpit, without any interruptions from his children, or from the ever-recurring little incidents of domestic affairs, to which, had he been in his own house, he would have been expected to give some attention; and his parishioners are more likely to call upon him in this room, knowing that he is there for the very purpose of seeing them, and that they shall not be disturbing anyone by their visit.
Having been requested to call on a clergyman of the place, I found him in such a room as I have just been describing, in company with another clergyman of the neighbourhood. Of course the conversation turned on church affairs. They told me that there were five Episcopal churches in the city; that the Episcopal church was not so active in the States of Mississippi and Louisiana as elsewhere in the Union. That the church of Rome was, in that part of the country, looking very far ahead, and buying large tracts of land, and founding educational establishments; that the Germans and Irish did not leave its communion. That church partisanship was a strong feeling in America; to take for instance our own church, there were everywhere men who were not members, that is communicants, but yet considered themselves as belonging to the Episcopal church, who would fight for every stitch in the surplice, and every letter in the Prayer-book. And that it was so in all the other churches. Much interest, they said, was taken in the ritualistic question, because it was becoming generally felt that our service is deficient in appeals to the senses; and that it wants variety and animation. That in the American church, though there is no canon forbidding ex tempore preaching, there is one which imposes on the clergyman the necessity of writing every sermon he preaches. The object of this canon is to enable the bishop to judge of the orthodoxy of any statements in the sermon with which the congregation may have been dissatisfied. This was thought necessary in consequence of the sensitiveness of some congregations, and the tendency in all American churches to lapse into some ‘ism’ or ‘ology.’ They told me that in some of the nascent States, as for instance in Idaho, the church was stronger than any other religious body. In this territory (I believe it is still in that embryonic condition), there is not a town or village without an Episcopal church. This has been brought about by sending out missionary bishops to plant the church in these new territories. The missionary bishop of Idaho, Dr. Clarkson, is one of the most active and successful of this new order. As this plan has succeeded so well, it is much to be regretted that it was not attempted long ago.
Going to Church 150 Miles off.
Americans are great travellers. It almost appears as if there was something in the air of America which makes one think lightly of distances, however great. I heard a lady at Washington talking of starting in a few days for California—a journey of more than five thousand miles—as if it involved no more than a journey from London to Edinburgh. I met another lady at a dinner table at New Orleans who had only that day arrived from New York, a distance of nearly fifteen hundred miles; and I entered Denver with two ladies who had been travelling continuously for about two thousand miles each—one from some New England town, and the other from New York. But I was never made so sensible of an American’s disregard of distance, and of the slightness of the provocation needed for inducing him to undertake a journey, as I was by an invitation I received from a gentleman to accompany him one hundred and fifty miles out, and of course as many back, merely to hear a preacher he thought well of, and who he understood would be only at that distance from Memphis on Sunday. Now this gentleman was a lawyer who had come all the distance from Detroit to Memphis, on the previous day, on some matter of business, and would have to start on his return on Monday evening; and this was the way in which he spent the Sunday that intervened between two such long journeys, adding three hundred miles to what anyone but an American would have thought was already a great deal too much travelling.
It is a commonly received opinion, though perhaps more largely entertained by authors than by their readers, that the ever-increasing luxury of the present day has done much to weaken the warlike virtues. This opinion, I believe, is exactly the opposite of the truth, and is merely the echo of the opinion of those writers of ancient Rome who made and bequeathed to us a thoroughly mistaken diagnosis of the diseases and symptoms of the body politic of their own decaying empire. Our own late wars, but above everything of the kind in modern or ancient times, the late great American war, show how entirely false is this opinion. Never was a war before carried on upon so great a scale, in proportion to the population of the communities engaged in it; never was a war more deadly; and never before was a war so thoroughly voluntary in the cases of so large a majority of the common rank and file of the combatants. The history of the 7th New York Volunteers, a regiment of gentlemen who went out, at the beginning of the war, of their own free will, and went through the whole of it with all its hardships, sufferings, and deadliness, would alone disprove this opinion. The hundreds of thousands of men who in the North left their countinghouses, their farms, and their drawing-rooms, to risk health, and limb, and life for an idea, are just so many hundreds of thousands of arguments against it. And in some respects the argument from the South is still stronger, for there a still larger proportion of the people went to greater hardships, more cruel wants and sufferings, and to a deadlier warfare, inasmuch as the same regiments had more frequently to meet the enemy. In every family I visited in the South I heard tales of suffering and of heroism. I will only repeat one, because it shows what a lady even can do and bear in these luxurious times. A Mrs. Read, while assisting her husband at the siege of Vicksburg, had her right arm so shattered by a shell that immediate amputation was necessary. It was during the night, but she would not have anyone called off from other work to do for her what she was still capable of doing for herself; she therefore held with her left hand the lamp which lighted the surgeon to amputate her shattered right arm.
Eden.
I arrived at Cairo by steamer at three o’clock in the morning. It was a dark and gusty winter night. The rain was falling heavily. At the landing place there was not a light, not a conveyance, not a porter, not a negro even to direct us the way to the hotel. Self-help was the only kind of help any of the passengers got that night. As I scrambled up the slippery Levee, and then waded through the mud to the hotel distant about a quarter of a mile, I congratulated myself on my having sent on all my heavy luggage in advance, so that I had nothing with me but a hat-box and a hand-bag. But these impediments were more than enough for the occasion. As I struggled on I thought that if the author of ‘Martin Chuzzlewit,’ who was then giving readings in America, should revisit his Eden under such circumstances, he would not feel dissatisfied with the kind of immortality he had conferred upon it.
The stream of passengers at last reached the hotel. There was no want of light here. This had been our beacon, and we felt that we had made the harbour. It was a large red-brick building, with a large hall, and a large stove, red-hot, in the midst of it. I went straight to the clerk’s counter, and entered my name in the folio guests’-book. I was among the first to do this, that I might secure a good room. No sooner, however, had I gone through this preliminary than the manager turned to me, and announced that the house could not allow me a room to myself that night, but that I must take one jointly with the gentleman who had registered his name before me. I hardly took in the speaker’s meaning, for this was the first occasion of my life when the idea of occupying a bed-room with another man had been suggested to me. I suppose I was so taken by surprise that I remained silent when I ought to have spoken, for I was next addressed by the gentleman himself with whom it was proposed I should share the bed-room. ‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘what do you intend to do? It is now past three; and if you don’t accept this gentleman’s offer, you will have to go out again into the street.’ Having said this he took the key from the clerk, and turning to an attendant, told him to show the way to the room. I rather followed than accompanied him, thinking over, as I went along, what I had read of Cairo when, fifteen or twenty years ago, it was a nest of rowdies, robbers, gamblers, and cut-throats, floating upon a fever-and-ague-haunted swamp. I began to be somewhat reassured by the appearance and bearing of my companion. He was a clean-limbed and remarkably handsome man, apparently turned of forty. His moustache and beard were trimmed in the French style, and his bearing was frank and soldierly. On the other side, however, I observed that he had no luggage whatever. At last the door was reached and opened. The attendant entered to light the gas. While he was doing this my companion crossed the room. In crossing it he took off his coat, and kicked off his boots, and walked ‘slick’ into bed. This was done quietly and deliberately, but in less time than it took to light the gas. I felt that I was becoming uncertain as to the reality of things. Was I at Drury Lane, looking on at the transformations of a pantomime? or was I dreaming that I was at Cairo?
A Bed-room Companion.