“Love: brown-haired young woman.”
I paid my quarter, willingly, and went to my room, linking an unknown, unnamed, intangible “brown-haired young woman” with the waiting parsonage.
Chapter XXIX. It Devolves
upon me to Entertain a Guest
and the Sentimental Consequences
Which Ensued
THEN, as if in conspiracy with the traveling phrenologist, the Seminary itself made “the brown-haired young woman,” concrete, before my eyes.
As the emotional revival had been the feature, the advertised feature of Evangelical University, so Lecture Week was the unique, advertised feature of the Seminary. As the Revival was doctrinal, controversial, and excessively unintellectual, so Lecture Week was undoctrinal, constructive, and preëminently intellectual. Lecture Week was, par excellence, one of the most inspiring intellectual treats of a week’s duration to be found within the bounds of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. For the special lecturers of the year pooled interests and appeared together. These lecturers were preëminent men drawn from the ranks of highest achievement: specialists of high, world-wide repute on preaching, social service, and belles lettres. They were men for whose speech and thought any student would gladly put aside treatises on oratory and explanations of social movements and interpretations of literature, and give himself entirely into their safe-keeping. Three words were inscribed over those precious, inspiring weeks: “Golden Speech,” “Ripe Thoughts,” and “Impressive Personalities!” Students were never the same in ambitions after the lecturers had shuffled their notes into their leather pouches and left: I had one student preach for me the Sunday following one such week, and there, before the eyes of my parishioners, some of whom had been in attendance on the lectures, appeared an excellent facsimile of the noted divine who had given the course on preaching; the student stroked back his hair exactly as the noted man had done, he leaned over the pulpit in perfect accord with the latter’s peculiar and distinguishing trait; even some of his climaxes and intonations of voice followed those used by the famous preacher in his most forceful oratorical moments. I think this student was not alone among those who played the sedulous ape to the Lecture Week speakers. I know that more than once I caught myself thinking that probably a change in method to that of Dr. Gladden’s conversational ease might impress my audience à la Dr. Gladden.
During that week the Seminary became a generous host to the country ministers, not only sending the poorer ones an urgent invitation to the feast, but following very closely that gospel which urges one to go out into the highways and compel them to come, for she aided some by railway fares, helped others by having the fares reduced, and when she had them into the city, gave them free lodgings in the dormitory and in the gymnasium, with students for chambermaids and professors for general managers of departments.
The result, in my senior year, for Lecture Week, was inspiring. The heroic preachers from the isolated parishes, who in true poverty and in chastity of heart hold up God’s light amidst a darkened, back way, came to us in their brushed-up frayed frock coats and white percale ties to find themselves somewhat surprised at the city ministers, who not only did not wear white ties during the week-days, but had even left their frock coats at home to appear on the campus more like doctors on holidays than sedate ministers of the gospel. However, in heart, neither frock nor sack coats made a difference, for it was astounding how boyish and playful the faces of both city ministers and country missionaries became in the interim of lectures, or at night when in the midnight hours some sedate man would get out of his cot, skulk past the snoring brethren who were arrayed in a row on the cots in the gymnasium, and either by rolling a thundering bowling ball at the pins, or by some other act of deliberate mischief, awaken Babel!
Morning, afternoon, and evening the city people united with the seminary members in crowding the lecture hall; school-teachers, women’s clubs, college professors and college students, librarians, esthetic clerks, intellectually inclined mill-workers, doctors, lawyers, and church people,—these were in evidence always, for the lecturers’ names, and the three poles of their thought—religion, social service, and letters—made a universal appeal. In fact, it must have somewhat embarrassed the speakers to have been called in to lecture to theological students and find before them all the Gentiles of the city. In any case, the speakers who had been so uninformed as to head each separate lecture, whether on “The Pastor in his Study,” “The Turmoil in Society,” or “The Supremacy of Browning over the Saxon Heart,” with the usual, “My Dear Young Men,” were compelled, on appearing, to make it read, “The Citizens of this City, Visiting School-teachers and Professors, the Faculty and my Dear Young Friends of the Seminary! Ahem!” and then go ahead and wonder how the Barbarians would be interested in what was intended for the Greeks! It was, in all, a reincarnation of a medieval monastery acting as light-bringer, with this difference, that the Seminary’s light was a Welsbach burner and no smoky fish-oil one that made a fog!
The visiting clergymen who had overrun the privacy of the Seminary left, and the parishes in the back places were to ring with the echoes of Lecture Week, and from many and many a dried-up well in the mind and heart of a minister who had never had money enough for timely books or visits to inspiring conferences, was to be flowing living, leaping water for months after. One missionary pastor, however, had been left within the precincts of the Seminary, a missionary whose work lay far back from the railroad, amidst the heavy, drifted snow roads in winter and amidst the serenity of the isolated hills and fields in summer; a missionary preacher who had been to a college, but not a theological seminary, and one who evidently strongly believed in equal suffrage—for this minister was a “brown-haired young woman.” She attended our classes in company with an elderly woman student and was present when our homiletical professor, to make his instruction clear as to how we should engineer a wedding, took a long and short man, called one the bride and the other the groom, and had them plight their troth before us, ex more.
One evening I sat at a supper table in the family hotel to where I had transferred my appetite, when I was surprised to see the busy little woman manager guide the “brown-haired young woman” over to my table and say, without a lift of the brow, as she came,