Part 3

The Colonel chuckled slowly to himself, as his custom was when anything amused him, and I asked him to tell me his ecclesiastical experience.

“Well, this was the way of it,” he replied. “One winter the leading citizens of the place decided to get up a series of union meetings. Perhaps you don’t know what a union meeting is? I thought so. It bears out what I was saying about your want of religious enterprise. Well, it’s a sort of monster combination, as we would say in the profession. All the churches agree to hold meetings together, and all the preaching talent of the whole of them is collected in one pulpit, and each man preaches in turn. Of course every minister has his own backers, who are anxious to see him do himself and his denomination credit, and who turn out in full force so as to give him their support. The result is that a union meeting will always draw, even in a town where no single church can get a full house, no matter what attractions it may offer.

“Now, a fundamental rule of a union meeting is that no doctrines are to be preached to which any one could object. The Baptist preacher is forbidden to say anything about baptism, and the Methodist can’t allude to falling from grace in a union meeting. This is supposed to keep things peaceful and to avoid arguments and throwing of hymn-books and such-like proceedings, which would otherwise be inevitable.

“The union meetings had been in progress for three or four nights when I looked into the Presbyterian church, where they were held one evening, just to see how the thing was drawing. All the ministers in town, except the Episcopalian minister, were sitting on the platform waiting their cues. The Episcopalian minister had been asked to join in the services, but he had declined, saying that if it was all the same to his dissenting and partially Christian friends he would prefer to play a lone hand; and the colored minister was serving out his time in connection with some of his neighbors’ chickens that, he said, had flown into his kitchen and committed suicide there, so he couldn’t have been asked, even if the white ministers had been willing to unite with him.

“The Presbyterian minister was finishing his sermon when I entered, and soon as he had retired the Baptist minister got up and gave out a hymn which was simply crowded with Baptist doctrine. I had often heard it, and I remember that first verse, which ran this way:

“‘I’d rather be a Baptist And wear a smiling face, Than for to be a Methodist And always fall from grace.’

“The hymn was no sooner given out than the Methodist minister rose and claimed a foul, on the ground that Baptist doctrine had been introduced into a union meeting. There was no manner of doubt that he was right, but the Baptists in the congregation sang the hymn with such enthusiasm that they drowned the minister’s voice. But when the hymn was over there was just a heavenly row. One Presbyterian deacon actually went so far as to draw on a Baptist elder, and there would have been blood shed if the elder had not knocked him down with a kerosene lamp, and convinced him that drawing pistols in church was not the spirit of the Gospel. Everybody was talking at once, and the women who were not scolding were crying. The meeting was beginning to look like an enthusiastic political meeting in Cork, when I rapped on the pulpit and called for order. Everybody knew me and wanted to hear what I had to say, so the meeting calmed down, except near the door, where the Methodists had got a large Baptist jammed into the wood-box, and in the vestibule, where the Unitarians had formed a ring to see the Unitarian minister argue with an Unleavened Disciple.

“I told the people that they were making a big mistake in trying to run that sort of an entertainment without an umpire. The idea pleased them, and before I knew what was going to be done they had passed a resolution making me umpire and calling on me to decide whether the Baptist hymn constituted a foul. I decided that it did not, on the ground that, according to the original agreement, no minister was to preach any sectarian doctrines, but that nothing was said about the hymns that might be sung. Then I proposed that in order to prevent any future disputes and to promote brotherly feeling, a new system of singing hymns should be adopted. I said, as far as I can recollect, that singing hymns did not come under the head of incidental music, but was a sort of _entr’acte_ music, intended to relax and divert the audience while bracing up to hear the next sermon. This being the case, it stood to reason that hymn-singing should be made a real pleasure, and not an occasion for hard feeling and the general heaving of books and foot-stools. ‘Now,’ said I, ‘that can be managed in this way. When you sing let everybody sing the same tune, but each denomination sing whatever words it prefers to sing. Everybody will sing his own doctrines, but nobody will have any call to feel offended.’

“The idea was received with general enthusiasm, especially among the young persons present, and the objections made by a few hard-headed old conservatives were overruled. The next time singing was in order the Unitarian minister selected a familiar short-metre tune, and each minister told his private flock what hymn to sing to it. Everybody sang at the top of his or her lungs, and as nobody ever understands the words that anybody else is singing, there did not seem to be anything strange in the singing of six different hymns to the same tune. There was a moment when things were a little strained in consequence of the Presbyterians, who were a strong body, and had got their second wind, singing a verse about predestination with such vigor as partly to swamp their rivals, but I decided that there was no foul, and the audience, being rather tired with their exertions, settled down to listen to the next sermon.

“The next time it was the Methodist minister who gave out the tune, and he selected one that nobody who was not born and bred a Methodist had ever heard of. We used to sing something very much like it at the windlass when I was a sailor, and it had a regular hurricane chorus. When the Methodist contingent started in to sing their hymn to this tune, not a note could any of the rival denominations raise. They stood it in silence until two verses had been sung, and then——

“Well, I won’t undertake to describe what followed. After about five minutes the Methodists didn’t feel like singing any more. In fact, most of them were outside the meeting-house limping their way home, and remarking that they had had enough of ‘thish yer fellowship with other churches’ to last them for the rest of their lives. Inside the meeting-house the triumphant majority were passing resolutions calling me a depraved worldling, who, at the instigation of the devil, had tried to convert a religious assemblage into an Orange riot. Even the Unitarians, who always maintained that they did not believe in the devil, voted for the resolutions, and three of them were appointed on the committee charged with putting me out. I didn’t stay to hear any more sermons, but I afterward understood that all the ministers preached at me, and that the amount of union displayed in putting the blame of everything on my shoulders was so touching that men who had been enemies for years shook hands and called one another brothers.

“Yes! we are an enterprising people in ecclesiastical matters, and I calculate that it will be a long time before an English village will see a first-class union meeting.”

A CLERICAL ROMANCE.

“If you want to know my opinion of women-preachers,” said the Colonel, “I can give it to you straight. They draw well at first, but you can’t depend upon them for a run. I have had considerable experience of them, and at one time I thought well of them, but a woman, I think, is out of place in the pulpit.

“Although I never was a full member of the New Berlinopolisville Methodist church, I was treated as a sort of honorary member, partly because I subscribed pretty largely to the pastor’s salary, the annual picnics, and that sort of thing, and partly because the deacons, knowing that I had some little reputation as a theatrical manager and was a man of from fair to middling judgment, used to consult me quietly about the management of the church. There was a large Baptist church in the same town, and its opposition was a little too much for us. The Baptist house was crowded every Sunday, while ours was thin and discouraging. We had a good old gentleman for a minister, but he was over seventy, and a married man besides, which kept the women from taking much interest in him; while his old-fashioned notions didn’t suit the young men of the congregation. The Baptists, on the other hand, had a young unmarried preacher, with a voice that you could hear a quarter of a mile off, and a way of giving it to the Jews, and the Mormons, and other safe and distant sinners that filled his hearers with enthusiasm and offended nobody. It was growing more and more evident every day that our establishment was going behindhand, and that something must be done unless we were willing to close our doors and go into bankruptcy; so one day the whole board of trustees and all the deacons came round to talk the matter over with me.

“My mind was already made up, and I was only waiting to have my advice asked before giving it. ‘What we want,’ said I, ‘is a woman-preacher. She’ll be a sensation that will take the wind out of that Baptist windmill, and if she is good-looking, which she has got to be, I will bet you—that is, I am prepared to say—that within a fortnight there will be standing-room only in the old Methodist church.’

“‘But what are we to do with Dr. Brewster?’ asked one of the deacons. ‘He has been preaching to us now for forty years, and it don’t seem quite the square thing to turn him adrift.’

“‘Oh! that’s all right,’ said I. ‘We’ll retire him on a pension, and he’ll be glad enough to take it. As for your woman-preacher, I’ve got just what you want. At least, I know where she is and how much we’ll have to pay to get her. She’ll come fast enough for the same salary that we are paying Dr. Brewster, and if she doesn’t double the value of your pew-rents in six months, I will make up the deficit myself.’

“The trustees were willing to take my advice, and in the course of a few days Dr. Brewster had been retired on half-pay, the church had extended a call to the Rev. Matilda Marsh, and the reverend girl, finding that the salary was satisfactory, accepted it.

“She was only about twenty-five years old, and as pretty as a picture when she stood in the pulpit in her black silk dress with a narrow white collar, something like the sort of thing that your clergymen wear. I couldn’t help feeling sad, when I first saw her, to think that she did not go into the variety business or a circus, where she would have made her fortune and the fortune of any intelligent manager. As a dance-and-song artiste she would have been worth a good six hundred dollars a week. But women are always wasting their talents, when they have any, and doing exactly what Nature didn’t mean them to do.

“Miss Marsh was a success from the moment that she came among us. Being both unmarried and pretty, she naturally fetched the young men, and as she let it be understood that she believed in the celibacy of the clergy and never intended to marry under any circumstances, the greater part of the women were willing to forgive her good looks. Then she could preach a first-class sermon, and I call myself a judge of sermons, for at one time I managed an agency for supplying preachers with ready-made sermons, and I never put a single one on the market that I hadn’t read myself. I don’t mean to say that Miss Marsh was strong on doctrinal sermons, but every one knows that the public doesn’t want doctrinal sermons. What it wants is poetry and pathos, and Miss Marsh used to ladle them out as if she had been born and bred an undertaker’s poet.

“As I had prophesied, the Baptists couldn’t stand the competition when we opened with our woman-preacher. Their minister took to going to the gymnasium to expand his chest, and by that means increased his lung-power until he could be heard almost twice as far as formerly, but it didn’t do any good. His congregation thinned out week by week, and while our church was crowded, his pew-rents fell below what was necessary to pay his salary, not to speak of the other incidental expenses. A few of the young men continued to stick by him until our minister began her series of sermons ‘To Young Men Only,’ and that brought them in. I had the sermons advertised with big colored posters, and they proved to be the most attractive thing ever offered to the religious public. The church was crammed with young men, while lots of men of from fifty to seventy years old joined the Young Men’s Christian Association as soon as they heard of the course of sermons, and by that means managed to get admission to hear them. Miss Marsh preached to young men on the vices of the day, such as drinking, and card-playing, and dancing, and going to the theatre, and she urged them to give up these dissipations and cultivate their minds. Some of them started a Browning Club that for a time was very popular. Every time the club met one of Browning’s poems would be selected by the president, and each member who put up a dollar was allowed to guess its meaning. The man who made the best guess took all the money, and sometimes there was as much as thirty dollars in the pool. The young men told Miss Marsh that they had given up poker and gone in for Browning, and of course she was greatly pleased. Then some of the older men started a Milton Club, and used to cut for drinks by putting a knife-blade into ‘Paradise Lost’—the man who made it open at a page the first letter of which was nearer to the head of the alphabet than any letter cut by any other man winning the game. Under Miss Marsh’s influence a good many other schemes for mental cultivation were invented and put into operation, and everybody said that that noble young woman was doing an incalculable amount of good.

“As a matter of course, at least half the young men of the congregation fell in love with the girl-preacher. They found it very difficult to make any progress in courting her, for she wouldn’t listen to any conversation on the subject. When Christmas came, the question what to give her kept the young men awake night after night. The women had an easy job, for they could give the preacher clothes, and lace, and hairpins, and such, which the young men knew that they could not give without taking a liberty. If she had been a man, slippers would, of course, have been the correct thing, but the young men felt that they couldn’t work slippers for a girl that always wore buttoned boots, and that if they did venture upon such a thing the chances were that she would feel herself insulted. One chap thought of working on the front of an underskirt—if that is the right name of it—I mean one of those petticoats that are built for show rather than use—the words, ‘Bless our Pastor,’ in yellow floss silk, but when he asked his sister to lend him one of her skirts as a model, she told him that he was the champion fool of the country. You may ask, why didn’t the preacher’s admirers give her jewelry? For the reason that she never wore anything of the kind except a pair of ear-rings that her mother had given her, and which she had promised always to wear. They represented chestnut-burs, and it is clear to my mind that her mother knew that no young man who had much regard for his eyesight would come very near a girl defended by that sort of ear-ring. Miss Marsh used to say that other people could wear what they thought right, but she felt it to be inconsistent with her holy calling to wear any jewelry except the ear-rings that her sainted mother had given her.

“The best running was undoubtedly made by the cashier of the savings bank and a young lawyer. Not that either of them had any real encouragement from Miss Marsh, but she certainly preferred them to the rest of the field, and was on what was certainly entitled to be called friendly terms with both of them. Of the two the cashier was by far the most devoted. He was ready to do anything that might give him a chance of winning. He even wanted to take a class in the Sunday-school, but the bank directors forbade it. They said it would impair the confidence of the public in the bank, and would be pretty sure to bring about a run which the bank might not be able to stand. They consented, however, that he should become the president of the new temperance society which the Rev. Miss Marsh had started, as the president had the right to buy wines and liquors at wholesale in order to have them analyzed, and thus show how poisonous they were. As the cashier offered to stand in with the bank directors and let them fill their cellars at wholesale rates, both he and the directors made a good thing of it.

“The other young man, the lawyer, was a different sort of chap. He was one of those fellows that begin to court a girl by knocking her down with a club. I don’t mean to say that he ever actually knocked a woman down, but his manner toward women was that of a superior being, instead of a slave, and I am bound to say that as a general thing the women seemed to like it. He wasn’t a handsome man, like the cashier, but he had a big yellow beard that any sensible girl would have held to be worth twice the smooth-shaved cheek of his rival. He never tried to join the Sunday-school or the temperance society, or do anything else of the kind to curry favor with the minister; but he used occasionally to give her good advice, and to tell her that this or that thing which she was doing was a mistake. Indeed, he didn’t hesitate to tell her that she had no business in the pulpit, and had better go out as a governess or a circus rider, and so conform to the dictates of Nature.

“I used to watch the game pretty closely, because I had staked my professional reputation on the financial success of the girl-preacher, and I didn’t want her to marry and so put an end to her attractiveness with the general public. I didn’t really think that there was much danger of any such thing, for Miss Marsh seemed to be entirely absorbed in her work, and her salary was exceptionally large. Still, you can never tell when a woman will break the very best engagement, and that is one reason why they will never succeed as preachers. You pay a man a good salary, and he will never find that Providence calls him elsewhere, unless, of course, he has a very much better offer; but a woman-preacher is capable of throwing up a first-class salary because she don’t like the color of a deacon’s hair, or because the upholstery of the pulpit doesn’t match with her complexion.

“That winter we had a very heavy fall of snow, and after that the sleighing was magnificent for the next month or two. The cashier made the most of it by taking the minister out sleigh-riding two or three times a week. The lawyer did not seem to care anything about it, even when he saw the minister whirling along the road behind the best pair of horses in the town, with the cashier by her side and her lap full of caramels. But one Saturday afternoon, when he knew that the cashier would be detained at the bank until very late—the president having just skipped to Canada, and it being necessary to ascertain the amount of the deficit without delay—the lawyer hired a sleigh and called for the minister. Although she was preparing her next day’s sermon by committing to memory a lot of Shelley’s poetry, she dropped Shelley and had on her best hat and was wrapped in the buffalo robe by the side of the lawyer in less than half an hour after she had told him that she positively wouldn’t keep him waiting three minutes.

“You remember what I said about the peculiar pattern of her ear-rings. It is through those ear-rings that the Methodist church lost its minister, and I became convinced that a female ministry is not a good thing to tie to. Miss Marsh and her admirer were driving quietly along and enjoying themselves in a perfectly respectable way, when one runner of the sleigh went over a good-sized log that had dropped from somebody’s load of wood and had been left in the road. The sleigh didn’t quite upset, but Miss Marsh was thrown against the lawyer with a shock for which she apologized, and he thanked her. But it happened that one of her ear-rings caught in the lawyer’s beard, and was so twisted up with it that it was impossible to disentangle it. Unless Miss Marsh was ready to drag about half her companion’s heard out by the roots, there was nothing to be done except for her to sit with her cheek close against his until some third person could manage to disentangle the ear-ring. While she was in this painful position—at least she said at the time that it was painful—a sleigh containing two of her deacons and a prominent Baptist drove by. Miss Marsh saw them and saw the horrified expression on their faces. She knew quick enough that her usefulness as a minister in New Berlinopolisville was at an end and that there was going to be a terrible scandal. So, being a woman, she burst into tears and said that she wished she were dead.

“But the lawyer was equal to the occasion. He told her that there was nothing left to be done except for them to be married and disentangled at the next town. Then he would take her on a long wedding-trip, stopping at Chicago to buy some clothes, and that if she so wished they would afterward settle in some other town, instead of coming back to New Berlinopolisville. Of course she said that the proposal was not to be thought of for a moment, and of course she accepted it within the next ten minutes. They drove to the house of the nearest minister, and the minister’s wife disentangled them, to save time, while the minister was engaged in marrying them.

“That was the end of the experiment of playing a woman-preacher on the boards of the First Methodist Church of Berlinopolisville. Everybody was content to call a man in the place of Miss Marsh, and everybody agreed to blame me for the failure of the experiment. I don’t know whether the lawyer ever had any reason to regret his marriage or not, but when I saw his wife at a fancy dress hall at Chicago, a year or two later, I could see that she was not sorry that she had given up the ministry. Ever since that time I have been opposed to women-preachers, and consider a woman in the pulpit as much out of place as a deacon in the ballet.”

A MYSTERY.

“Do I believe in spiritualism?” repeated the Colonel. “Well, you wouldn’t ask me that question if you knew that I had been in the business myself. I once ran a ‘Grand Spiritual Combination Show.’ I had three first-class mediums, who did everything, from knocking on a table to materializing Napoleon, or Washington, or any of your dead friends. It was a good business while it lasted, but, unfortunately, we showed one night in a Texas town before a lot of cowboys. One of them brought his lasso under his coat, and when the ghost of William Penn appeared the cowboy lassoed him and hauled him in, hand over hand, for further investigation. The language William Penn used drove all the ladies out of the place, and his want of judgment in tackling the cowboy cost him all his front teeth. I and the other mediums and the doorkeeper had to take a hand in the manifestation, and the result was that the whole Combination was locked up over-night, and the fines that we had to pay made me tired of spiritualism.