The Leatherwood God

by William Dean Howells

“He'll hear more about him than he wants to if he listens to all you tell, Matthew,” Mrs. Braile retorted.

“Oh, no; oh, no,” the stranger protested, and the Squire laughed.

“You wanted to know,” he said, well after the beginning of their talk, “whether there were many of the Little Flock left. Well, some; and to answer your other question, they're as strong in the faith as ever. The dead died in the faith; the living that were young in it in the late eighteen-twenties are old in it now in the first of the fifties. It's rather curious,” the Squire said, with a long sigh of satisfaction in the anomaly, “but after the arrest of Dylks, and his trial and acquittal before this court,” the Squire smiled, “when he came out of the tall timber, and had his scalp mended, and got into a whole suit of Saint Peter's clothes, he didn't find the Little Flock fallen off a great deal. They were a good deal scared, and so was he. That was the worst of the lookout for Dylks; his habit of being afraid; it was about the best thing, too; kept him from playing the very devil. There's no telling how far he might have gone if he hadn't been afraid: I mean, gone in personal mischief.”

“Yes,” the stranger assented. “And his failure in all his miracles had no effect on his followers?”

The Squire laughed, with a rattling of loose teeth on his pipe-stem. “Why, he didn't fail according to the Little Flock; it was only the unbelievers that disbelieved in the miracles. Even those that went with him Over-the-Mountains to see the New Jerusalem come down got to having seen it as time went on, though some had their doubts when they first came back. Before they died, they'd all seen him go up in a chariot of fire with two black horses and no driver. Nobody but those two purblind ignorant boys that tried to keep him from drowning, when he fell into the river, could be got to say that the heavenly city didn't come down and suck him up. Why, seven or eight years after he left there was a preacher who was one of his followers came back here, and preached in the Dylks Temple—the old Temple burned down, long ago and was never rebuilt—preached the divinity of Dylks, and said there was no true religion that didn't recognize him as God. As for Christianity, he said it was just a hotch-potch of Judaism and heathenism. He saw the Good Old Man go right up into heaven, and said he was going to come back to earth before long and set up his kingdom here. He's never done it, and that slick preacher never came back, either, after the first. He was very well dressed and looked as if he had been living on the fat of the land, somewhere, among the faithful Over-the-Mountains, I reckon. Knew where the fried chickens roosted. Excuse me, mother. She's heard that joke before,” he explained to their guest.

“I've heard it too often to mind it,” Mrs. Braile mocked back.

“Well, it seems to be new to our friend here.”

Mr. Mandeville was laughing, but he controlled himself to ask, “And had the fellow no progressive doctrine, no steps of belief, no logical formulation of his claims? He couldn't have been merely a dunder-headed, impudent charlatan, who expected to convince by the miracles he didn't do?”

“Oh, no; oh, no. I didn't mean to imply that,” the Squire explained. “He was a cunning rascal in his way, and he had the sort of brain that has served the purpose of the imposter in all ages. He had a plan of belief, as you may call it, which he must have thought out before he came here, if he hadn't begged, borrowed, or stolen it from somebody else. At first he called himself a humble teacher of Christianity, but it wasn't a great while before he pretended to be Jesus Christ who died on Calvary. That didn't satisfy him long, though. When he had convinced some that he was Christ, he began to teach that the Christ who was crucified, though he was a real Messiah, was not a perfect Messiah, because he had died and been buried, and death had had power over him just as it has over any mortal. But the real Messiah would never taste death, and he was that Messiah. Dylks would never taste death, and as the real Messiah, he would be one with God, and in fact he was the one and only God. These were the steps, and the way to belief in the godhead was clear to the meanest understanding. The meaner the understanding, the clearer,” the Squire summed up, with another tattoo on his pipe-stem. “You see,” he resumed after a moment, “life is hard in a new country, and anybody that promises salvation on easy terms has got a strong hold at the very start. People will accept anything from him. Somewhere, tucked away in us, is the longing to know whether we'll live again, and the hope that we'll live happy. I've got fun out of that fact in a community where I've had the reputation of an infidel for fifty years; but all along I've felt it in myself. We want to be good, and we want to be safe, even if we are not good; and the first fellow that comes along and tells us to have faith in him, and he'll make it all right, why we have faith in him, that's all.”

“Well, then,” the stranger said, holding him to the logic of the facts, as he leaned toward him from his side of the fireplace, and fixed him with an eager eye, “I can't see why he didn't establish his superstition in universal acceptance, as, say, Mahomet did.”