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Title: The Supply at Saint Agatha's
Author: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Illustrator: E. Boyd Smith
Marcia Oakes Woodbury
Release Date: November 8, 2010 [EBook #34256]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SUPPLY AT SAINT AGATHA'S ***
Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: "_The kneeling people lifted their wet faces ... But the
chancel was empty_"]
THE
SUPPLY AT SAINT AGATHA'S
BY
ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_
BY
E. BOYD SMITH AND MARCIA OAKES WOODBURY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1896
Copyright, 1896,
BY ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS WARD AND
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
_All rights reserved._
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
THE SUPPLY AT SAINT AGATHA'S.
At the crossing of the old avenue with the stream of present traffic,
in a city which, for obvious reasons, will not be identified by the
writer of these pages, there stood--and still stands--the Church of
Saint Agatha's.
The church is not without a history, chiefly such as fashion and sect
combine to record. It is an eminent church, with a stately date upon
its foundation stone, and a pew-list unsurpassed for certain qualities
among the worshipers of the Eastern States. Saint Agatha's has long
been distinguished for three things, its money, its music, and its
soundness.
When the tax-list of the town is printed in the daily papers once a
year, the wardens and the leading parishioners of Saint Agatha's stand
far upwards in the score, and their names are traced by slow, grimy
fingers of mechanics and strikers and socialists laboriously reading on
Saturday nights.
The choir of Saint Agatha's, as all the world knows, is superior. Her
soprano alone (a famous prima donna) would fill the house. Women
throng the aisles to hear the tenor, and musical critics, hat in hand,
and pad on hat, drop in to report the anthem and the offertory for the
Monday morning press.
In ecclesiastical position, it is needless to add, Saint Agatha's has
always been above reproach. When did Saint Agatha's question a canon?
When did she contend with a custom? When did she criticise a creed?
Why should she contest a tradition? She accepts, she conforms, she
prospers.
In one particular Saint Agatha's has been thrust into an attitude of
originality foreign to her taste. Her leading men feel called upon
occasionally to explain how the eternal feminine came--a little
contrary to the fashion of our land--to be recognized in the name of
the church. Saint Agatha's first pastor, one should know, was a very
young man of enthusiastic and unconventional temperament. He did not
live long enough to outgrow this--for a clergyman--unfortunate trend of
nature, having died, full of dreams and visions, in the teeth of a
lowering conflict with his wardens; but he lived long enough to carry
the day and the name for a portion of his people who desired to call
their church in honor of a sweet, though rich, old lady who had put her
private fortune into their beautiful house of worship, and her warm
heart into their future success. It had befallen this dear old lady to
bear the name of Agatha, which, for her sake,--and, of course, in due
ecclesiastical remembrance of the strictly canonical saint of similar
cognomen,--was accordingly bestowed upon the church.
In the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and another numeral, which I
am requested not to indicate, but I may not deny that it is a recent
one, the popular rector of Saint Agatha's took a winter vacation. He
was an imposing and imperious man, full of years and honors, in the
full sway of his professional fame, when he fell a victim, like any
common person, to the grippe.
In the attempt to recover from this vulgar malady, he was forced to
observe that his select physician had drugged him, via an exclusive
bronchitis, into a minister's sore throat, such as any ordinary country
parson might develop for lack of an overcoat, or a fire in his bedroom.
Without undue delay or reluctance, the rector of Saint Agatha's took
ship for the south of France; and in the comfortable way in which such
things are done in such quarters, the church was set trundling upon the
wheels of a two-months' "supply." This was managed so gracefully by
the experienced vestry of Saint Agatha's that hardly a visible jar
occurred in the parish machinery. Many of the people did not know that
their rector had gone until a canon from London sonorously filled the
pulpit one Sunday morning. A distinguished Middle State clergyman
followed the next week; the West sent her brightest and best the
succeeding Sunday; and so it went.
Eminent variety easily occupied that sacred desk. The wardens of St.
Agatha's have but to say, Come, and he cometh who weigheth the honor of
ministering in this aristocratic pulpit. In brief, the most
distinguished men in the denomination cordially supplied. On the
whole, perhaps the parish enjoyed their rector's vacation as much as he
did.
Now, upon the vestry there chanced at that time to be one man who was
"different." One does find such people even among the officers of
fashionable churches. This man (he was, by the way, a grand-nephew of
the old lady who built the church when Saint Agatha's was an unendowed
experiment) had occasional views not wholly in harmony with the policy
of his brother officers; and, being himself a heavy rate-payer, was
allowed, sometimes, by the courtesy of the majority,--when his notion
was not really in bad form, you know,--to have his way. He did not get
it so often but that he was glad to make the most of it when he did;
and when his turn came to control the supply for that Sunday with which
this narrative has to do, he asked the privilege of being intrusted
with the details of the business. This request, as from a useful man
of certain eccentricities, was indulgently granted; and thus there
occurred the events which I am privileged to relate.
It was just before Lent, and the winter had been a cold one. One
Friday evening in early March there came up, or came down, a drifting
snow-storm. It was bad enough in town, but in the suburbs it was
worse, and in the country it was little less than dangerous to
passengers through the wide, wind-swept streets, the choking lanes, and
bitter moors.
An old clergyman, the pastor of a scattered parish, sat in his study on
that Friday night, and thanked God that the weekly evening service was
over, and his day's work done. He would have regretted being called
out again that night, for he had got quite wet in walking to church and
back, and the cold from which he had been suffering for a week past
might not be benefited thereby. This fact in itself was a matter of no
concern, under ordinary conditions, to the old clergyman, who, being a
lonely man in a forlorn country boarding-house, with nobody to take
care of him, was accustomed to live under the shadow of a "common
cold," and who paid no more attention to his own physical discomforts
in the face of daily duty than he paid to the latest fashion in sable
trimmings in the front pews at Saint Agatha's. There was no fur
trimming on his overcoat, which was seven years old and pitiably thin.
But he had been invited to supply at Saint Agatha's next Sunday, and to
that unexampled honor and opportunity he gave the pathetic
attention--half personal pleasure, half religious fervor--of an
overlooked and devout man. In the course of a forty-years' ministry he
had not been asked to preach in a city pulpit. The event was
tremendous to him. He had been agitated by the invitation, which ran
in some such way as this:
[Illustration: "_He had been invited to supply at St. Agatha's_."]
... "In closing, permit me to say, sir, that it would be agreeable to
us to welcome among us the grandson of our first pastor, that young
rector who died in the bud of his youth and Christian originality. The
fact of your ancestry will give to your presence a peculiar interest
for our people at large. But I beg to be allowed to add on behalf of
the committee, that certain qualities in yourself and in your own work
have led us to believe that you may exert positive influences upon us
of which we stand in need. In your remote and rural parish your life
has not passed unobserved. Your labors as a pastor, and your methods
of preaching, have been an object of study to some of us. We have come
to rate you, sir, as one of the men of God. There are not many. In
meeting with our people, the writer personally hopes that you may be
able to teach us something of the secret of your own happy and
successful experience as a minister of Christ our Lord." ...
The old clergyman sat with his feet upon the base of his little
cylinder coal-stove. His thin ankles shrank in the damp stockings
which he had not been able to change since he came in out of the storm,
because, owing to some personal preference of the laundress, he could
not find any dry ones. His worn slippers flapped upon his cold feet
when he moved. But he had on his flowered dressing-gown of ancient
pattern and rustic cut; his high arm-chair was cushioned in chintz and
excelsior behind his aching head; the green paper shade was on his
study-lamp; his best-beloved books (for the old saint was a student)
lay within reach upon the table; piled upon them were his manuscript
sermons; and he sighed with the content of a man who feels himself to
be, although unworthy, in the loving arms of luxury. A rap at the door
undeceived him. His landlady put in her withered face.
"Sir," she said, "the widder Peek's a-dying. It's just like her to
take a night like this--but she's sent for you. I must say I don't
call you fit to go."
"A man is always fit to do his duty," said the old clergyman, rising.
"I will go at once. Did she send--any--conveyance?"
"Catch her!" retorted the landlady. "Why, she hain't had the town
water let in yet--and she wuth her fifteen thousand dollars; nor she
won't have no hired girl to do for her, not that none of 'em will stay
along of her a week, and Dobson's boy 's at the door, a drippin' and
cussin' to get you, for he 's nigh snowed under. She 's a wuthless old
heathen miser, the widder Peek."
"Then there is every reason why I should not neglect her," replied the
clergyman, in his authoritative, clerical voice. "Pray call the lad in
from the weather, and tell him I will accompany him at once."
He did look about his study sadly while he was making ready to leave
it. The fire in the base-burner was quite warm, now, and his wet,
much-darned stockings were beginning to dry. The room looked sheltered
and pleasant; his books ran to the ceiling, though his floor was
covered with straw matting, with odd pieces of woolen carpet for rugs;
his carpet-covered lounge was wheeled out of the draft; his lamp with
the green shade made a little circle of light and coziness; his Bible
and prayer-book lay open within it, beside the pile of sermons. He had
meant to devote the evening to the agreeable duty of selecting his
discourse for Saint Agatha's. His mind and his heart were brimming
over with the excitement of that great event. He would have liked to
concentrate and consecrate his thoughts upon it that evening. As he
went, coughing, into the cold entry, it occurred to him that the spot
in his lung was more painful than he had supposed; but he pulled his
old cap over his ears, and his thin overcoat up to meet it, and tramped
out cheerfully into the storm.
"Well, well, my lad!" he said in his warm-hearted way to Dobson's boy;
"I 'm sorry for you that you have to be out a night like this."
The boy spoke of this afterwards, and remembered it long--for a boy.
But at the time he did but stare. He stopped grumbling, however, and
plunged on into the drifts, ahead of the old rector, kicking a path for
him to right and left in the wet, packed snow; for the widow Peek lived
at least a mile away, and the storm was now become a virulent thing.
What passed between the unloved, neglected, dying parishoner and her
pastor was not known to any but themselves, nor is there witness now to
testify thereof. Neither does it in any way concern the record of this
narrative, except as the least may concern the largest circumstance in
human story. For, in view of what came to pass, it is impossible not
to put the old, judicial question: Did it pay? Was it worth while?
When the miser's soul went out, at midnight, on the wings and the rage
of that blind, black storm, did it pass gently, a subdued, forgiven
spirit, humble to learn how to live again, for Christ's sake and his
who gave himself--as his Master had before him--to comfort and to save?
Did it pay? _Do_ such things pay? God knows. But as long as men do
not know, there will always be found a few among them who will elect to
disregard the doubt, to wear the divinity of uncalculating sacrifice,
and to pay its price.
For the soul of the widow Peek the price was large, looked at in our
mathematical way; for, when the old clergyman, having shrived her soul
and closed her eyes, started to come home at one o'clock of the
morning, the storm had become a malignant force. Already wet through
and through his thin coats and worn flannels, weak from the exposure,
the watching, and the scene of death, every breath a sword athwart his
inflamed lungs, with fire in his brain, and ice at his heart, he
staggered against the blizzard.
Dobson's boy had long since sought the shelter of his own home, and the
old man was quite unattended. True, the neighbor who watched with the
dead woman suggested that he remain till morning; but the widow Peek's
house was cold (she was always especially "near" about fuel), and he
thought it more prudent to get back to his own stove and his bed.
Whether he lost his way; whether he crossed and recrossed it, wandering
from it in the dark and drift; whether he fell and lay in the snow for
a time, and rose again, and staggered on, and fell again, and so pushed
on again, cannot be known. It is only known that at half-past two on
Saturday morning his landlady put her wrinkled face out of the window,
for the twentieth time, in search of him (for she had a thought for him
in her own hard-featured way), and saw him fallen, and feebly trying to
crawl on his hands and knees up the drifted steps.
She got him in to his warm study, past the chair where the flowered
dressing-gown and old slippers awaited him, and as far as the
carpet-covered lounge, Beyond this he could not be taken.
By morning the whole parish rang the door-bell; the hands and hearts
and horses, the purses, the nurses, the doctors, the watchers, the
tears, and the prayers of the village, were his--for he was dearly
beloved and cherished in that parish. But he lay on his old lounge in
his study among his books, and asked of them nothing at all. The
kerosene lamp, behind its green shade, went out; and the Bible, with
the pile of sermons on the table, looked large in the snow-light of a
day when the storm ceases without sun. He did not talk; but his
thoughts were yet alive. He remembered Saint Agatha's, and the sermon
which he was to preach to-morrow. He knew that not one of his people
(ignorant of such matters) would understand how to get word to the city
vestry. He tried to give directions, but his voice refused his
bidding. He knew that he would be supposed to have failed to meet his
appointment, perhaps to have been thwarted--a rural clergyman, old and
timorous, baffled in an important professional engagement--by a little
snow. He was to have taken the evening train. He was to be the guest
of the vestryman who wrote that pleasant letter. He was to preach in
Saint Agatha's to-morrow. He was to--
Nay,--he was not,--nay. He was to do none of these things. A sick
man, mortally a sick man, past power of speech, he lay upon his carpet
lounge, shivering under the pile of thin blankets and cotton comforters
that had been wrapped around him, and gently faced his fate. He could
not preach at Saint Agatha's. And he could not explain to the vestry.
Perhaps his heart-sickness about this matter subsided a little--one
likes to think so--as his disease grew upon him; but there are men who
will understand me when I say that this was the greatest disappointment
of his humble, holy life.
As Saturday night drew on, and the stars came out, he was heard to make
such efforts to speak articulately, that one of his weeping people (an
affectionate woman of a brighter wit than the rest) made out, as she
bent lovingly over him, to understand so much as this:
"Lord," he said, "into thy hands I commit my s-p--"
"He commits his spirit to the Lord!" sobbed the landlady.
But the listening parishioner raised her finger to her lips.
"Lord," he said again, and this time the dullest ear in the parish
could have heard the words--"Lord," he prayed, "into thy hands I
commit--my supply."
Sunday morning broke upon the city as cold and clear as the sword of a
rebuking angel. People on the way to the West End churches exchanged
notes on the thermometer, and talked of the destitution of the poor.
It was so cold that the ailing and the aged for the most part stayed at
home. But the young, the _ennuyé_, the imitative, and the soul-sick,
got themselves into their furs and carriages when the chimes rang, and
the audiences were, on the whole, as comfortable and as devout as usual.
The vestryman sat nervously in his pew. He had not fully recovered
from the fact that his supply had disappointed him. Having sent his
coachman in vain to all the Saturday evening trains to meet his country
parson, the vestryman had passed but an uneasy night.
"I had supposed the old man had principles about Sunday travel," he
said to his wife, "but it seems he is coming in the morning, after all.
He might at least have sent me word."
"Telegraphing in the country is--difficult, sometimes, I have heard,"
replied the lady, vaguely. She was a handsome, childless woman, with
the haughty under lip of her class. Her husband spoke cheerily, but he
was not at ease, and she did not know how to make him so.
The Sunday morning train came in from the country station forty miles
back, but the old clergyman was not among its passengers. Now
thoroughly alarmed, the vestryman had started for his hat and coat,
when his parlor-maid brought him a message. It had been left at the
door, she said, by a messenger who brooked neither delay nor question,
but ordered her to tell the master of the house that the supply for
Saint Agatha's was in the city, and would meet the engagement at the
proper time and place. The old clergyman, the messenger added, had
been suddenly stricken with a dangerous illness, and could not be
expected; but his substitute would fill the pulpit for the day. The
vestryman was requested to feel no concern in the matter. The preacher
preferred retirement until the hour of the service, and would fulfil
his duties at the church at the appointed hour.
But when the vestryman, feeling flurried despite himself, tapped at the
door of the luxurious vestry-room, gracefully refurnished that winter
for the rector with the sore throat who was in the south of France, he
found it locked; and to his unobtrusive knock no answer came. At this
uncomfortable moment the sexton tiptoed up to say that the supply had
requested not to be disturbed until the service should begin. The
sexton supposed that the clergyman needed extra preparation; thought
that perhaps the gentleman was from the country, and--ah--unused to the
audience.
"What is his name? What does he look like?" asked the chairman, with
knotted brows.
"I have not seen him sir," replied the sexton, with a puzzled
expression.
"How did you receive the message?"
"By a messenger who would not be delayed or questioned."
Struck by the repetition of this phrase, the chairman asked again:
"But what did the messenger look like?" The sexton shook his head.
"I cannot tell you, sir. He was a mere messenger. I paid no attention
to him."
"Very well," said the church officer, turning away discontentedly. "It
must be all right. I have implicit confidence in the man whose chosen
substitute this is."
With this he ceased to try to intrude himself upon the stranger, but
went down to his pew, and sat beside his wife in uneasy silence.
The chimes sang and sank, and sang again:
Holy, holy, holy--
The air was so clear that the sound rang twice the usual distance
through the snowlit, sunlit air; and the sick and the old at home
listened to the bells with a sudden stirring at their feeble hearts,
and wished again that they could have gone to church. One bed-ridden
woman, whose telephone connected her with Saint Agatha's, held the
receiver to her sensitive ear, and smiled with the quick gratitude for
trifling pleasures of the long sick, as she recognized the notes of the
chime. With a leap and a thrill as if they cast their metal souls out
in the act, the voices of the bells rose and swelled, and ceased and
slept, and where they paused the anthem took the word up:
Holy, holy--
and carried it softly, just above the breath, with the tone which is
neither a sigh, nor a cry, nor a whisper, but that harmony of all which
makes of music prayer.
He must have entered on the wave of this strain; opinions differed
afterwards as to this: some said one thing, some another; but it was
found that most of the audience had not observed the entrance of the
preacher at all. The choir ceased, and he was; and no more could be
said. The church was well filled, though not over-crowded, and the
decorous rustle of a fashionable audience in the interval preceding
worship stirred through the house.
In the natural inattention of the moment, it was not remarkable that
most of the people failed to notice the strange preacher until he was
among them.
But to the church officer, whose mind was preoccupied with the supply,
there was something almost startling in the manner of his approach.
The vestryman's uneasy eyes were not conscious of having slipped their
guard upon the chancel for a moment; he had but turned his head
politely, though a bit impatiently, to reply to some trivial remark of
his wife's, when, behold, the preacher stood before him.
Afterwards it was rumored that two or three persons in the audience had
not been taken by surprise in this way, but had fully observed the
manner of the stranger's entrance; yet these persons, when they were
sought, were difficult to find. There was one shabby woman who sat in
the gallery among the "poor" seats; she was clad in rusty mourning, and
had a pale and patient face, quite familiar to the audience, for she
was a faithful church-goer, and had attended Saint Agatha's for many
years. It came to be said, through the sexton's gossip or otherwise,
that this poor woman had seen the preacher's approach quite clearly,
and had been much moved thereat; but when some effort was made to find
her, and to question her on this point, unexpected obstacles
arose,--she was an obscure person, serving in some menial capacity for
floating employers; she was accustomed to slip in and out of the church
hurriedly, both late and early,--and nothing of importance was added
from this quarter to the general interest which attended the
eccentricities of the supply.
The stranger was a man a trifle above the ordinary height, of majestic
mien and carriage, and with the lofty head that indicates both
fearlessness and purity of nature. As he glided to his place behind
the lectern, a hush struck the frivolous audience, as if it had been
smitten by an angel's wing: such power is there in noble novelty, and
in the authority of a high heart.
When had the similar of this preacher led the service in that venerable
and fashionable house of worship? In what past years had his
counterpart served them?
Whom did he resemble of the long line of eminent clerical teachers with
whose qualities this elect people was familiar? What had been his
history, his ecclesiastical position, his social connections?
It was characteristic of the audience that this last question was first
in the minds of a large proportion of the worshipers. Whence came he?
His name? His titles? What was his professional reputation--his
theology? What were his views on choirboys, confessionals, and
candles--on mission chapels and the pauperizing of the poor?
These inquiries swept through the inner consciousness of the audience
in the first moment of his appearance. But in the second, neither
these nor any other paltry queries fretted the smallest soul before him.
The stranger must have had an impressive countenance; yet afterwards it
was found that no two descriptions of it agreed. Some said this thing,
some said that. To this person he appeared a gentle, kindly man with a
persuasive manner; to that, he looked majestic and commanding. There
were some who spoke of an authoritative severity in the eye which he
turned upon them; but these were not many. There were those who
murmured that they had melted beneath the tenderness of his glance, as
snow before the sun; and such were more. As to the features of his
face, men differed, as spectators are apt to do about the lineaments of
extraordinary countenances. What was the color of his eyes, the
contour of his lips, the shape of his brow? Who could say?
Conflicting testimony arrived at no verdict. In two respects alone
opinions agreed about the face of this man: it commanded, and it shone;
it had authority and light. The shrewdest heresy-hunter in the
congregation would not have dared question this clergyman's theology,
or the tendencies of his ritualistic views. The veriest pharisee in
the audience quailed before the blinding brilliance of the preacher's
face. It was a moral fire. It ate into the heart. Sin and shame
shriveled before it.
One might say that all this was apparent in the preacher before he had
spoken a word. When he had opened his lips these impressions were
intensified. He began in the usual way to read the usual prayers, and
to conduct the service as was expected of him. Nothing eccentric was
observable in his treatment of the preliminaries of the occasion. The
fashionable choir, accustomed to dictate the direction of the music,
met with no interference from the clergyman. He announced the hymns
and anthems that had been selected quite in the ordinary manner; and
the critics of the great dailies took the usual notes of the musical
programme. In fact, up to the time of the sermon, nothing out of the
common course occurred.
But having said this, one must qualify. Was it nothing out of the
common course that the congregation in Saint Agatha's should sit as the
people sat that day, bond-slaves before the enunciation of the familiar
phrases in the morning's confession?
"What a voice!" whispered the wife of the vestryman. But her husband
answered her not a word. Pale, agitated, with strained eyes uplifted,
and nervous hands knotted together, he leaned towards the stranger. At
the first articulate sentence from the pulpit, he knew that the success
of his supply was secured.
What a voice indeed! It melted through the great house like burning
gold. The heart ran after it as fire runs through metal. Once or
twice in a generation one may hear the liturgy read like that--perhaps.
In a lifetime no longer to be counted short, the vestryman had heard
nothing that resembled it.
"Thank God!" he murmured. He put his hat before his face. He had not
realized before what a strain he had endured. Cold drops stood upon
his brow. He shook with relief. From that moment he felt no more
concern about the service than if he had engaged one of the sons of God
to "supply."
"Are you faint?" asked his wife in a tone of annoyance. She offered
him her smelling-salts.
Had there existed stenographic records of that sermon, this narrative,
necessarily so defective, would have no occasion for its being. One of
the most interesting things about the whole matter is that no such
records can to-day be found. Reporters certainly were in the gallery.
The journals had sent their picked men as usual, and no more. Where,
then, were their columns of verbal record? Why has so important a
discourse gone afloat upon vague, conflicting rumor? No person knows;
the reporters least of all. One, it is said, lost his position for the
default of that report; others received the severest rebukes of their
experience from their managing editors for the same cause. None had
any satisfactory reason to give for his failure.
"I forgot," said he who lost his position for his boyish excuse. "All
I can say, sir, is I forgot. The man swept me away. I forgot that
such a paper as 'The Daily Gossip' existed. Other matters," he added
with expensive candor, "seemed more important at the time."
* * * * *
"When the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?"
The stranger announced this not unusual text with the simple manner of
a man who promised nothing eccentric in the sermon to come. Yet
something in the familiar words arrested attention. The phrase, as it
was spoken, seemed less a hackneyed biblical quotation than a pointed
personal question to which each heart in the audience-room was
compelled to respond.
The preacher began quietly. He reminded his hearers in a few words of
the true nature of the Christian religion, whose interests he was there
to represent. One felt that he spoke with tact, and with the kind of
dignity belonging to the enthusiast of a great moral movement. It
occurred to one, perhaps for the first time, that it was quite manly in
a Christian preacher to plead his cause with as much ardor as the
reformer, the philanthropist, the politician, or the devotee of a
mystical and fashionable cult. One became really interested in the
character and aims of the Christian faith; it did not fall below the
dignity of a Browning society, or a study in theosophy or hypnotism.
The attention of the audience--from the start definitely
respectful--became reverent, and thus absorbed.
It was not until he had his hearers thoroughly in his power that the
preacher's manner underwent the remarkable change of which Saint
Agatha's talks in whispers to this day. He spoke entirely without
manuscript or note, and he had not left the lectern. Suddenly folding
his hands upon the great Bible, he paused, and, as if the audience had
been one man, he looked it in the eye.
Then, like the voice of the living God, his words began to smite them.
What was the chancel of Saint Agatha's? The great white throne? And
who was he who dared to cry from it, like the command of the Eternal?
Sin! Sinners! Shame! Guilt! Disgrace! Punishment! What words were
these for the delicate ears of Saint Agatha's? What had these silken
ladies and gilded men to do with such ugly phrases? Smiles stiffened
upon refined, protesting faces. The haughty under lip of the
vestryman's wife, and a hundred others like it, dropped. A moral
dismay seized the exclusive people whom the preacher called to account
like any vulgar audience. But the shabby woman in the "poor" seats
humbly wept, and the young reporter who lost his position cast his eyes
upon the ground, for the tears that sprang to them. From the delicate
fingers of the vestryman's wife the smelling-salts fell upon the
cushioned seat; she held her feathered fan against her face. Her
husband did not even notice this. He sat with head bowed upon the rail
before him, as a good man does when reconsecrating himself at the
communion hour.
The choir rustled uneasily in their seats. The soprano covered her
eyes with her well-gloved hand, and thought of the follies and regrets
(she called them by these names) that beset the musical temperament.
But the tenor turned his face away, and thought about his wife. Down
the avenue, in the room of the "shut-in" woman, where the telephone
carried the preacher's voice, a pathetic cry was heard:
"Forgive! Forgive! Oh, if suffering had but made me better!"
But now the preacher's manner of address had changed again. Always
remembering that it is now impossible to quote his language with any
accuracy, we may venture to say that it ran in some such way as this:
The Son of God, being of the Father, performed his Father's business.
What do ye who bear his name? What holy errands are ye about? What
miracles of consecration have ye wrought? What marvels of the soul's
life have ye achieved upon the earth since he left it to your trust?
He came to the sinful and the unhappy; the despised and rejected were
his friends; to the poor he preached the Gospel; the sick, and
overlooked, and cast-out, the unloved and forgotten, the unfashionable
and unpopular, he selected. These to his church on earth he left in
charge. These he cherished. For such he had lived. For them he had
suffered. For them he died. People of Saint Agatha's, where are they?
What have ye done to his beloved? Thou ancient church, honored and
privileged and blessed among men, where are those little ones whom thy
Master chose? Up and down these godly aisles a man might look, he
said, and see them not. Prosperity and complacency he saw before him;
poverty and humility he did not see. In the day when habit cannot
reply for duty, what account will ye give of your betrayed trust? Will
ye say: "Lord, we had a mission chapel. The curate is responsible for
the lower classes. And, Lord, we take up the usual collections; Saint
Agatha's has always been called a generous church"?
In the startled hush that met these preposterous words the preacher
drew himself to his full height, and raised his hand. He had worn the
white gown throughout the day's services, and the garment folded itself
about his figure majestically. In the name of Christ, then, he
commanded them: Where were those whom their Lord did love? Go, seek
them. Go, find the saddest, sickest souls in all the town. Hasten,
for the time is short. Search, for the message is of God. Church of
Christ, produce his people to me, for I speak no more words before
their substitutes!
Thus and there, abruptly, the preacher cast his audience from him, and
disappeared from the chancel. The service broke in consternation. The
celebrated choir was not called upon to close the morning's worship.
The soprano and the tenor exchanged glances of neglected dismay. The
prayer-book remained unopened on the sacred desk. The desk itself was
empty. The audience was, in fact, authoritatively dismissed--dismissed
without a benediction, like some obscure or erring thing that did not
deserve it.
The people stared in one another's faces for an astounded moment, and
then, without words, with hanging heads, they moved to the open air and
melted out of the church.
The sexton rushed up to the vestryman, pale with fear.
"Sir," he whispered, "he is not in the vestry-room. He has taken
himself away--God knows whither. What are we to do?"
"Trust him," replied the church officer, with a face of peace, "and God
who sent him. Who he may be, I know no more than you; but that he is a
man of God I know. He is about his Father's business. Do not meddle
with it."
"Lord forbid!" cried the sexton. "I'd sooner meddle with something I
can understand."
Upon the afternoon of that long-remembered Sunday there was seen in
Saint Agatha's the strangest sight that those ancient walls had
witnessed since the corner-stone was laid with a silver trowel in the
name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost "whom we, this
people, worship."
Before the chimes rang for the vesper service, the house was filled.
Before the bronze lips of the bells were mute, the pews were packed.
Before the stranger reappeared, the nave and the transept overflowed.
The startled sexton was a leaf before the wind of the surging crowd.
He could not even enforce the fire-laws, and the very aisles were
jammed. Who carried the story? How do such wraiths of rumors fly?
Every member of that church not absent from town or known to be ill in
his bed sought his pew that afternoon. Many indeed left their
sick-rooms to be present at that long-remembered service. But no man
or woman of these came alone. Each brought a chosen companion; many,
two or three; some came accompanied by half a dozen worshipers: and
upon these invited guests Saint Agatha's looked with an astonishment
that seemed to be half shame; for up those velvet aisles there moved an
array of human faces at which the very angels and virtues in the
painted windows seemed to turn their heads and stare.
Such wretchedness, such pallor, hunger, cold, envy, sickness, sin, and
shame were as unknown to those dedicated and decorated walls as the
inmates of hell. Rags and disease, uncleanliness and woe and want,
trod the house of God as if they had the right there. Every pew in the
church was thrown open. Tattered blanket shawls jostled velvet cloaks,
and worn little tan-colored reefers, half concealing the shivering
cotton blouses of last summer, rubbed against sealskin furs that swept
from throat to foot. Wretched men, called in by the throb of
repentance that follows a debauch, lifted their haggard eyes to the
chancel from the pews of the wardens, and women of the town sat gently
beside the "first ladies" of the parish and of the city. There were a
few ragged children in the audience, wan and shrewd, sitting drearily
beside mothers to whom they did not cling. The pew of our friend, the
vestryman, was filled to overflowing. The wife with the under lip sat
beside him, and did not protest. She had herself gone with him to the
hospital to select their guests. For their pew was filled with the
crippled and other sick who could neither walk nor afford to ride, and
whom their own carriage had brought to Saint Agatha's. One of these, a
woman, came on crutches, and the lady helped her, not knowing in the
least how to do it; and a man who had not used his feet for six years
was lifted in by the pew-owner and his coachman and butler, and carried
the length of the broad aisle.
The church, as we say, was packed long before the preacher appeared.
He came punctually to his appointment, like any ordinary man. It was
mid-afternoon, and the sun was declining when he glided across the
chancel. Already shadows were lying heavily in the corners of the
church and under the galleries on the darker side. A few lights were
glimmering about the chancel, but these served only to illuminate the
stranger's form and face; they did not lighten the mass of hushed and
appealing humanity before him.
The choir, with bowed heads, just above the breath, began to chant:
Who shall lay anything to the charge
Of God's Elect?
It is God that justifieth,
It is Christ that died.
While they sang the preacher stood quite still and looked at the
people, that strange and motley mass, the rich and the poor, the sick
and the well, the disgraced and the reputable, the pampered and the
starving, the shameful and the clean of life, the happy and the
wretched together. When the singing ceased, he spoke as if he talked
right on; he read no prayers; he turned to no ritual; he did not even
use the great Bible of Saint Agatha's--but only spoke in a quiet way,
like a man who continues a thought begun:
"For the Lord," he said, "is the maker of you all."
There was no sermon in Saint Agatha's that afternoon. Ecclesiastically
speaking, there was no service. But the preacher spoke to the people;
and their hearts hung upon his words. But what those words were no man
may tell us at this day.
It has been whispered, indeed, that what he said took different
meanings to the members of that strange audience. Each heart received
its own message. Wide as the earth were the gulfs between those
hearers. But the preacher's message bridged them all. From his
quivering lip and melting voice each soul drank the water of life.
Afterwards each kept its own secret, and told not of that thirst, or of
its assuaging.
"He speaks to me," sighed the patrician, with bowed head. "How happens
this, for I thought no man did know that inner history? I have never
told"--
"To me! To me!" sobbed the pauper and the castaway--"the preacher
speaks to me. My misery, my shame--the whole world knows, but no man
ever understood before."
The afternoon waned. The shadows deepened under the galleries. The
great house clung like one child to the voice of the preacher. It was
as still as the courts of Heaven when a soul is pardoned. The stranger
spoke in a low but penetrating voice. Not a word was lost by the
remotest. He spoke of the love of God the Father, and of the life of
Christ the Son. He spoke of sin and of forgiveness, of sorrow, of
shame, and of peace. He spoke of sacrifice, of patience, of purity,
and of hope, and of the eternal life.
Not once did he allude to the petty differences among the people who
sat bowed and breathless before him. Such paltry things as riches or
poverty, or position, or obscurity, he did not recognize. He spoke to
men and women, the children of God. He spoke to sinners and to
sufferers, and to patient saints; he said nothing about "classes;" he
talked of human beings; he rebuked them for their sins; he comforted
them for their miseries; he smote their hearts; he shook their souls;
he passed over their lives as conflagration passes, burning to ashes,
purifying to new growth.
As he spoke, the manner of his countenance changed before them, like
that of any great and holy man who is charged with the burden of souls,
and who persuadeth them. A fine, inner light glowed through his
features, as a sacred lamp glows through alabaster or some exquisite
shell. His plaintive lip trembled. His deep eyes burned and
retreated, as if they veiled themselves. An expression dazzling to
behold settled upon his face. His white garment gathered light, and
shone. Suddenly pausing, he stretched forth his hands. What delicate
arrangement of the chancel lamps illuminated them? It was noticed by
many, and spoken of afterwards below the breath. For, as he raised
them in benediction upon the people, there scintillated from the palms
a light. Some said that it was reflected from the radiance of the
man's face. Some said that it had another cause. Only this is sure:
when he did uplift his hands to bless them, all the people fell upon
their knees before him.
It was now almost dark in the church, and no man could see his
neighbor's face. The choir, on their knees, began to sing, "Holy,
holy, holy"-- When their voices fell, the preacher's rose:
"And now may the grace of God the Father, and the love of Jesus Christ
his Son, your Lord, and the peace of the Holy Spirit, be upon you; for
there is Life Eternal; and God is the Light thereof; whose children ye
are forever. Amen, and Amen."
His voice ceased. The hush that followed it was broken only by sobs.
The electric lights sprang out all over the church. In the sudden
brilliance the kneeling people lifted their wet faces to the
stranger's, thinking to catch a last sight of him for life-long
treasure.
But the chancel was empty. As silently, as strangely, as he had come,
the preacher had gone. It was the fashion of the man. Such was his
will. He was never seen at Saint Agatha's again; nor, though his name
and fame were widely sought, were they ever learned by any.
The great, strange crowd of worshipers melted mutely away. No man
spoke to his neighbor; each was busy with the secret of his own soul.
The sick returned to their sufferings; the bereaved to their
loneliness; the poor to their struggles; the rich to their pleasures;
the erring to their temptations; and God went with them.
Down the avenue, in the room of the life-long invalid, the receiver
fell from a woman's shaking hand. All these--all they, the saddest,
the sorest, of them all--had been preferred before her.
"Oh, to have seen his face!" she cried. She held her thin hands before
her eyes. Then, flashing by that inner light which burns in the brain
of the sensitive sick, the face of the stranger swam before her for an
instant--and was not; for she had recognized it.
[Illustration: "_The face of the stranger swam before her_"]
In the Monday morning's paper, the vestryman of Saint Agatha's observed
a line or two of obituary notice tucked away in one of the spaces
reserved for the obscure. It set forth the fact that the old clergyman
who had failed to meet his appointment died on Sunday morning, of
pneumonia, after a brief illness, aged seventy-two.
Books by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.
(MRS. WARD.)
THE GATES AJAR. 78th Thousand. 16mo, $1.50.
BEYOND THE GATES, 30th Thousand. 16mo, $1.25.
THE GATES BETWEEN. 16mo, $1.25.
The above three volumes, in box, $4.00.
MEN, WOMEN, AND GHOSTS. Stories. 16mo, $1.50.
HEDGED IN. 16mo, $1.50.
THE SILENT PARTNER. 16mo, $1.50.
THE STORY OF AVIS. 16mo, $1.50; paper, 50 cents.
SEALED ORDERS, and Other Stories. 16mo, $1.50.
FRIENDS: A Duet. 16mo, $1.25; paper, 50 cents.
DOCTOR ZAY. 16mo, $1.25; paper, 50 cents.
AN OLD MAID'S PARADISE, and BURGLARS IN PARADISE. 16mo, $1.23.
THE MASTER OF THE MAGICIANS. Collaborated with
HERBERT D. WARD. 16mo, $1.25; paper, 50 cents.
COME FORTH! Collaborated with HERBERT D. WARD.
16mo, $1.25; paper, 50 cents.
FOURTEEN TO ONE. Short Stories. 16mo, $1.25.
DONALD MARCY. 16mo, $1.25.
A SINGULAR LIFE. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.
The above 16 volumes, uniform, $21.50.
THE SUPPLY AT ST. AGATHA'S. Illustrated. Square 12mo, $1.00.
THE MADONNA OF THE TUBS. Illustrated. 12mo, $1.50.
THE SAME. Square 12mo, boards, 75 cents.
JACK THE FISHERMAN. Illustrated. Square 12mo, boards, 50 cents.
THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMORTALITY. Essays. 16mo, $1.25.
THE TROTTY BOOK. Illustrated. Square 16mo, $1.25.
TROTTY'S WEDDING TOUR AND STORY BOOK. With
Illustrations. Square 16mo, $1.25.
WHAT TO WEAR? 16mo, $1.00.
POETIC STUDIES. Square 16mo, $1.50.
SONGS OF THE SILENT WORLD. With Portrait. 16mo, $1.25.
CHAPTERS FROM A LIFE. Illustrated. 12mo, $1.50
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY,
BOSTON AND NEW YORK.
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