Sez Arvilly, “If you should depend on prayer alone to keep your big shanghai rooster from fightin’ the little bantys I guess you would be apt to have considerable of a wake in your hen-yard. And you don’t kneel down and shet your eyes and pray for your young turkeys and chickens when a pair of big wicked hawks are swoopin’ down on ’em or a heavy thunder-storm comin’ on. No, you drive your little onprotected broods into the first shelter you can find and go at the old hawks with a club. Not that I approve of fightin’,” sez Arvilly, “but there is a time to pray and a time to use a horsewhip; our Lord, who was and is our divine example, prayed thy kingdom come, and then helped it to come by driving out the money-changers, and them that defiled the temple. He might have prayed for them to be driv 461 out and then folded his hands and waited for the millennium. But He didn’t, nor He didn’t say that human nature wuz too hard to handle, and that evil things had got to be changed gradual. He didn’t take their rich gifts, He didn’t make ’em church wardens, nor hang their pictures up in college halls to stimulate young men to go and do likewise. And that is what ministers of our Lord and his disciples want to do to-day, to drive out of the temple and the country the fat thieves that infest it, and the sanctified rascals wearin’ sheep’s clothin’. They have got a powerful whip in a consecrated ballot that will drive the thieves out and make them disgorge their ill-gotten gains.”
Elder Cross wuz agitated; the argument wuz driving him into a corner where he didn’t want to stand; he turned the conversation:
“This is a great work dear brother White is doing, but some criticise the idea of his opening the house of God every evening for amusements as well as prayer. Some don’t believe in mingling secular things with sacred.”
Sez Arvilly, “What is more sacred to the Lord than a saved soul, a lost one redeemed, a prodigal brought back. What headway is one church opened three hours a week goin’ to make aginst twenty saloons open every day and night.” Arvilly begun to be powerful agitated and I spoke up quick, for I knew how hash she wuz when she got to goin’, and I didn’t want this beautiful day marred by hashness even if it wuz deserved.
Sez I, “We all know how much good the church has done in the past. And now that the churches are beginning to band themselves together, and vote as they pray, this enormous force of righteousness is going to be victorious over sin and darkness, and the Saloon and the Canteen, the licensed houses of shame, monument of woman’s degradation, the unjust monopoly, the high fence separating the few enormously rich from the masses of the suffering, starving poor, will all have to fall. Christ did not die in vain,” sez 462 I, “nor the blood of the martyrs has not been in vain. The Lord has promised and he will fulfill.”
“God speed that day!” sez Elder Cross shettin’ his eyes and claspin’ his hands.
“Amen!” sez I.
But I hearn Arvilly behind me mutter, “You’ll have to open your old eyes, Elder, and go to work, or you won’t have much hand in it.”
But I guess he didn’t hear her.
Well, goin’ home that night, my heart sung for joy a anthem, more than a ordinary sam tune. The bright moonlight rested on the democrat and my pardner, and gilded the way in front of us, and further off we could see it lay on the lake, and it seemed to make a silver path on it. Life seemed worth livin’, the cold waves of death seemed lit up with a heavenly glow, the hosts of evil seemed to back off before the Angel of Deliverance.