A Circuit Rider's Wife. Corra Harris
propensities, and it is difficult to describe the shock with which I faced the perpetual exposure of their spiritual nakedness. It was a naïve kind of religious indelicacy, like the unguarded ways of very young children.
Brother Jimmie Meadows would confess to the most private faults in an experience meeting, and, if he did not, Sister Meadows would do it for him. They lacked the sense of humor, which, being interpreted, is a part of the sense of proportion. They shrank from the illuminating quality of wit as if it were a sacrilege—this auto-seriousness was even an important part of William's character. He put on solemnity like a robe when he was in the throes of thought.
The deadly monotony of Christian country life where there are no beggars to feed, no drunkards to credit, which are among the moral duties of Christians in cities, leads as naturally to the outvent of what Methodists call "revivals" as did the backslidings of the people in those days. So it came to pass, that year at Redwine, when the "crops were laid by" William faced his first revival, and I faced William. Spiritually speaking, we parted company. He passed into a praying and fasting trance, and my heart was nearly broken with the loneliness, for praying and fasting did not agree with me, and William seemed to recede in some mystical sense hard to define, so that I became a sort of unwilling grass-widow.
The revival was to begin at Redwine, when suddenly the rumor reached us that Brother Tom Pratt, a prominent member, had back-slided, and that nothing could be done there in a spiritual way until he was reclaimed. He was a large, fair, goat-lipped man with a long straw beard hanging under his chin, and he was said to be mightily gifted in prayer. But his besetting sin was strong drink, and he had recently been drunk. The simplicity with which William went about reclaiming him as a part of the preparation for the coming revival seemed to me almost too premeditatedly spiritual.
Brother Tom Pratt, a Prominent Member, Had Backslided.
The revival proceeded, at first with awful chilliness, at length with flickering warmth. At last, after a very moving sermon on the prodigal son, the altar suddenly filled with penitents. I have often thought of it, the tenderness with which the good God founded our Scriptures for us, so they would fit the human heart to the uttermost generations of men. That story of the prodigal is the eternal love message from Him to us. Preach it anywhere, and the aching, shamed, dissolute rebel in us trembles and wants to come home. Here in this hill settlement, where scarcely any man had been ten miles from where he was born, it seemed that a hundred had been secret vagabonds in the terrible "far country." When the altar was full to suffocation William called on Brother Tom Pratt to "lead us in prayer." And he led us through a long night into the very morning of God. I wish it were the fashion to call oftener on outbreaking sinners to pray in church. Usually they have a stronger sense of the immediateness of the Lord than the long-winded saints do; and many a time since that night have I listened to the Heaven-turning eloquence of better men in prayer, but never have I heard a nobler petition for the forgiveness of sin.
The church was a darkened space rimmed with light from tallow candles standing on wooden brackets around the walls, and the space was filled with the bowed forms of men and women. Near the pulpit there was more light falling upon the dejected figures of the penitents clinging to the altar rail. Within the rail, kneeling facing them, William's face gleamed like the death mask of prayer.
There was a silence; then a voice arose from somewhere out of the deeper shadows, timid, beseeching at first, like a sad messenger of the outer darkness who had known all the torments of hell and trembled now before the throne of Heaven. But as the bearer of the petition gained courage from his very woes the volume of his voice increased until it filled the church. The rafters shook, and sinners fell prostrate in the chancel. This, however, was only the beginning. The great opera of Brother Pratt's spirit went on like a rude Wagnerian measure until none could resist it. Men arose from their knees shouting. Finally, the prayer-maker, who had risen in his passion and stood praying with his hands above his head, reaching visibly for salvation, fell exhausted to the floor.
The scene is no less amazing to me now as I recall it than it was that night thirty years ago as I sat, a trembling bride, in the remotest corner, praying privately and fervently that the Lord would spare me the sight of William taking part in it. I felt that if he did I should ever after have some earth fear of him. If preachers could only preach without thrusting us up too close to the awful elbows of God before our time!
It was the custom in those days always to conclude a Methodist revival with a "love feast"; you cannot have it where you cannot have an old-fashioned revival. One of the coldest functions I ever attended was a so-called "love feast" in a fashionable Methodist church at the end of a series of meetings. The men wore tuxedos and the women wore party gowns, high-necked, of course, on account of its being a church affair. And the only difference between that and any other social function was that a good many people were present whom the fashionable members never invited to their own homes and whom they treated with offensive cordiality on this occasion.
But at the end of the revival at Redwine there was a real "love feast." A great crowd had assembled, due to the honorable curiosity in the neighborhood to know who would "testify," who would confess his fault or proclaim that he had forgiven some brother man about a line fence between their farms or a shoat. It was, indeed, a sort of Dun and Bradstreet opportunity to know the exact spiritual standing of every man and woman in the community. And it was William's plan that the service should be held in the evening out-of-doors under the great pines. Torches of lightwood furnished the illumination. William stood beside a small table facing the congregation, who were seated on the benches that had been brought out of the church. After a song and a prayer that must have made the old saints sit up on their dust in the graveyard behind the church to listen, William gave the customary invitation.
"Brethren and sisters," he said, "we have had a gracious meeting and a mighty outpouring of the Spirit. It is meet and proper for those who have been helped, who feel that their sins are forgiven, who aim to live a new life, to get up and say so, and thus burn the bridges behind them. Come out on the Lord's side so everybody can see where you stand! I leave the meeting open to you."
"Brother Thompson," said a gray old man with meal on his coat, "I feel that I have been blessed durin' this meetin', and I ask the prayers of all Christian people that I may continue faithful to the end!"
"Amen!" said William, and there were general grunts of approval, for the miller was known to be a wonderfully good man.
"Brother Thompson," said a strange, shaggy young Adam, "I feel that my sins are forgiven me and that I am a child of God. I ask the prayers of all Christian people that I may continue faithful." He was a moonshiner who had destroyed his whisky and cut up his own copper worm and vats during the meeting. As he resumed his seat a little thin woman in a blue cotton dress sprang to her feet, hopped with the belligerent air of a fighting jaybird across the intervening space and lost herself in the arms of the regenerated moonshiner. She was his wife, the good woman who stayed at home and prayed for him of nights. Now she shouted and beat a tender tattoo with her little brown hands upon his bowed head.
"I jest can't help shoutin'," she cried. "I'm so glad he done it!"
He had "done it" three times before—reformed, only to fall again so soon as the corn was gathered in the fall. No one had confidence in him save this little blue-winged heart who loved him. It is no wonder women believe in God easier than anyone else does! They can believe with so little reason in men.
After this followed several triumphant testimonies. Sister Glory White began to shout sweetly and quietly in the amen corner, slapping her fat hands together and whispering softly:
"Bless the Lord, O my soul! Bless the Lord, O my soul! And all that is within me, praise His holy name!"
Presently there was an interruption. William had made the mistake of confiding one of the torches to Brother Billy Fleming, a "holiness man." Suddenly he leaped into the air, shouting and brandishing his blaze in every direction.