Revisiting the Earth

by James Langdon Hill

All religious annals will be searched in vain for a better example of the community church. Everybody attended it. All our pleasures were connected with it. Anyone could get the key to hold a meeting. There was always something doing. It had a part in everything that interested the people. When in the Civil War there were victories, the farmers came in, and there sang Praise God, etc., and when we had reverses there was a meeting to appoint a fast. Far away down the gallery of memory hangs a picture. It is a church scene. The figures are the deacons and others, in colors that are fresh and glowing to this hour. The artist that could portray them on canvas would be immortalized in that one act. Extremely fastidious critics would call them old fashioned, but they have at least this merit, they are life-like. It would be becoming in us to honor them as they, in their day, honored the community. I recollect nearly every family that sat under the benign ministry of that church, and could come near to designating each pew they occupied. There was a kind of exaltation about the place, which held the fire, in the old days, on God's altars, and the quaint bare building became as the temple on Mount Zion. Never in the splendid temples, seen in after life, where the wealth of princes had been lavished, to decorate the world famous cathedrals, where stained windows shed an impressive light over the solemn courts, and where the ponderous organ rolls its deep thunders on the ear, have I seemed to be so near the Holy of Holies, as on one or two occasions when my heart was lifted up in that unadorned place of worship. Once the clergyman had pronounced the blessing and the congregation were dispersing when I lingered behind to make a single vow. Tear down that church! I could not have stood it to be present. To some meeting houses they attach a card giving, in plain letters, the church's name and age.

Recollections of Other Years

If, as a boy, I had been asked to prepare a tablet to place on that heaven-blessed house of prayer, I should have put up the sign, "The Lord lives here." There was a solemnity, in its very simplicity, and an impressiveness not artificial, which to a religious fanatic might easily seem supernatural.

The large plain room was pervaded, in the evening, by a dim religious light that proceeded from a few reeking kerosene lamps. Any kind of a meeting was opened with prayer and much decorum and orderliness were observed by the citizens, old and young. The church took everything hard that concerned its own folks. The building was our cradle of liberty. Both men and boys rocked that cradle. A large sweetly toned bell, joyously rung by lads at day break on Independence Day, was finer music to our juvenile ears than would be the combined bands of the world. In the capitol at Richmond, a painting is exhibited, representing the Earl of Chatham pointing to a little flame on the altar of liberty. At that flame how many torches have been lighted. Some have held that the church must be opened only to old age, but that was not the view then and there held. I loved the church. I never saw it surpassed. All its ideals are mine today. I have labored and sacrificed to exhibit them and realize them in other places. If the older present resident members were to visit the people that once had their church home with them there, they would find no trouble in recognizing the leaven which had been carried away from that sanctuary. Temperaments were different, all were unlike and individual, with unequal education, with diverse talents, not able to see with each other's spectacles, yet all learned from each other and all united on the big things. I feel myself indebted to those with whom I associated there, some of whom afterward obtained high and merited distinction. Some of them, God has made princes in the earth. There is the place where they grew up and there they had their vision of service. My warmest prayers have always been for their success. A throng of recollections which I can not repress starts from every corner of the old church and attends my walks about the streets.

Through Tears of Memory

There is no other such dark day as when a boy parts with his home and his native state for good, to find a home God only knows where, and the old life that meant so much to him is over. There were our friends, there was our home, and there are our graves, my father having given commandment concerning his bones. Pardon me, gentle reader, if for the moment I speak with a personal accent. An individual cannot inherit his experience. It is my feeling that it is well to know some part of the world thoroughly. "He who is everywhere is nowhere." Neither a globe-trotter, running like a wandering Jew all over the world, nor a tramp knows the countries he travels over. Here in my early day was a place without amusements.

The hoe, the hod, the plough, the scythe, the shovel, the woodsaw, and the axe, these are all old friends of mine. It is possible that as things are now viewed our sphere had in it a trifle too much of constraint, that the soul had hardly free play enough to unbend and recreate the mind, that we settled down too early, like well broken horses, to the work of life. A little shadow passes over my mind as I think of the analogy to bitting a horse. But when at sunset all nature rings the Angelus, we all say in our hearts, God bless the town and all its people.

Unterrified Visitors

"It would be no unprofitable thing," said Increase Mather, "for you to pass over the several streets and call to mind those who lived here so many years ago." On my approach, the homes of my day, that now survive, seemed to come right out to meet me. The old citizens appeared to start forth from their portrait frames. "They come like shadows and so depart." The old time town was revivified. The dry bones were stirred and made to live. The gates opened their arms widely finding us early residents and bold enough to enter. The same bordered walk led up to the front door. Houses, Say on. You want to speak. Utter your voices. Tell your story. I know its truth. You will not startle me. Many appeared to answer me as I stood, with my greetings, before them. Our old relations are all in my heart. In my day, everybody knew his neighbor and his neighbor was everybody. As is known of ancient Athens, at its best, quoting from an oration writer, "It is impossible for a man in this city to be of good repute or otherwise without all of us knowing it."

Even the most beautiful scenery needs absence to gain its hold upon us, and to unite a new and an old revaluation into something better than either. There is an old proverb, What is ever seen, is never seen. What is always heard, is never heard. The sound of Niagara becomes inaudible to the waiters at the hotels. "To feel the same thing always and not to feel at all, come to the same thing." A man casts his shadow over "A land where all things always seem the same."