A new name

by Grace Livingston Hill

“Yes, I s’pose you belonged at home. In fact they said you did. Well, we meet at quarter to ten. Then the regular morning service is quarter to eleven, and Sunday-school is in the afternoon. Have they asked you to take a class yet? Well, they will. Then the Christian Endeavor meets at seven. They’re planning to make you president at the next election. Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you that, but it’s a foregone conclusion, of course. And the evening service is eight o’clock. Of course it’s short and snappy and gets out by nine fifteen, but it’s a full day. Not much time left for your family if you go to everything.”

“No, I suppose not,” murmured Murray, trying to keep the amazement out of his voice. It was his policy to agree with everybody, as far as possible, until he had further light, but was it possible that grown men and women went to Sunday-school? Some nurse of his childhood had taken him for a few months once when he was quite young, but he had always supposed it was a matter merely for children. Yet Warren spoke as if he went to Sunday-school, as if the whole town went to Sunday-school. What was he letting himself in for if he stayed in this strange place? Could he possibly go through with it? And what were these “services” that he spoke of? Just church? Well, he could get out of that probably. Say he had a headache.

But when Sunday morning came and he sat down at the little round breakfast-table opposite Mrs. Summers and ate the delicate omelet, fresh brown bread, sweet baked apples with cream, and drank the amber coffee that composed the Sunday breakfast, and heard her talk, it was not so easy to get out of it.

“There’s an article in this week’s ‘Presbyterian’ I’d like you to read. It speaks of that very subject we were talking about last night. You’ll have plenty of time to read it before we go to church. I left it over on the Morris chair for you,” she said. It was very plain she was counting on his going to church. Indeed, he had been given to understand on every hand all the week from many different people, that church was where he was expected to be whenever here was service there, and he sighed, and wondered how long he would be able to keep up this religious bluff. If he only had thought to profess to be going to spend the week-end with some old friend a few miles away it would have given him freedom for a few hours at least, and a start of almost two days on his pursuers, in case he decided not to return.

But then, there was the old question again, where could he go, how get another name, and why try to find a better place of hiding when this one seemed fairly crying out for him? Then, too, where would justice be less likely to search for him than in a church?

So he settled into the Morris chair with a sigh, and took up the paper to read an article, the like of which he had never read nor heard before, and the meaning of which touched him no more than if it were written in a foreign tongue.

The article was about Church Unity. He gathered there was a discussion of some sort abroad, some theological crisis imminent. The article was couched in terms he had never even heard before, so far as he remembered—The Atonement, Calvary, The Authenticity of the Scriptures, The Virgin Birth, The New Birth, The Miracles. What was it all about, anyway? There seemed no sense to it. He read it over again, trying to get a few phrases in case some one began to talk this queer jargon, and he was evidently expected to be a connoisseur in such things. He must master enough to put him beyond suspicion.

Take, for instance, that phrase, “the new birth,” how strangely like the sentence he had seen in the trolley-car, “Ye must be born again!” It had come from the Bible. He had discovered that the first night he spent in this house. There must be some slogan like that in all this discussion. He was rather interested to know what it all meant. It fitted so precisely in with his own needs. He was trying so hard to be born again, and he felt so uncertain whether he was going to succeed or not. Perhaps if he read this paper he would discover something more about it. At any rate it would make the good lady with whom he lived feel that he was interested in what she had been saying, and he had taken good care that she did the talking when she got on such topics, too. So he asked if he might take the paper up to his room for further perusal. Mrs. Summers said yes, of course, but it was time to start to church, and he must get his hat and come right down. And in spite of his desire to remain at home, he found himself yielding to her firm but pleasantly expressed wishes.

The sermon that morning was short and direct. The text was, “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ to give account of the deeds done in the body,” and from the time those firm, mobile lips of the pastor began to repeat the words, and the clear, almost piercing, eyes to look straight down at him from the pulpit, he never took his eyes from the preacher’s face.

It was, perhaps, the first real sermon he had ever listened to in his life. Oh, he had been to church now and then through the years, of course—mostly to weddings, now and then to a funeral, occasionally a vesper service where something unusual was going on, and his mother wished him to escort her, once or twice to a baccalaureate sermon. That was all. Never to hear a direct appeal of the gospel. It was all new to him.