“Yes, or leastways, that’s the idea, but no one knows for certain.”
“Lanty will take it terribly hard,” said the old man musingly. “He and Len Simpson ran together always till Len went off, and Lanty never took up with anyone else like he did with Len.”
Sidney had been a little chilled by Vashti’s attitude towards the death of this young fellow. But with the persistent delusion of the idealist he did not call it hardness of heart, but “a lofty rectitude of judgment”; himself incapable of pronouncing a hard word against a human being, he yet did not perceive what manner of woman this was. He thought only what severe and lofty standards she must have, how inexorable her acceptance of self-wrought consequences was, and he said to himself that he must purify himself as by fire, ere he dared approach the altar of her lips.
Old Mr. Lansing mused aloud upon Len, and his family, and his death.
“Well,” he said, “poor Len was always his own worst enemy. Did you hear if he was reconciled before he died?”
“Reconciled,” ah surely, surely that is the word; not converted, nor regenerated, nor saved, but reconciled—reconciled to the great purposes of Nature, to the great intention of the Maker; so infinitely good beside our petty hopes of personal salvation. Reconciled to that mighty law which “sweetly and strongly ordereth all things.” Reconciled to give our earthly bodies back to mother earth, our spirits back to the Universal Bosom; to render the Eternal Purpose stronger by the atom of our personal will.
The church to which they were going, and which was even now in sight, was a large frame building, whose grey, weather-beaten walls were clouded by darker stains of moisture and moss. Virginia creeper garlanded the porch wherein the worshippers put off their coats, their smiles and, so far as might be, the old Adam, before entering the church proper. Tall elms overshadowed the roof, their lowest branches scraping eerily across the shingles with every breath of wind, a sound which, in a mind properly attuned to spiritual things, might easily typify the tooth and nail methods of the Devil in his assault upon holy things. Indeed the weird sighings and scrapings of these trees had had their share in hastening sinners to the anxious seat, and in precipitating those already there to deeper depths of penitential fear.
Behind the church, in decent array, the modest tomb-stones of God’s acre were marshalled. What a nucleus of human emotion is such a church—with its living within and its dead without, like children clustered about the skirts of their mother. Surely, surely, it is, at least, a beautiful thing, this “sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection”—the hope which had sustained so many weary old hearts in this congregation, when one after another their loved ones went from them to be cradled in Mother Earth!
Well—Religion they say has grown too scant a robe for human reason. Through its rents is seen the glorious nakedness of science; yet surely the strongest of us must feel a tender reverence for the faith typified by such a church as this. The home of simple faith, where simple folk found peace.
In sect this Church was one of those independent bodies of which there are so many in America, which having retained the severe rectitude of the Puritans are yet leavened with evangelical tenderness, and vivified by evangelical zeal. It approximated perhaps more closely to the Congregational Body than any other, and was self-governing and self-sustaining. As the Chicago people date everything from “The Fire” so Dole people dated all their reminiscences from the “Opening” of the “Church,” which meant the dedication of the present church, which, in old Mr. Lansing’s boyhood, had replaced the humbler log building of earlier days. The minister was chosen for life, and was by far the most important personage of the community. No one disputed his pre-eminence, and public opinion was moulded by his mind. The ministers tilled their gardens, lived simply as their fellows, and beyond a black coat on Sunday, wore no insignia of office; yet that office wrapped them in a mantle of distinction. There was no laughing at holy things in Dole. No Dole children heard the minister and his sermons criticized. The shadow of the great Unseen rested above the humble church and hallowed it.