Considering his inadequate equipment, so inferior in the relation of means to end to that of the social worker, the average minister of to-day does better than his preparation deserves. If he has devotion, devotion will, in the long run, counteract his blunders. People will put up with almost anything from a man so long as he’s a man. There never was a time when respect for a clerical coat, as a coat, was less; there never was a time when reverence for the man within the coat, as a man, was greater. Because of this fact, we of the ministry who best know the seamy side of an ideal know also best its beauty.
I was born beneath a banner I did not choose, but like many another ministerial child, I have grown from a mere external allegiance to a real one. I think the angels of birth were a little distraught when they dropped me in the tents of the righteous, but on the whole I am reconciled. I have traveled to and fro and far, but only the rectory tent is home, there alone exists the nomad’s intense family friendship which is a home’s sole enduring furniture. I have wandered so far among other men and other manners and morals that sometimes our little band has seemed but a faint dot on the spaces of a universe undreamed of within the limitations of rectory walls. Wandering thus, I have questioned many things unquestioned in my childhood. Only ministerial children themselves can estimate how open they are to doubt’s attacks. The very intensity of partisanship and narrowness of creed and practice in which they have been brought up are sources of danger, while, having always been nourished on the glory of the mind, they will always in their traveling gravitate to the places of intellect, only to find their little faith regarded there as one more soap-bubble to be tossed about. Accustomed at home to the old-fashioned unquestioning distinctions, the minister’s son or daughter will discover that there no longer exists the old sharp fight between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, because each side recognizes far too well a kinship in weakness and wistfulness. There was a time when to take a man’s faith from him was a fair game, for it was his own affair to guard a castle aggressively inviting attack. Now even infidels are too pitiful to steal another man’s God.
It is not so simple an adjustment as perhaps it externally appears, the return to the tiny clerical camp whence once we issued forth to our education. Perhaps I have thrilled to the trumpets of larger armies, perhaps our little troop of skirmishers seems to me a sorry one now, and perhaps, darker treachery still, the hosts of Midian do not loom so big and black to me as of old, perhaps I have even made some charming friends among the Hittites and the Jebusites, but it is astonishing how, when I am back in the old conditions, the enemy’s ranks resume their old color and proportion.
When I am abroad I am no stickler for church attendance, yielding myself sometimes to the call of a “heaven-kissing hill” or to the spell of woods sacredly serene; but at home I am accustomed by contagion to look darkly askance at Sunday picknickers or lazy stay-at-homes. They should come and hear my father preach! Yet I myself feel God nearer on a hilltop than at the altar, and I own, as closest comrades and most inspiring, men and women whose souls never bow in worship anywhere. They belong to another army, that army of social betterment which is so curiously blind to its own pillar of fire. My creed is to their minds a child’s lisping, they ask neither a God nor an immortality, they ask only that they may lift the burdened man upright. If we cannot worship, let us work, people say to-day, and do not dream that never before in history was there enough religion in the world to make theirs a plausible deduction.
These my friends belong to the army of non-church-goers arraigned in the little village church where I kneel to say my prayers. It is very strange, they say to me,—these soldiers of an army grown far larger now than our thinning ranks,—very strange to me that you should need a religion; and I answer it is very strange to me that you cannot hear above the blackness of your hosting, your own prophet voices choiring a midnight mass to Heaven.
There are divers ways of worship and I acknowledge that my own way, minister’s daughter though I am, exemplary in externals, is not always that which would appear best in accord with my bowed head and practiced knees. There is much in your full-sized Anglican that is bigger than his Prayer Book, although I loyally hold that an inspired document of Christian common sense. Many a windy, rolling thought comes to me when I am kneeling in secret rebellion at the abasement of the Litany, irreverent, meseemeth, to the souls cast in God’s image, but who am I that I should think scorn of any words by which people climb to Heaven? Suppose I should compose prayers for my father’s congregation, think how bewildered the good people in our pews would become if they should find, writ out for their repeating, the calls of birds and the voices of winds, which I know would sing themselves into any prayer of my making.
No, in its prayers and in its practice, I find myself ever turning quietly back to the faith of my fathers, that banner of my clan. Perhaps I may think its gold tarnished with mediævalism, its silk worn very thin, but are not all banners merely the work of men’s hands? And what matter of the ensign so long as it holds skyward? I, within the ministry, may sometimes question our methods of warfare, thinking them valiant against obsolete bugaboos and oblivious of a more subtle Satan, but, doubtful how better to direct the age-old campaign, uncertain what newer weapons to endue, I would rather still be on the side of a blind and passionate ideal, for energies may sometimes be wasted, but ideals are never wasted.
Perhaps I have sometimes thought to join that other army, of man’s social progress, a noble army the thunder of whose modern warfare rolls ever louder and louder through the land. But I a deserter from the thin, faint brigade that belongs to an older fashion? A deserter now, when, in our little rectory corps, I see the hands that grasp the sword growing weaker, and the hands that uphold the sword-bearer’s growing frailer, and when, in eyes keen to pierce the Enemy’s darkness, I read the growing peace prophetic of the battle over? Back to my place in the ranks, back beneath our tattered pennon! What better service have I craved? What braver banner? For on the ensigns of many creeds I have searched, after all, only for that one sure device which shines upon my fathers’ faith. That device is a Face, even the face of the leader of all the host, and as on and on I follow the march of our ministry,—
“That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,
Or decomposes, but to recompose,
Become my universe that feels and knows!”