But he made it quite clear, out of his profound knowledge of the wishes of the Almighty, that God did not want little boys and girls to have a good time. Quite the contrary. God wanted them to do exactly what the Preacher told them to do; He wanted them to accept the Preacher as their guide and their philosopher and to believe everything they were told, without fretting him with unanswerable and therefore blasphemous questions. He wanted the little boys and girls to spend most of their time praying to Him to “gimme this and gimme that,” and the rest of it being little gentlemen and little ladies, solemn and subdued, speaking only when spoken to and answering promptly when called. God told the Preacher, who relayed the message on to me very impressively, that it was a sin to play marbles on Sunday, or to play for keeps at any time; that it was a sin to roll hoops on the sidewalk in front of the church or rattle a stick against the picket fence in front of the parsonage. Everything that I wanted to do, everything that seemed to hold any promise of fun or excitement, was a sin.
But it was not a sin to saw wood for the Preacher, or to carry huge armfuls of sticks and fill his kitchen bin, and it was not a sin to mow his lawn or rake the trash in his back yard. The children of the godly were permitted to do these things because of the profound love which the Preacher bore for them; his motto was “Suffer little children to come unto me, and I will put them to work.” And since by his own admission the Preacher was a Man of God, we were permitted to perform these labors for nothing. A boy was paid twenty-five to fifty cents, enormous and gratifying sums in those days, if he mowed the lawn or raked the trash for a family given over to sin, but if he did the job for a Preacher or a devout Brother, he received nothing but a pat on the back and a prayer, or he could listen to a verse from the Bible and a lecture on his duty to serve the Lord and, incidentally, the self-appointed ambassadors of the Lord.
Once when I was about twelve years old our pastor telephoned my mother and asked that I be sent to his house to help him perform certain tasks which should have been done by the darky men of all work about town. But our family did not wish to offend the Preacher, so I did the work. And it was hard work. I toiled all morning cleaning out the Preacher’s woodshed and stacking split stove wood in neat piles, and then I carried in enough to fill two big wooden boxes in the kitchen. During this time the Preacher sat in his study, holding communion with God, and I presume, reading the Scriptures. Occasionally he came out to the woodshed to superintend my work, ordering me to do this and do that and scolding me because I did not work faster, but he did none of the work himself. And when I was through he told me to come into his study and receive payment. I hurried after him, very weary, but with pleasant visions of a quarter floating before my eyes. I believed that was the least I should receive, and to me it was a great deal of money; properly expended at McKinney’s or Otto Rottger’s, it would keep me in jawbreakers for more than a week, and there might be enough left to buy a bag of peewees or an agate.
But I did not receive the twenty-five cents. The Preacher closed the door when we got into his study, and then he commanded me to kneel. He put a hand on my shoulder, and he said:
“My dear boy, I am going to pray for you. I am going to ask the Lord Jesus to enter your heart and make you a good boy.”
And then he knelt and prayed somewhat in this fashion: “O Lord Jesus, bless this little boy who has this day performed labor in Thy behalf,” etc.
It was all very confusing. I went home somewhat in doubt as to whether the Preacher or God owned the woodshed.
But labor of little boys was not all that the Preachers got for nothing. They were inveterate beggars, and all of them had fine, highly developed noses for chickens and other dainties; it was seldom that a family could have a chicken or turkey dinner without the Preacher dropping in. It is true that their salaries were not large, but they had free use of the parsonage, and they were not in dire circumstances at all. Yet they always had their hands out, grasping; they were ecclesiastical tramps begging for a donation. In our town we used to give showers for them; many families made periodical donations to the Pastor, and sometimes there were surprise parties, when the Preacher and his wife were led into a room and shown piles of old clothing, food and discarded furniture, all of which was sent next day to the parsonage. The Preacher was always pathetically grateful for these things; he would kneel in the midst of them and offer a prayer for the souls of the good people who had thus given him the clutterings of their cellars and attics, which they had no further use for. He seldom had enough self-respect to refuse them.
4
The notion was prevalent in Farmington, among the Brothers and Sisters, that the Preachers were their servants and should peddle God to them 365 days a year. It was felt also that their wives should be constantly at the Lord’s work; that they should be at home at all times, available for consultation and prayer meetings, and that when they went abroad they should dress soberly and walk with due humility. The wife of Brother Court, one of our Methodist pastors, was severely criticized for her departure from this formula of conduct. Apparently the Courts had means other than the salary paid them by the church, and they kept a maid, which in itself was enough to arouse suspicion that Mrs. Court was not a true servant of the Lord.