XIV
IN WHICH SOCRATES DISCOVERS A NEW FOLLY
“Well, I went and saw the Reverend Robert Knowles sail between ‘Silly and Charybdis.’ He bumped on both sides, but did it rather gracefully. He reviewed the career of Samuel, who lived and died some thousands of years ago. The miraculous touch of Carlyle or Macaulay might easily have failed in the task of reviving a man so thoroughly dead. But the Reverend Robert entered this unequal contest with no evidence of alarm. The dead man prevailed. The power of his long sleep fell upon us. My head grew heavy. I felt my weight bearing down upon the cushions. A stiffness came into my bones.
“On our way to church Betsey had placed the young minister in my thoughts. The trustees had reckoned that he would revive the interest of the young people in Sunday worship; and he did, but it was the worship of youth and beauty.
“Well, the other churches were emptier than ever, and so the spiritual life of the community was in no way improved. In fact, I guess it had been a little embittered by the new conditions. As soon as it became known that Marie had won the prize of his favor the other girls had returned to their native altars, having discovered that the new minister was vain, worldly, and conceited.
“Lettie Davis, who had made a dead set at him, had been strongly convinced of that as soon as he began to show a preference for Marie, and the Davis family had left the church and gone over to the Methodists. The young man had been filled with alarm. He feared it would 140 wreck the church. That old ship of the faith was leaky and iron-sick, and down by the head and heel, as they say at sea. She rolled if one got off or on her.
“Such was the condition of things when we entered the church of my fathers. We sat down in the Potter pew a few minutes before the service began. There were, by actual count, forty-nine people gathered around the altar of the old church, and behind us a great emptiness and the ghosts of the dead. In my boyhood I had sat in its dim light, with six hundred people filling every seat to the doors and a man of power and learning in the pulpit.
“Faces long forgotten were there in those pews––old faces, young faces. How many thousands had left its altar to find distant homes or to go on their last journey to that nearer one in the churchyard! My heart was full and ready for strong meat, but none came to me. The moment of silence had been something rare––like an old Grecian 141 vase wonderfully wrought. Then, suddenly, the singing fell upon us and broke the silence into ruins. It was in the nature of a breach of the peace. There are two kinds of people who ought to be gently but firmly restrained: the person that talks too much and the person that sings too much.