Chapter 2 No.2

The fragrance of perfected harvests pervaded Foxden. The air was full of those sweet remembrances of summer which are better than her radiant presence. The sky overhead was flooded with rich autumnal sunshine. Far to the north lay glimmering a heavy bank of clouds. There might be rain before night.

I entered the familiar parsonage and inquired for its occupant. He had walked to the end of the garden with Miss Hurribattle, who had been with him for some hours. I was at liberty to await his return in a depressing theological lumber-room, called the study. The First Church had liberally supplied its former ministers with the current literature of their craft. Current literature! are not the words a mockery? could they ever have applied to those printed petrifactions? One would sooner look for vitality among the frozen denizens of the Morgue on St. Bernard! Yet I doubt if these stately authors, wrapped in the cerements of their prosiness, may reasonably reproach a forgetful world. They ministered to the wants of their present, and by so doing were privileged to fashion a future which they might not enter and possess. Complain indeed! Why, their progeny had a good ten, twenty, or fifty years' life of it, as the case might be,-and here about us are men of greater enterprise and grasp doomed to work off paragraphs that perish on the day of printing. Well, no earnest soul can fail to modify the character of his age, and thus of all ages. So, if our generation demands ministry in newspapers instead of folios, a man may still win an honest immortality without the biography and the bother of it.

I looked up from the books to see the clergyman part with Miss Hurribattle at the gate, and then turn his steps towards the house.

There was something like embarrassment as we exchanged greetings, yet there was hardly time to mark this before it had passed.

"Ah, Heaven!" exclaimed Clifton, passionately, "how I envy that woman's faith in the omnipotence of a trifle! Suppose you or I can attain a judicial largeness of view, is it any compensation for that intense glow of the sympathies as they crowd into one specious channel? Why this man's yearning after intellectual satisfaction, when we only want a little fragment of truth to hang our sentiments upon?"

There was bitterness in the tone in which Clifton spoke. It hinted of the living death of a proud, disappointed man, who has renounced his youth of high motives and warm ideas, who has learned to contemn his boyish ambition to do some great thing for the world. Truly it is better to consume in the flame of a fierce sectarianism than to permit the spirit of youth to die when the gray hairs come.

"Nay, Sir," said I, "it is for you to be heartily thankful for this exuberant enthusiasm which has come to town. The complaint of the day is, that the doctrines of Christianity have either dissolved into abstractions or hardened into formalisms; and here you have a crop of fresh insights to direct aright, and to keep from degenerating into fanatical clamor."

"But how satisfy or control these crazy people who begin by ignoring the creeping pace of Time? Why, here is Miss Hurribattle, who has been these two hours beating into me, as with logical sledge-hammers, that it is my duty to denounce Deacon Greenlaw from the pulpit. The argument, to her mind, is overwhelming, as thus: Intoxicating fluids cause the breaking of all the commandments; cider, if one drinks enough of it, is intoxicating; Deacon Greenlaw presses apples, and sells the juice; he therefore upholds and encourages the aforesaid commandment-breaking;-it is the business of the pulpit to denounce sinners persisting in their sin, therefore, etc., etc.,-you perceive the conclusion. In short, if I do not instantly take the ruts of their narrow logic, and go about pounding into some and propounding unto others their pet scheme of regeneration,-why, I am a wolf in the sheep-fold, the Antichrist of prophecy, and I know not what other accursed thing. And here is truly the alternative,-to stagnate in a lifeless church, or to join these ravers in their breakneck leap at the Millennium."

"There is a noble element in this one-sided pertinacity," I suggested, "and a wise man might humor and use it for the best ends. Instead of attempting to pull these hopeful people back into the church, cannot you urge the church forward to comprehend their position? This impulse,-fanatical as some of its manifestations doubtless are,-might it not be constrained, or at least directed?"

"Never by me!" exclaimed Clifton, haughtily. "I should have to commit myself to all the wild Saturnalia of their moralities before it would be possible to acquire any power over them."

"But surely you might go as far as any one in the advocacy of Temperance."

"Temperance! Why, you forget that I must denounce Temperance as the deadliest of sins, and proclaim Abstinence to be the only virtue. There is a grand State Convention of Progressive Gladiators at present in session in Foxden; all the neighboring towns have sent delegates. Well, it was only yesterday afternoon that Stellato, in behalf of one of the committees, denounced the clergy of New England as gross flesh-eaters who had made themselves incapable of perceiving any spiritual truth. And I happen to know that Mrs. Romulus so successfully manipulated Chepunic, not a hundred miles up the river, that before leaving that town she publicly delivered her lecture entitled, 'Marriage a Barbarism,' and professed to have discovered something far higher and holier than the chain of wedlock."

"I am sure that Miss Patience Hurribattle is ignorant of any such tendency in these new doctrines," I exclaimed, indignantly.

"Doubtless she is," assented Clifton. "There is a hopeful, simple-hearted gleam in her eye, a fine simplicity in her speech, which betokens enthusiasm of a purely religious type. But she is banded with those who would use religion only as a fiery stimulant to the intellect, never as a balm to the heart."

A crunching upon the gravel-walk. A man and a woman were hurrying up to the parsonage. The woman short, sharp, lean; the man unctious and foxy,-yet also representing a chronic state of gelatinous bewilderment. The Great Socialists,-I knew them at once.

"Triumph! triumph!" cried Mr. Stellato, bursting into the study. "Deacon Greenlaw has been converted at last! He will make a holocaust of his cider-mill!"

"He will signalize his submission to the Gladiators by a great Act of Faith!" exclaimed Mrs. Romulus. "His cider-mill will be publicly burned this afternoon at five o'clock. All the delegate Gladiators will march in procession to the ground. Invitations have been sent to the Order of Frugivorous Brothers, the Infants' Anti-Tobacco League,"-

"Two drops of the oil of tobacco will kill a tomcat of the largest proportions," murmured Mr. Stellato, in choral parenthesis.

-"the Principal and Patients of the Lilac-Hill Water-Cure, the Children of the Public Schools, the Millennial Choir, and Progressive Citizens generally," said Mrs. Romulus, finishing her sentence.

"It is the afternoon of Mrs. Widesworth's semiannual supper to the singing-school," hissed Mr. Stellato, maliciously. "The Deacon's cider-mill stands on the hill just before Mrs. Widesworth's house: the procession may be expected to pass before her windows about four o'clock; it will then make the circuit of the town, and reach the top of the hill a little before five, when the exercises will commence."

Some petulant reply seemed ready to spring from the lips of the clergyman, but he checked it, and said,-

"You will have more water than fire: those clouds drifting up over the river mean rain."

"Only wine-bibbers and flesh-eaters are affected by the weather!" responded Stellato, with great contempt. "Sunshine and storm are alike wholesome to the purified seekers for truth!"

"But there is no time to lose," cried Mrs. Romulus. "We have come to ask you, as pastor of the first church in this place, to make the prayer before the torch is applied. You will doubtless decline; but we shall then be able to assure the people that the Gladiators are rejected by an apostate church, which has been cordially invited to become their fellow-worker."

"You had really better think of it," urged Stellato, in a seductive whisper. "The fact is, there is a great excitement, and we are getting on famously. We are bound to carry the county at the next election, and in a year or two we shall sweep the State. We have already enrolled some of the best members of your parish, and you see the Deacon is added to the list. Influential men who join us now will be well provided for when we come into power. We want funds to carry on the cause. Think how much you might do with such men as Prowley and Dastick! Ah, those abominable old sinners, it would be a charity to get something out of them to repair a little of the mischief they have done in the world."

I protested at the way in which these gentlemen were mentioned: they were friends of mine, and highly esteemed citizens.

"Sir, they are Moderate Drinkers," said Mrs. Romulus, with an emphasis which claimed the settlement of the whole question. "The Gladiators are full of pity for the poor lost inebriate. They propose to convert their bar-keeping brothers by a course of moral suasion. But they will ever proscribe and defy those relentless Moderate Drinkers who admit the wine-cup into their families, and-and-why, Sir, did you ever see the stomach of a Moderate Drinker?"

I never had.

"Mr. Stellato has one fourteen times the size of life, colored after Nature by a progressive artist. It is a fearful sight!"

I did not question it.

"Once more, there is not a moment to spare," said Mrs. Romulus, turning suddenly upon the clergyman. "The question is, Shall we put you upon our Order of Exercises?"

"It would not sound badly," insinuated Stellato, perusing the document in imagination: "'Chant, by the Choir; Recitation of Original Verses, by Jane Romulus; Prayer, by the Reverend Charles Clifton'"-

"Stop!" cried the clergyman. "I decline all connection with this business. I have no sympathy with its promoters, and I will never cower before the mob-tyranny they evoke. If I have yet any influence in the First Church, it shall be used in solemnly counselling all youths and maidens of the congregation to report themselves at Mrs. Widesworth's singing-school. The feverish paroxysms of these public meetings are doubtless more stimulating than the humble duties of home, or the modest pleasures at which a lady of Mrs. Widesworth's character is willing to preside; but it is not the wholesome activity which a wise man may promote. And I know that to the children of our public schools such excitement is far more fatal than the cup they never coveted: their minds should be nurtured in moderation and simplicity, even as their bodies are best nourished upon bread and milk."

"Bread and milk!" echoed Mrs. Romulus in shrill falsetto; "say rather loaves of plaster and alum crumbed into bowls of chalk-mixture! This is the sort of bread and milk furnished by your barbarous civilization! But the beginning of the end of this priestridden world has at length come. A new era is dawning upon earth. Much-oppressed Woman asserts her entire freedom; she insists upon her passional independence, and demands harmonial development. She is going to get it, too! Stellato, come along!"

We watched them up the gravel-walk, and then off upon the dusty road.

The minister meditated in silence, as one who had the gift of penetrating beyond his fellows into the mystery of sin. Now he was distrustful: the time might soon come when he would be desperate. I think he almost longed for the power to become a proselyte to any active communion, even if it proposed but a new whitewashing of the sepulchre which hides the corruptions of society. Notwithstanding the vigorous words he had spoken, I knew him for one who could never take hearty satisfaction in denouncing any form of Error, because always fated to discern behind it the muffled figure of Truth. More than most men he felt the pressure of an awful fact which weighs upon such as are gifted with any fine apprehension of these worlds of spirit and matter,-namely, the impossibility of drawing anywhere in Nature those definite lines of demarcation which the mind craves to limit and fortify its feeble beliefs. If the boundaries of the animal and vegetable kingdoms are hopelessly interlaced, it is only an image of the confusion in which our blackest sins are shaded off into the sunlight of virtue.

"But why am I here?" exclaimed Clifton, suddenly starting to his feet. "I can at, least swim a few desperate strokes against this current, before sinking beneath it forever! I can do something to save a few ardent maidens from this whirling water of Reform!

"And yet," he continued, after a pause, "yet many, perhaps most of these wretched people, drained dry by their one idea, are devoted with absolute singleness of purpose to the pursuit of an honest thing. Let us consider whom and what we may be found fighting against. If these subverters do not altogether prove the truth of their own opinions, do they not at least demonstrate the error of those who totally oppose them? Here is Miss Hurribattle,-who will not acknowledge her noble contempt for the accidental and the transitory? I believe that woman desires Truth as earnestly as men desire wealth or reputation!"

"It is so, indeed," I assented. "Her large nature will assimilate whatever grandeur of idea may be found among this acid folk. After a little time she will reproduce in saintly form whatever gives its real vitality to this movement."

"Never!" said the clergyman; "they will put upon her the strait-jacket of their system, and carry her off to doom."

Soon after this we went in different ways through the town.

I called upon Mrs. Widesworth, who had a culinary engagement, and could not appear, and then walked to the top of the hill, where a number of the faithful were heaping tar-barrels and shavings about the solitary cider-mill. Regarding their operations from a little distance stood Deacon Greenlaw; his face wore an expression of grim humor, underlaid by a shrewd intelligence of the true position of affairs.

"They are making lively preparations for your holocaust," said I.

"Well, 't isn't exactly that long word neither," replied the Deacon. Fact is, I just looked it out in the dictionary, and there they call it 'a whole burnt-offering'; but it won't mean all that with me, I can tell you!"

"But, my dear Sir, surely you mean to go under the Juggernaut handsomely, and not squirm in the process?"

The Deacon indulged in an interrogative whistle, and jerked his thumb in the direction of a corn-barn which stood near the base of the hill.

I requested explanation.

"The floor of that corn-barn," observed its proprietor, "is covered with husks about four foot deep. Under those husks is my patent screw and a lot of cider-fixins. That old mill's a rattle-trap, any way. There's a place at the other end of the orchard a sight more handy for a new one. So, when folks get to reading their Bible without leaving out the marriage in Cana, why"-

"Then you have been badgered into this," I said, seeing that the Deacon was not disposed to finish his sentence.

"Well, they've been pecking at me pretty hard; and when Mis' Greenlaw and the girls went over, of course I couldn't hold out. I kept telling 'em that the Lord gave us apples, and I didn't believe He cared whether we eat 'em or drank 'em. But you see I had to knock under."

I questioned if it was going to rain, after all; for the clouds were scudding off to the east.

"They're just following the bend of the river," asserted the Deacon, elevating his chin to bring them within range, and giving them a significant nod, as if to recall an appointment. "These apple-trees will be dripping well before night. I know the weather-signs in Foxden. It is going to rain,-and, what's more, when it does rain, it'll rain artichokes,-and, what's more than that, I don't care if it does!"