Having testified to the nature and sincerity of his sentiments with respect to the obnoxious interloper, as he considered him, our local wit turned a cold shoulder toward the pulpit and buried himself in the pages of a small, much-worn volume he drew from his pocket, never vouchsafing another glance at desk or occupant during the service.
The little book was a collection of devotional readings he carried with him everywhere. His mother had given it to him when he went abroad. From her, too, he had learned to kneel by his bed each night and pray, as he had done at her knee in infancy. He never remitted the habit. I used to wonder, with a hard heartache, if he kept it up during that dark, dreadful age in the asylum.
Less than three years after my first sight of him, the deaf, dumb and lunatic heir of the vast Randolph estate joined the mother he had not forgotten, nor ceased to love and venerate in the long night that had no star of hope, and which was to know no dawning this side of heaven.
XXXIII
PLANTATION PREACHING—COLORED COMMUNICANTS—A “MIGHTY MAN IN PRAYER”
In the group of midland counties that embraced Charlotte, Prince Edward and Halifax—names that fell into line, as by natural gravitation, in the thought and speech of the “Old Virginian”—the Presbyterian was the leading denomination. Rice, Lacy, Hoge, Alexander, and Speece had left their mark upon preceding generations, and a fragrant memory—as of mountains of myrrh and hills of frankincense—through all the Southern Church.
Five out of seven of the leading planters in the region were Presbyterians. The others were, almost without exception, Episcopalians, and the two denominations affiliated more cordially than with Baptists, Methodists, and the sparse sprinkling of Campbellites, or “Christians,” as they preferred to call their sect.
Slavery existed in Virginia in its mildest possible form, and nowhere was the master’s rule more paternal than in the group of counties I have named. The negroes were permitted to hold their own prayer-meetings in their cabins whenever it pleased them; they attended religious services as regularly as their owners, and, in a majority of the old families, were called in to family worship with the children of the household. No more convincing proof of their religious freedom could be desired than the fact that the bulk of the colored population belonged to the Baptist Church. Why, I could never make out. The Methodists would seem likely to attract them with equal force, their methods appealing to the emotional, excitable natures of the semi-tropical race as strongly as those of the denomination that found favor in their sight. Yet, when one of our servants “got through” the spiritual conflicts that ushered in a state of grace, we expected him, or her, to join the Baptist Church as confidently as we looked for the child of the Covenant, “ordered in all things and sure,” to confirm, when it arrived at “the age of discretion,” the vows taken by parents and sponsors in baptism.