"Grow? I should swan! four feet every summer, an' freeze off to the roots every winter—jes' like your converts. Get all het up at meetings, blossom with grace, then comes the backsliding, the frost, an' nips the leafage. Where's the sense of it?"
Now the Probationer had his own doubts. Having turned a prentice hand at revival work, he was painfully familiar with its characteristic phenomena—first, hot enthusiasm, slow cooling, obstinate adherence to the form after the spirit has fled, finally the reaction which would leave his people less charitable, not quite so kindly, a little poorer in the things which make for the kingdom of Christ on earth. He had tried to be a real shepherd to his flock—to upraise by precept, example, counsel, and admonition. Avoiding dogma, he had brought them together irrespective of cult and creed on the broad basis of love and a common humanity, and just when he was beginning to expect fruit from that liberal sowing, this bitter theologian, the revivalist, had been loosed upon him. And this was first fruit of his work!
Jimmy's illustration coincided exactly with his own experience, yet fealty to his Church demanded some sort of defence. "Isn't an annual growth better than none?" he asked. "The green shoots certainly improve the appearance of your garden."
Jimmy blew a derisive cloud over the few cabbages, two sickly cauliflowers, a bed of onions, salvage from worms and spring frost of half an acre's planting. "But you don't get results. One sound cabbage is worth an acre of sick saplings; a cheerful sinner discounts a hundred puckered saints. I'm scairt as the black knot has got inter that orchard o' yourn, sir?"
"I'm afraid so," the young fellow sadly agreed. "Well, I must try and prune it out."
"I'd advise the axe," Jimmy grimly commented. "An' begin with Betsy Rodd."
Sorrowing, the Probationer drove on to the school, where a very cold young lady answered his call at the door. A slant of sunshine struck in under the porch twining an aureole about her golden head, creating an auriferous nimbus for her shapely figure. Standing there, so cold and pale, she might have passed for a statue of purity, and the Probationer, being young and still impressionable albeit engaged, wondered that any should have dared to doubt her. Thawing when he mentioned Ruth, she froze again as soon as he touched, apologetically, upon the event of the night before.
"If religion strips them of common charity, they would be better without it," she answered his apology, and turned but a cold ear to his plea for his people.
"They were altogether subject to emotion, incapable of a reasoned rule of life," he said. "With the fear of God removed from their hearts, they would drop to unmentionable levels, to say nothing of the hope and consolation religion brought to sweeten their hard lives."
But he made little headway. "I don't doubt they are not quite so bad as they would like to be. But there, let us drop the subject. Won't you come in and examine the children?"