It was on this first Sunday that he delivered a sermon on “Civil and Religious Liberty,” taking as his text Acts 5:38, 39; which was said to have roused the Valley settlements to active open opposition against the Mother Country.
On Sunday morning the church doors were opened regularly at nine o’clock, though service did not begin until ten. From sunrise a person might stand in the church yard and looking out over the Valley see the worshippers leaving their distant homes and in convergent and ever-increasing numbers approach the church from every direction. They came in family groups or singly; on foot and on horseback; a few in carriages and farm wagons; sometimes a family on a single horse; the wife riding behind her husband, with a baby in her lap and a child of tender years clinging on behind her.
At nine-thirty, the sweet voiced bell was first tolled; most of the congregation had already gathered in neighborly little groups under the trees. The women on their side of the yard discussed family news and local gossip; while the men on their side talked of crops and sports, hinted at horse trades to be consummated on the morrow and argued over politics, taxation and religion.
There was a distinct group of several families from far away Greenaway Court; in the main conformists who at the time having no church of their own to attend, came to Jackson River. They were kindly received in the settlement and welcomed by the congregation. They remained to themselves until the last church bell rang, when they, too, separated; the men going in the door to the right and the women to the left, as was the custom of the Valley congregations. Each mother with her girls [pg 97] about her, walked down the aisle and shooed them into a pew; while beyond the partition, over which the top of a tall man’s head might be glimpsed, the fathers found seats for themselves with their boys.
The schoolmaster announced and read the hymn, which was considered necessary, as books were few; then whanging his tuning fork until the key suited his trained ear, led in singing the hymn—Reconsecration—by Rev. Samuel Davies.
Here at that cross where flows the blood
That bought my guilty soul for God;
Thee, my new Master, now I call,
And consecrate to Thee my all.
As he was in the midst of his first long prayer; the one in which it was the custom to pray by name for the sick, afflicted and dissolute; and for the heads and representatives of government from the King to the county magistrate; he was interrupted by the piping voice of four-year-old Dorothy Fairfax, of Greenaway Court, who sitting near the partition and peeping through a gimlet hole made by some bad boy, saw little John Calvin Campbell, of her own age, not more than a foot away.
In the unsubdued voice of infant innocence, she piped out: “’ittle boy, peep through the ’ole.”
He was the grandson of the minister, and while minister’s sons are not always well behaved, it is said their grandsons are; at least John Calvin, an infant non-conformist, knew better than to talk to a daughter of the conformist church during meeting. He remained quiet with his eyes fixed on the preacher with a sleepy stare, while Dorothy’s voice grew louder and more insistent; to the amusement of the younger members of the congregation, until the thought occurred, that now all peep [pg 98] holes would be hunted out and plugged by Deacon Cressler, the carpenter.
The schoolmaster, knowing the ways of and accustomed to interruptions by children, did not waver in the fervency of his prayer, except as the child’s voice grew louder his own was raised in seeming greater earnestness.