Held to Answer: A Novel

by Peter Clark MacFarlane

"There will be a business meeting of the church on Monday night to consider matters of grave import to the congregation. Every member is urged to be present."

There was a grave doubt if the Elder had a right of himself to call a meeting of the church. Yet the only man with force enough to voice that doubt was the minister, and he did not voice it. Instead, he stood quietly until the announcement was concluded and then invoked the benediction of God upon all the service, which, of course, included the announcement.

When at the close of the service Doctor Hampstead undertook to mingle among his people, according to custom, he found a minority hysterically hearty in their assurances of confidence, sympathy, and support; but the majority avoided him. Instead of enduring this and withering under it, the minister was roused into something like aggression. By confronting and accosting them, he forced aloof individuals to address him. He made his way into groups that did not open readily to receive him. In all conversations he frankly recognized his position, made it the uppermost topic, and solicited opinion and advice. He even eavesdropped a little. Once people opened their mouths upon the subject, he was astonished at their frankness. When the sum total of the impressions thus gathered was organized and deductions made, he was stunned almost to cynicism by their results. Of course, no one indicated that they believed him guilty of theft, and in the main all accepted his defense as the true defense. But they found him guilty of folly—a folly with a woman. Whether it was merely a folly and not a sin, it appeared was not to greatly alter penalties.

Yet justice must be done these people. They felt sorry for their minister and showed it; and they only shrank from him to avoid showing something else that would hurt him. They still acknowledged their debts of personal gratitude to him, but now they experienced a feeling of superiority. Their weaknesses had overtaken them in private; his had caught up with him under the spotlight's glare. They looked upon him with commiseration, pityingly, but from a lofty height. Besides which, they accused him of an overt offense. He had brought shame on All People's. He had preached to them this morning upon the duty of being true; but he had himself not been true—to the proud self-interest of All People's.

This indignant concern for the reputation of All People's was rather a surprising revelation to Hampstead. He had fallen into the way of thinking that he had made All People's; that he and All People's were one. That the congregation could have any purpose that did not include his purpose was not thinkable. He had never conceived of it as a social organism, with self-consciousness, with pride, with a head to be held up and a reputation to be sustained. To him All People's was not a society of persons with a pose. It was an association of individuals, each more or less weak, more or less dependent in their spiritual nature upon each other and upon him; the whole banded together to help each other and to help others like themselves. He had thought of himself as the instrument of All People's in its work of human salvage. But he now discovered that in these four years All People's had suffered from an over extension of the ego. It had been spoiled by prosperity and public approbation, just as other congregations, or individuals, might be or have been. The admiration of the members for him as their pastor, their humble obedience to his will, was in part due, not to his spiritual ascendancy, not to his conspicuously successful labors as a helper of humankind in so many different ways, but to the fact that these activities of the minister won him that public admiration and approval which shed a glamour also upon the congregation and upon the individual members of the congregation. Because of this, they worshipped him, honored him, and palavered over him to a point where Hampstead, no doubt as unconsciously as the congregation and as dangerously, had suffered an over-extension of his own ego.

But deflation of spirit had come to him swiftly. Now his own pride and his own self-sufficiency had all been shot away. If any remained, the effect of this Sunday morning service was quite sufficient to perform the final operation of removal.

He was to preach that night from the text: "If God is for us, who is against us." He gave up the idea. It sounded egotistical. He preached instead his farewell sermon, though without a word of farewell in it, from the text:

"Brethren, even if a man be overtaken in any trespass, ye who are spiritual restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; looking to thyself lest thou also be tempted."

That was what the pastor of All People's was trying to do,—to restore a man. In preaching this sermon, he forgot that this was his valedictory, forgot himself, forgot everything but the great mission of spiritual reconstruction upon which he had labored and proposed to labor as long as life was in him, no matter what yokes and scars were put upon him. In it he reached the oratorical height of his career, which was not necessarily lofty.

But people listened—and with understanding. Some of them cried a little. It made them reminiscent. The man himself, now slipping, had once restored them with great gentleness. All said, "What a pity!"