“Got thinking in a groove, Priddy, that’s what the professor thought. But, of course, I’ve other faults. I don’t speak up—just whisper: no life or action. But,” he went on with a confidential smile, “I’m working hard on that, too. Mean to brighten up on those things next Sunday; though reformation can’t come in a day or a week.”
The next Monday a most encouraging report came to Burner from his deacon. Among other things, the old man said in his letter,
“There were not many out to hear him, for they had not cared for his preaching of the previous Sunday: but to those of us who had heard him the first time, his second appearance was startling. First of all, he seemed to have confidence. That was the striking thing. Then, in his effort to make himself heard he kept on a high-pitched note, which was somewhat monotonous, but more effective than his former timid whispering as if he were afraid of bursting the ear-drum of a gnat which sat on his desk. He fanned the air like a windmill in an effort to remedy lack of action: but that was a good sign. It argues well for the young man when he gets on the middle ground. But his sermon! He really gave us a cheering word; that made most of the others, who were there, like him. Personally, he would be glad to know in what a different way I have taken the application of his sermon, to ‘rejoice, and again—rejoice.’ I wish him the best of success. There is hope for him. I am getting one or two people, who told me they like what he had to say about rejoicing, to write notes of appreciation to him.”
“Twenty dollars well spent!” concluded Burner, with a smile. “At the rate, he is going Tucker will have a church of his own, over which he will cast his blessing. He has confidence—now!”
Late in the spring, Tucker found himself enjoying somewhat of a local reputation among us, for he was a decided success, by that time, on his preaching expeditions. He said to me,
“Priddy, the other people think I’ve got a call—now. I had a narrow escape, didn’t I?”
Chapter XXIV. Burner, a
Searcher After Truth. How a
May-Pole Subdued a Tribe of
Little Savages
BURNER, the upper-classman, though not my roommate, and by his upper-class privileges under no sentimental obligations to me, became my constant companion. He was a tall, thick-set man with a very heavy black moustache, much older than myself and dominated by a very heavy but sincere temperament. He had been a real estate agent and a country auctioneer up to his thirtieth birthday. Then he had studied for three years, privately, with a high-school principal, and later he had come to the Seminary to put himself under training for the ministry.
Burner almost frightened me by his hunger and thirst after knowledge, for in him I looked upon the epic grandeur of a mind, long starved, completely awake. All the outstanding, amazing, bewildering intellectual problems of the Universe and God, had solutions which Burner, with a sense of his limitations, sought to master. I had seen students of books before, prize scholars, in Evangelical University, but I had never beheld the workings of an awakened, mature mind. Books and the teachings of the masters were merely the starting points, the paths of departure, for Burner. He sought his path to God and God’s mind by his own charts. He was his own authority in thought, an independent ship under full sail exploring unmapped territory. He would sit in his Morris chair, in a secluded corner of his room, with his bony fingers propping up his gaunt chin, and with blazing eyes try to think out, in his own words, from a synthesis of his own observations, why God permitted evil. One night he rushed into my room with almost fanatical eagerness and compelled me to listen while, from a newspaper item which told of a father who had given some of his blood to his sickly child, he gave an eloquent theory of the Divine Fatherhood, suggested by that analogy. All his studies, in language, science, and philosophy were focussed upon his thought of God. They were not merely a discipline, or parts of a necessary curriculum, but the means to an end, the roads over which he went to a completer knowledge of his faith. The most unrelated and even trivial items of truth aroused his mind to action and set him at work on the most intricate and abstruse doctrines. He was critical down to the fine points of sharpening a pencil: he was intolerant of those who got their conclusions from text books.
“I’m doing my own thinking,” was his favorite sentence, “basing it on careful reading and minute information and nearly always I find that I get conclusions, after hard thought, that I might have secured, second-hand, from books. But oh, Priddy, what a treat it is to be in the Seminary, filling in the mind after it has been starved all these years!”