Chapter 3
Oratory and poetry--all foolishness, I say. Better far are drawing-lessons, and raffia-work, and clay-modeling than: “I come not here to talk,” and “A soldier of the Legion lay dying at Algiers,” and “Old Ironsides at anchor lay.” (I observe that these lines are more or less familiar to you, and that you are eager to add selections to the list, all of them known to me as well as you.) That children, especially boys, loathe to speak a piece is a fact profoundly significant. They know it is nothing in the world but foolishness; and if there is one thing above another that a child hates, it is to be made a fool in public. That's what makes them work their fingers so, and gulp, and stammer, and tremble at the knees. That is what sends them to their seats, after all is over, mad as hornets. This is something that I know about. It happened that, instead of getting funny pieces to recite as I wanted to, discerning that one silly turn deserves another, my parents, well-meaning in their way, taught me solemn things about: “O man immortal, live for something!” and all such, and I had to humiliate myself by disgorging them in public. The consequence was, that not only on Friday afternoons but whenever anybody came to visit the school, I was butchered to make a Roman holiday. Teacher was so proud of me, and the visitors let on that they were tickled half to death, but I knew better. I could see the other scholars look at one another, as much as to say: “Well, if you'll tell me why!” Even in my shame and anger I could see that. But there is one happy memory of a Friday afternoon. Determined to show my friends and fellow-citizens that I, too, was born in Arcadia, and was a living, human boy, I announced to Teacher: “I got another piece.”
“Oh, have you?” cried she, sure of an extra O-man-immortal intellectual treat. “Let us hear it, by all means.”
Whereupon I marched up to the platform and declaimed that deathless lyric:
“When I was a boy, I was a bold one. My mammy made me a new shirt out o' dad's old one.”
All of it? Certainly. Isn't that enough? That was the only distinctly popular platform effort I ever made. I am proud of it now. I was proud of it then. But the news of my triumph was coldly received at home.
I don't know whether it has since gone out of date, but in my day and time a very telling feature of school exhibitions was reading in concert. The room was packed as full of everybody's ma as it could be, and yet not mash the children out of shape, and a whole lot of young ones would read a piece together. Fine? Finest thing you ever heard. I remember one time teacher must have calculated a leetle mite too close, or else one girl more was in the class than she had reckoned on; but on the day, the two end girls just managed to stand upon the platform and that was all. They recited together:
“There was a sound of revelry by night And Belgium's capital....”
I forget the rest of it. Well, anyhow, they were supposed to make gestures all together. Teacher had rehearsed the gestures, and they all did it simultaneously, just as if they had been wound up with a spring. But, as I said, the two end girls had all they could do to keep on the platform, and it takes elbow room for: “'T is but the car rattling over the stony street,” and one girl--well, she said she stepped off on purpose, but I didn't believe her then and I don't now. We had our laugh about it, whichever way it was.
We had our laugh.... Ah, life was all laughter then. That was before care came to be the shadow at our heel. That was before black Sorrow met us in the way, and would not let us pass unless we gave to her our dearest treasure. That was before we learned that what we covet most is, when we get it, but a poor thing after all, that whatsoever chalice Fortune presses to our lips, a tear is in the bottom of the cup. In those happy days gone by if the rain fell, 't was only for a little while, and presently the sky was bright again, and the birds whistled merrily among the wet and shining leaves. Now “the clouds return after the rain.”
It can never be with us again as once it was. For us the bell upon the Old Red School-house calls in vain. We heed it not, we that hearkened for it years ago. The living tide of youth flows toward the school-house, and we are not of it. Never again shall we sit at those old desks, whittled and carved with rude initials, and snap our fingers, eager to tell the answer. Never again shall we experience the thrill of pride when teacher praised us openly. Never again shall we sit trembling while the principal, reads the note, and then scowls at us fiercely with: “Take off your coat, sir!” Ah, me! Never again, never again.
Well, who wants it to be that way again? We're men and women now. We've duties and responsibilities. Who wants to be a child again? Not I. Let me stick just at my present age for about a hundred years, and I'll never utter a word of complaint.
THE SABBATH-SCHOOL
“We-a love the Sunday-school. We-a love the Sunday-school. (Girls)--So do I. (Boys)-So do I. (School)--We all love the Sunday-school.”
“SPARKLING DEWDROPS.”
Some people believe that when General Conference assigned them to the Committee on Hymn-Book Revision, power and authority were given unto them to put a half-sole and a new heel on any and all poetry that might look to them to be a little run over on one side. If they felt as I do about the lines that head this article they would have “Sunday” scratched out and “Sabbath” written in before you could bat an eye. The mere substitution of one word for another may seem a light matter to a man that has never composed anything more literary than an obituary for the Western Advocate of Sister Jane Malinda Sprague, who was born in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, in 1816, removed with her parents at a tender age to New Sardis, Washington County, Ohio, where, etc., etc. If he wanted to extract a word he would do it, and never even offer to give the author gas. But I know just how it hurts. I know or can imagine how the gifted poet that penned the deathless lines I have quoted must have walked the floor in an agony until every word and syllable was just to suit him, and so, though I feel sure he meant to write “Sabbath-school,” I don't dare change it.
To most persons one word seems about as good as another, Sunday or Sabbath, but when there are young people about the house you learn to be careful how you talk before them. Now, I would not go so far as to say that “Sunday” is what you might call exactly rowdy, but er... but... er... Let me illustrate. If a man says, “It's a beautiful Sunday morning,” like enough he has on red-and-green stockings, baggy knickerbockers, a violet-and-purple sweater, a cap shaped like a milk-roll, and is smoking a pipe. He very likely carries a bagful of golf-sticks, or is pumping up his bicycle. But if a man says, “This beautiful Sabbath morn,” you know for a certainty that he wears a long-tailed black coat, a boiled shirt, and a white tie. He is bald from his forehead upward, his upper lip is shaven, and his views and those of the late Robert Reed on the disgusting habit of using tobacco are absolutely at one.
Not alone a regard for respectability, but the hankering to be historically accurate, urges me to make the change I speak of. Originally the institution was a Sunday-school, and not very respectable either. I should hate to think any of my dear young friends were in the habit of attending such a low-class affair as Robert Raikes conducted. Sunday-schools were for “little ragamuffins,” as he called them, who worked such long hours on week-days (from five in the morning until nine at night) that if they were to learn the common branches at all it had to be on a Sunday. A ragged school was bad enough in itself, putting foolish notions into the heads of gutter-brats and making them discontented and unhappy in their lot; but to teach a ragged school on Sunday was a little too much. So Robert Raikes encountered the most violent opposition, although from that beginning dates popular education in England.
To be able to read is no Longer a sign that Pa can afford to do without the young ones' wages on a Saturday night, and can even pay for their schooling. It is no longer a mark of wealth or even of hard-won privilege, but the common fate of all; to know the three R's, and Sunday is not now set apart for secular instruction. So good and wholesome an institution as the Sunday-school was not permitted to perish, but was changed to suit the environment. It is now become the Sabbath-school for the study of the Bible, a Christian recrudescence of the synagogue. For some eighteen centuries it was supposed that a regularly ordained minister should have exclusive charge of this work. At rare intervals nowadays a clergyman may be found to maintain that because a man has been to college and to the theological seminary, and has made the study of the Scriptures his life-work (moved to that decision after careful self-examination) that therefore he is better fitted to that ministry than Miss Susie Goldrick, who teaches a class in Sabbath-school very acceptably. Miss Goldrick is in the second year in the High School, and last Friday afternoon read a composition on English Literatoor, in which she spoke in terms of high praise of John Bunion, the well-known author of “Progress and Poverty.” Miss Goldrick is very conscientious, and always keeps her thumbnail against the questions printed on the lesson-leaf, so as not to ask twice, “What did the disciples then do?”
It were a grave error to suppose that no secular learning is acquired in the modern Sabbath-school. I remember once, when quite young, speaking to my teacher, in the interval between the regular class work and the closing exercises, about peacocks. I had read of them, but had never seen one. What did they look like? She said a peacock was something like a butterfly. I have always remembered that, and when I did finally see a peacock, I was interested to note the essential accuracy of the description.
Also, one day a new lady taught our class, Miss Evans having gone up to Marion to spend a Sunday with her brother, who kept a stove store there, and this new lady borrowed two flower vases from off the pulpit and a piece of string from Turkey-egg McLaughlin to explain to us boys how the earth went around the sun. We had too much manners to tell her that we knew that years and years ago when we were in Miss Humphreys's room. I don't remember what the earth going around the sun had to do with the lesson for the day, which was about Samuel anointing David's head with oil--did I ever tell you how I anointed my own head with coal oil?--but I do remember that she broke both the vases and cut her finger, and had to keep sucking it the rest of the time, because she didn't want to get her handkerchief all bloodied up. It was a kind of fancy handkerchief, made of thin stuff trimmed with lace--no good.
The Sabbath-school may be said to be divided into three courses, namely, the preparatory or infant-class, the collegiate or Sabbath-school proper, and the post-graduate or Mr. Parker's Bible-class.
What can a mere babe of three or four years learn in Sabbath-school? sneers the critic. Not much, I grant you, of justification by Faith, or Effectual Calling; but certain elementary precepts can be impressed upon the mind while it is still in a plastic condition that never can be wholly obliterated, come what may in after life. Prime among these elementary precepts is this: “Always bring a penny.”
Some one has said, “Give me the first seven years of a child's life and I care not who has the remainder.” I cannot endorse this without reserve; but I maintain as a demonstrated fact: “Bring up a child to contribute a copper cent, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” It was recently my high privilege to attend a summer gathering of representative religious people in the largest auditorium in this country. Sometimes under that far-spreading roof ten thousand souls were assembled and met together. This fact could be guessed at with tolerable accuracy from the known seating capacity, but the interesting thing was that it could be predicated with mathematical certainty that exactly ten thousand people were present, because the offertory footed up exactly one hundred dollars. What an encouragement to these faithful infant-class teachers that have labored unremittingly, instant in season and out of season, saying over and over again with infinite patience, “Always bring a penny,” to know that their labor has not been in vain, and that as a people we have made it the rule of our lives always to bring a penny--and no more.
I have often tried to think what a Sabbath-school must be like in California, where they have no pennies. It seems hardly possible that the institution can exist under such a patent disability, and yet it does. Do they work it on the same principle as the post-office in that far-off land where you 'cannot buy one postal card because the postmaster cannot make change, but must buy five postal cards or two two-cent stamps and a postal? In other words, does a nickel, the smallest extant coin, serve for five persons for one Sunday or one person for five Sundays? I have often wondered about this.
Subsidiary instruction in the preparatory course consists of sitting right still and being nice, keeping your fingers out of Johnny Pym's eye, because it hurts him and makes him cry, not grabbing in the basket when it goes by, even though it does have pennies in it, coaching in a repertory of songs like: “Beautiful, Beautiful Little Hands,” “You in Your Little Corner and I in Mine,” “The Consecrated Cross-Eyed Bear,” “Pass Around the Wash-Rag”--the grown folks call that “Pass Along the Watchword” and stories about David and Goliath, Samson and the three hundred foxes with fire tied to their tails, Moses in the bulrushes, the infant Samuel, Hagar in the wilderness, and so forth. The clergy have often objected that these stories, being told at the same period of life with those about Santa Claus, “One time there was a little boy and he had a dog named Rover,” the little girl that had hair as black as ebony, skin as white as snow, and cheeks as red as blood, because her Ma, who was a queen by occupation, happened to cut her finger with a black-handled knife along about New Year's--the clergy, I say, have often objected that all these matters, being brought to a child's attention at the same period in its life, are likely to be regarded in after years as of equal evidential value. I am not much of a hand to argue, myself, but I should like to have one of these carping critics meet my friend, Mrs. Sarah M. Boggs, who has taught the infant-class since 1867, having missed only two Sundays in that time, once, in 1879, when it stormed so that nobody in town was out, and once, last winter a year ago, when she slipped off the back porch and hurt her knee. I can just see Sister Boggs laying down the law to anybody that finds fault with the infant-class, let him be preacher or who. Why the very idea! Do you mean to say, sir--I guess Sister Boggs can straighten him out all right.
No less faithful is Mr. Parker, the leading lawyer of the town, who conducts the Bible-class. I believe one morning he didn't get there until after the last bell was done ringing, but otherwise his record of attendance compares favorably with Sister Boggs's. Both teachers agree to ignore the stated lesson for the day, but whereas Sister Boggs leads her flock through the flowery meads of narration, Mr. Parker and his class have camped out by preference for the last forty years in the arid wilderness of Romans and Hebrews and Corinthians First and Second, flinging the plentiful dornicks of “Paul says this” and “Paul says that” at each other's heads in friendly strife. Mr. Parker's class is also very assiduous in its attendance upon the Young People's meetings, seemingly holding the dogma, “Once a young person always a young person.” The prevailing style of hairdressing among the members is to grow the locks long on the left side of the head, and to bring the thin layer across to the right, pasted down very carefully with a sort of peeled onion effect.
There is a whole lot of them, and they jower away at each other all through the time between the opening and the closing exercises, having the liveliest kind of a time getting over about two verses of the Bible and the whole ground of speculative theology.
Immeasurably more impermanent in method and personnel is the regular collegiate department, the Sabbath-school proper. In the early days, away back when sugar was sixteen cents a pound, the thing to do was to learn Scripture verses by heart. If you were a rude, rough boy who didn't exactly love the Sunday-school as much as the hymn made you say you did, but still one who had rather sing it than stir up a muss, you hunted for the shortest verses you could find and said them off. From four to eight was considered a full day's work. But if you were a boy who put on an apron and helped your Ma with the dishes, a boy who always wiped your feet before you came in, a boy that never got kept in at school, a boy that cried pretty easy, a nice, pale boy, with bulging blue eyes, you came to Sabbath-school and disgorged verses like buck-shot out of a bag. The four-to-eight-verse boys sat and listened, and improved their minds. There was generally one other boy like you in the class, and it was nip-and-tuck between you which should get the prize, until finally you came one Sunday, all bloated up with 238 verses in your craw, and he quit discouraged. The prize was yours. It was a beautiful little Bible with a brass clasp; it had two tiny silk strings of an old-gold color for bookmarks, and gilt edges all around that made the leaves stick together at first. It was printed in diamond type, so small it made your ears ring when you tried to read it.
Other faculties than that of memory were called into action in those days by problems like these: “Who was the meekest man? Who was the strongest man? Who was the father of Zebedee's children? Who had the iron bedstead, and whose thumbs and great-toes were cut off?” To set a child to find these things in the Bible without a concordance seems to us as futile as setting him to hunt a needle in a haystack. But our fathers were not so foolish as we like to think them; they didn't care two pins if we never discovered who had the iron bedstead, but they knew that, leafing over the book, we should light upon treasure where we sought it not, kernels of the sweetest meat in the hardest shells, stories of enthralling interest where we least expected them, but, most of all, and best of all, texts that long afterward in time of trouble should come to us, as it were the voice of one that also had eaten the bread of affliction, calling to us across the chasm of the centuries and saying: “O, tarry thou the Lord's leisure: be strong and He shall comfort thine heart.”
In the higher classes, that still were not high enough to rank with Mr. Parker's, the exegetical powers were stimulated in this wise: “'And they sung a hymn and went out.' Now what do you understand by that?” We told what we “understood,” and what we “held,” and what we “believed,” and laid traps for the teacher and tried to corner him with irrelevant texts wrenched from their context. He had to be an able man and a nimble-witted man. Mere piety might shine in the prayer-meeting, in the class-room, at the quarterly love-feast, but not in the Sabbath-school. I remember once when Brother Butler was away they set John Snyder to teach us. John didn't know any more than the law allowed, and we made him feel it, until finally, badgered beyond endurance, he blurted out that all he knew was that he was a sinner saved by grace. Maybe he couldn't just tell where to find this, that, and t' other thing in the Bible, but he could turn right to the place where it said that though a body's sins were as scarlet, yet they should be white as snow. It was regarded as a very poor sort of an excuse then, but thinking it over here lately, it has seemed to me that maybe John had the root of the matter in him after all.
The comparative scarcity of polemical athletes and the relative plenty of the Miss Susie Goldrick kind of teachers, apparently called into being the Berean Lesson Leaf system, with its Bible cut up into lady-bites of ten or twelve verses, its Golden Topics, Golden Texts, its apt alliterations, like:
S AMUEL EEKS AUL ORROWING
and its questions prepared in tabloid form, suitable for the most enfeebled digestions, see directions printed on inside wrapper. Among the many evidences of the degeneracy of the age is the scandalous ignorance of our young people regarding the sacred Scriptures, which at the very lowest estimate are incontestably the finest English ever written. Those whose childhood antedates the lesson leaf are not so unfamiliar with that wondrous treasure-house of thought. It is not for me to say what has wrought the change. I can only point out that lesson leaves, being about the right size for shaving papers, barely last from Sunday to Sunday, while that very identical Bible with the blinding type that I won years and years ago, by learning verses, is with me still. Yes, and as I often wonder to discover, some of those very verses that I gobbled down as heedlessly as any ostrich are with me still.
Remain to be considered the opening and closing exercises, principally devoted, I remember, to learning new tunes and singing old ones out of books with pretty titles, like “Golden Censer,” “Silver Spray,” “Pearl and Gold,” “Sparkling Dewdrops,” and “Sabbath Chimes.” I wasn't going to tell it, but I might as well, I suppose. I can remember as far back as “Musical Leaves.” There must be quite a lot of people scattered about the country who sung out of that when they were little. I wish a few of us old codgers might get together some time and with many a hummed and prefatory, “Do, mi, Sol, do; Sol, mi... mi-i-i-i,” finally manage to quaver out the sweet old tunes we learned when we were little tads, each with a penny in his fat, warm hand: “Shall we Gather at the River?” and “Work, for the Night is Coming”; and what was the name of that one about:
“The waves shall come and the rolling thunder shock Shall beat upon the house that is founded on a rock, And it never shall fall, never, never, never.”
What the proper English tune is to “I think when I read that sweet story of old” I cannot tell, but I am sure it can never melt my heart as that one in the old “Musical Leaves.” with its twistful repetitions of the last line:
“I should like to have been with Him then, I should like to have been with Him then, When He took little children like lambs to His fold, I should like to have been with Him then.”
I fear we could not sing that without breaking down. As we recall it, we draw an inward fluttering breath, something grips our throats and makes them ache, our eyes blur, and a tear slips down upon the cheek, not of sorrow--God knows not all of sorrow--but if we had it all to live over again, how differently we--oh, well, it's too late now, but still.
Leafing over my little girl's “Arabian Nights” the other day, when I came to the story of “The Enchanted Horse,” I found myself humming, “Land ahead! Its fruits are waving.” My father used to lead the singing in Sabbath-school, and when he was sol-fa-ing that tune to learn it, I was devouring that story, and was just about at the picture where Prince What's-his-name rises up into the air on the Enchanted Horse, with his true love hanging on behind, and all the multitude below holding their turbans on as they look up and exclaim: “Well, if that don't beat the Dutch!”