The following afternoon, pursuant to this plan, when the professor had greeted us, his first question was,
“What are we to study? Can any one tell me?” It brought no response.
He looked around the room in great astonishment and went from man to man, asking,
“Can you tell me?” and each time getting a decided and belligerent negative.
Then a smile of satisfaction lighted up his sober face and he said,
“There, gentlemen. Now that you have made up your minds that you know nothing about psychology, I am ready to begin to teach you!” and from then to the end of the year we sat under instruction that was masterly, inspiring.
This spirit of thoroughness and critical honesty was needed during the second year, for we were constructing a personal faith: a task more serious than the mere acquisition of historic facts or encyclopædic knowledge. But the teachers were patient, kindly, and watched us let conservative and traditional habits of mind go, not in any spirit of intolerance. There were many times, that year, when I found myself almost duplicating Burner’s misery, by sitting in my room and wondering, after I had let go my traditional habits of thought about God and the Bible, what I should do without faith. But as one conception went, another, larger conception came, and I found a nobler faith than I ever had before. The self-distrust and miserable vacancy of doubt, were, as I had blunderingly told Burner, mere phases towards a positive faith. One winter morning, after a night of mental struggle, during which I suffered fully as much as I had ever suffered from any physical hardship, I went out on the campus to walk about in the crisp air. The students had just gone into the chapel for morning prayers. I stopped under the windows and heard the drone of the parlor organ. Then, on the quietness of the morning, the manly melody came to my ears: a hymn resonant with a man’s faith, and bringing peace to my doubts. “Oh, Love That Will Not Let Me Go,” they were singing, a monkish, monastic tinge to it, coming from male throats,—only the tenor was too boyish for a monk, too thrillingly rampant in its ambitious soaring after God over the high notes. But it soothed me and I went in the strength of that hymn for many days.
Chapter XXVII. The Wonderful
Summer on the Pleasure Island
MY next opportunity of earning money for my education came in a call to preach on Sundays in a little church sixty miles from the Seminary at a fashionable summer resort. The compensation to be ten dollars a week: compensation for three days’ absence from the Seminary, one hundred and twenty miles of travel and expenses, and the nervous exertion of preaching twice and teaching a Sunday-school class, not excluding pastoral work whenever opportunity should offer!
These weekly journeys began when I arose on Saturday morning at five o’clock, drank a hastily prepared cup of cocoa, and hurried off to the station for the six o’clock train. Then the train would start on its way through the snowdrifts, puffing and gasping down white aisles through rows of stiff, stately pines whose hands held puffy clouds of snow, and then followed a slow passage through miles of birches bending low under the weight of wet snow like robed saints humbled by too great a weight of glory. The railway trip was followed by a steamer journey of eight miles through a heavy, sad sea which never seemed to have any light in it, and in whose icy surface pretty grey and mottled gulls were not afraid to dip their palpitating breasts. The steamer put me ashore on an island whose centre was loaded with a serried row of little mountains. At the landing I found a stage and drove for eight miles over the island to my parish. The stage horse rushed us down dipping roads that threaded between precipitous mountain sides, whose summits were desert rocks and at whose feet had crumbled cliff after cliff of red rock, spread out like a rusty iron yard. Then the road became a climb until some highlands were attained and we sped through a little fishing village which nestled close to a mysterious, secluded cove, guarded by stern, fretted cliffs, a place where Stevenson would have had a cave of smugglers or the anchorage of a rakish pirate craft. Then came a turn in the road, where, behind a fringe of thick, old gold birches and in the midst of some dead oak stumps, nature had placed a cathedral pile of gigantic slabs of stone, one on another, as if to show to man what the angels of strength could do once they started to build with stone. Next followed a bewildering ride over a spiral road up a steep hill on which stood aristocratic summer homes. At a lookout where the road took a sudden dip, one saw the cold ocean far down below with its heavy, listless breakers pounding wearily against the iron cliffs, as if saying, “Why do the poets insist on our ceaselessly trying to shatter this cliff? I wish they would let us rest through the winter, till the summer visitors come: then I will pound like Vulcan’s hammer to please them!” In the distance, little dismal islands stood in the sea like burnt dumplings in gravy. Over them the gulls were screaming and wailing, adding to the solitude and the winter’s dreariness. Then the stage slanted down the hill and after a long, twisting ride drew up before the village post-office, where I met my host and was duly welcomed as the new minister.