Goose-Quill Papers

by Louise Imogen Guiney

D., with his active and high-strung temperament, was your true conversational preacher, treating with glad and reverent familiarity "thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls." Beneath the sounding-board he was perpetually on the defensive. He was always setting you straight, putting you in the way of seeing good, reconciling you to your antipathies. If we may use the word to signify a process so gentle, he hammered his optimism into you. You must be cheerful, you must be thankful, you must be self-sacrificing; there was no escaping it. D., in his zeal and his amiability, was a far-away echo of John the Evangelist; and the phrase, "My little children," came with peculiar unction from his lips. His voice was not powerful. It may have been a slight hesitation and reluctance of speech which gave it an especial charm. "Somewhat he lispèd," also, like Chaucer's Friar; if not

——"for his wantonnesse
To make his English sweete upon his tonge."

We remember that once, by some chance development of his favorite topic, he came across a wayside tramp, and gave him an apotheosis laughingly called to mind whenever one of that thenceforth respected species lights upon our path.

"Here is a vagabond, an outcast of society," began the Reverend D., with his usual high-bred gesture of expostulation,—"a good-for-nothing beggar whom you brush as you pass; and drawing aside, mayhap in your heart of hearts you despise him. You have no right to despise him. Nothing has destroyed or will destroy the eternal brotherhood between you. Despise him? Why, it is a disloyalty to mankind. In the eye of Heaven sinlessness is the criterion, not riches or health or intelligence. And he may stand nearer to the Throne than you, because of a more repentant spirit. Why should you despise him? It belongs to you rather to love and aid him. He is a reflection of yourselves, distanced from you by the mean formalities of the world, but fashioned like you without and within, and co-heir of whatever has fallen to your share. What you have been taught through the dignity of manhood and womanhood to think yourselves—that is he. He is the Image of Uncreated Beauty. He is the Wedding Guest in the palace of the King. He is the Mortal who shall put on Immortality. He is the Son of the House of David, the hope and joy of Israel. His head is like Carmel, and his form as of Libanus, excellent as the cedars. Dare you despise him? Even as you deal with him in your thought, should the Most High deal with you in our great day forthcoming!"

This extraordinary burst was delivered with indescribable serenity. We have but suggested the gorgeous language in which D. revelled when he chose, nor hinted at the peculiarity of pose and intonation which helped to make his words vital. To one hearer, at least, the effect was superb, and the tramp was established in his native dignity forever.

Dr. R. had the artistic temperament, being a poet of rare worth. There was always a fine metaphoric haze about his sermons. He was by nature diffident and somewhat listless; the effort of mounting the pulpit stair must have been distasteful to him. His phrasing was of extreme nicety and justness; and he spoke English pure and simple. Yet his "Greek languor," his low, unobtrusive voice, served to veil the excellence of his thoughts. He was shy of any display. His Sunday efforts certainly did not become popular, in the Brentford acceptance of that term. But while R., like the clouds, seemed gray always to heedless eyes, to brighter perceptions he must have shown the delicate, transitory tints of the rainbow. He had two great merits: his quotations, scriptural and other, were exquisitely apt; he likewise knew the value of sudden epilogues. You had not time to suspect that the last rounded period was having its dying fall, before

"He straight, disburthened, bounded off as fleet
As ever any arrow from a cord."

Altogether another type of Levite was the Reverend M., of clear Puritan descent. He had an expansive personality, and could rise to any occasion, clothing what he had to say in easy and elegant language. As a rule, his sermons, not to speak it profanely, were pacifying as an opiate. But sometimes he stood before his astonished hearers not wholly as a symbol of the peace-maker.

For his text, many years back, he once took the "abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet," Matthew xxiv. The awful sublimity of his reading prepared his auditors for what was to follow. Hearts were stirred to the depths that day, with the measured musical utterance, the dread and calm authority, such as fancy had conceived proper to the Recording Angel. M. never seemed quite so aerial and boyish in his proper person again. That one grand sermon shed its supernatural light still over him, as he walked on Monday and Tuesday in view of the laity. It seemed as if all his previous and subsequent words and ways were a disguise, and that only on the never-to-be-forgotten morning he had been revealed. None of his other attempts were thereafter held in comparison with this, an advantage not to be doubted. A magnificent prejudice in his favor would fain have forced upon his every parley the beauty which the first had worn.

We last heard the Reverend M. (he was then nearing his sixtieth year) on the evening of a Christmas day. We recall that he began by poetically picturing the corresponsive hour of that primal Christmas when the divine Child lay slumbering in His mother's arms, the hush of the Bethlehem hills, the unconsciousness of the broad kingdom that "knew him not." Little by little, the monotones of this tranquil discourse fell, like so many snow-flakes, upon our eyelids. A swinging festoon of smilax, stirred by chance beneath the pulpit edge, charmed us deeper into oblivion. The light ran in eddies on the faint gray walls. The visible, the palpable, were as if they had not been. We had slipped from our moorings into the irresistible depth of dreams.