Elmer watched her going from class to class; he saw how naturally and affectionately the children talked to her.
“She’d make a great wife and mother—a great wife for a preacher—a great wife for a bishop,” he noted.
IV
Evening services at the Banjo Crossing Methodist Church had normally drawn less than forty people, but there were a hundred tonight, when, fumblingly, Elmer broke away from old-fashioned church practise and began what was later to become his famous Lively Sunday Evenings.
He chose the brighter hymns, “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” “Wonderful Words of Life,” “Brighten the Corner Where You Are,” and the triumphant pæan of “When the Roll is Called up Yonder, I’ll be There.” Instead of making them drone through many stanzas, he had them sing one from each hymn. Then he startled them by shouting, “Now I don’t want any of you old fellows to be shocked, or say it isn’t proper in church, because I’m going to get the spirit awakened and maybe get the old devil on the run! Remember that the Lord who made the sunshine and the rejoicing hills must have been behind the fellows that wrote the glad songs, so I want you to all pipe up good and lively with ‘Dixie’! Yes, sir! Then, for the old fellows, like me, we’ll have a stanza of that magnificent old reassurance of righteousness, ‘How Firm a Foundation.’ ”
They did look shocked, some of them; but the youngsters, the boys and the girls keeping an aseptic tryst in the back pews, were delighted. He made them sing the chorus of “Dixie” over and over, till all but one or two rheumatic saints looked cheerful.
His text was from Galatians: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace.”
“Don’t you ever listen for one second,” he commanded, “to these wishy-washy fellows that carry water on both shoulders, that love to straddle the fence, that are scared of the sternness of the good old-time Methodist doctrine and tell you that details don’t mean anything, that dogmas and the discipline don’t mean anything. They do! Justification means something! Baptism means something! It means something that the wicked and worldly stand for this horrible stinking tobacco and this insane alcohol, which makes a man like a murderer, but we Methodists keep ourselves pure and unspotted and undefiled.
“But tonight, on this first day of getting acquainted with you, Brothers and Sisters, I don’t want to go into these details. I want to get down to the fundamental thing which details merely carry out, and that fundamental thing—— What is it? What is it? What is it but Jesus Christ, and his love for each and every one of us!
“Love! Love! Love! How beauteous the very word! Not carnal love but the divine presence. What is Love? Listen! It is the rainbow that stands out, in all its glorious many-colored hues, illuminating and making glad again the dark clouds of life. It is the morning and the evening star, that in glad refulgence, there on the awed horizon, call Nature’s hearts to an uplifted rejoicing in God’s marvelous firmament! Round about the cradle of the babe, sleeping so quietly while o’er him hangs in almost agonized adoration his loving mother, shines the miracle of Love, and at the last sad end, comforting the hearts that bear its immortal permanence, round even the quiet tomb, shines Love.