Had we not been absorbed in conversation, we might have discovered the latter fact some time previous to our arrival at the church-door, for the preacher was shouting at the top of his lungs. He evidently thought the good Lord either a long way off, or very hard of hearing. Not wishing to disturb the congregation at their devotions, we loitered near the doorway until the prayer was over, and in the mean time I glanced around the premises.
The 'meeting-house,' of large unhewed logs, was a story and a half in hight, and about large enough to seat comfortably a congregation of two hundred persons. It was covered with shingles, with a roof projecting some four feet over the wall, and was surmounted at the front gable by a tower, about twelve feet square. This also was built of logs, and contained a bell 'to call the erring to the house of prayer,' though, unfortunately, all of that character thereabouts dwelt beyond the sound of its voice. The building was located at a cross-roads about equally distant from two little hamlets, (the nearest nine miles off,) neither of which was populous enough to singly support a church and a preacher. The trees in the vicinity had been thinned out, so that carriages could drive into the woods, and find under the branches shelter from the rain and the sun, and at the time of my visit, about twenty vehicles of all sorts and descriptions, from the Colonel's magnificent barouche to the rude cart drawn by a single two-horned quadruped, filled the openings. There was a rustic simplicity about the whole scene that charmed me. The low, rude church, the grand old pines that towered in leafy magnificence around it, and the soft, low wind, that sung a morning hymn in the green, wavy woods, seemed to lift the soul up to Him who inhabiteth eternity, but who also visits the erring children of men.
The preacher was about to 'line out' one of Watts' psalms, when we entered the church, but he stopped short on perceiving us, and, bowing low, waited till we had taken our seats. This action, and the sycophantic air which accompanied it, disgusted me, and turning to the Colonel, I asked jocosely:
'Do the chivalry exact so much obsequiousness from the country clergy'? Do you require to be bowed up to heaven?'
In a low voice, but high enough, I thought, for the preacher to hear, for we sat very near, the Colonel replied:
'He's a renegade Yankee—the meanest thing on earth.'
I said no more, but entered into the services as seriously as the strange gymnastic performances of the preacher would allow me to do, for the truth is, he was quite as amusing as a circus clown.
With the exception of the Colonel's and a few other pews in the vicinity of the pulpit, all of the seats were mere rough benches, without backs, and placed so closely together as to interfere uncomfortably with the knees of the sitters. The house was full, and the congregation as attentive as any I ever saw. All classes were there; the black serving-man away off by the doorway, the poor white a little higher up, the small turpentine-farmer a little higher still, and the wealthy planter, of the class to which the Colonel belonged, on 'the highest seats of the synagogue,' and in close proximity to the preacher.
The 'man of prayer' was a tall, lean, raw-boned, angular-built individual, with a thin, sharp, hatchet-face, a small sunken eye, and long, loose hair, brushed back and falling over the collar of a seedy black coat. He looked like nothing in the world I have ever seen, and his pale, sallow face, and cracked, wheezy voice, were in comic keeping with his discourse. His text was: 'Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward.' And addressing the motley gathering of poor whites and small-planters before him as the 'chosen people of God,' he urged them to press on in the mad course their State had chosen. It was a political harangue, a genuine stump-speech, but its frequent allusion to the auditory as the legitimate children of the old patriarch, and the rightful heirs of all the promises, struck me as out of place in a rural district of South-Carolina, however appropriate it might have been in one of the large towns, before an audience of merchants and traders, who are, almost to a man, Jews.
The services over, the congregation slowly left the church. Gathered in groups in front of the 'meeting-house,' they were engaging in a general discussion of the affairs of the day, when the Colonel and I emerged from the doorway. The better class greeted my host with considerable cordiality, but I noticed that the well-to-do, small planters, who composed the greater part of the assemblage, received him with decided coolness. These people were the 'North county folks' on whom the overseer had invoked a hanging. Except that their clothing was more uncouth and ill-fashioned, and their faces generally less 'cute' of expression, they did not differ materially in appearance from the rustic citizens who may be seen on any pleasant Sunday gathered around the door-ways of the rural meeting-houses of New-England.