The spring is suggestive of G.o.d and heaven and a resurrection day. That eye must be blind that does not see G.o.d"s footstep in the new gra.s.s, and hear His voice in the call of the swallow at the eaves. In the white blossoms of the orchards we find suggestion of those whose robes have been made white in the blood of the Lamb. A May morning is a door opening into heaven.
So autumn mothers a great many moral and religious suggestions. The season of corn husking, the gorgeous woods that are becoming the catafalque of the dead year, remind the dullest of his own fading and departure.
But summer fatigues and weakens, and no man keeps his soul in as desirable a frame unless by positive resolution and especial implorations. Pulpit and pew often get stupid together, and ardent devotion is adjourned until September.
But who can afford to lose two months out of each year, when the years are so short and so few? He who stops religious growth in July and August will require the next six months to get over it. Nay, he never recovers. At the season when the fields are most full of leaf.a.ge and life let us not be lethargic and stupid.
Let us remember that iniquity does not cease in summer-time. She never takes a vacation. The devil never leaves town. The child of want, living up that dark alley, has not so much fresh air nor sees as many flowers as in winter-time. In cold weather the frost blossoms on her window pane, and the snow falls in wreaths in the alley. G.o.d pity the wretchedness that pants and sweats and festers and dies on the hot pavements and in the suffocating cellars of the town!
Let us remember that our exit from this world will more probably be in the summer than in any other season, and we cannot afford to die at a time when we are least alert and worshipful. At mid-summer the average of departures is larger than in cool weather. The sun-strokes, the dysenteries, the fevers, the choleras, have affinity for July and August. On the edge of summer Death stands whetting his scythe for a great harvest. We are most careful to have our doors locked, and our windows fastened, and our "burglar alarm" set at times when thieves are most busy, and at a season of the year when diseases are most active in their burglaries of life we need to be ready.
Our charge, therefore, is, make no adjournment of your religion till cool weather. Whether you stay in town, or seek the farm house, or the sea-sh.o.r.e, or the mountains, be faithful in prayer, in Bible reading and in attendance upon Christian ordinances. He who throws away two months of life wastes that for which many a dying sinner would have been willing to give all his possessions when he found that the harvest was past and the summer was ended.
The thermometer to-day has stood at a high mark. The heat has been fierce.
As far as possible people have kept within doors or walked on the shady side of the street. But we can have but a faint idea of what the people suffer crossing a desert or in a tropical clime. The head faints, the tongue swells and deathly sickness comes upon the whole body when long exposed to the summer sun. I see a whole caravan pressing on through the hot sands. "Oh," say the camel-drivers, "for water and shade!" At last they see an elevation against the sky. They revive at the eight and push on.
That which they saw proves to be a great rock, and camels and drivers throw themselves down under the long shadow. Isaiah, who lived and wrote in a scorching climate, draws his figure from what he had seen and felt when he represents G.o.d as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.
Many people have found this world a desert-march. They go half consumed of trouble all their days. But glory be to G.o.d! we are not turned out on a desert to die. Here is the long, cool, certain, refreshing shadow of the Lord.
A tree, when in full leaf.a.ge, drops a great deal of refreshment; but in a little while the sun strikes through, and you keep shifting your position, until, after a while, the sun is set at such a point that you have no shade at all. But go in the heart of some great rock, such as you see in Yosemite or the Alps, and there is everlasting shadow. There has been thick shade there for six thousand years, and will be for the next six thousand. So our divine Rock, once covering us, always covers us. The same yesterday, to-day and for ever! always good, always kind, always sympathetic! You often hold a sunshade over your head pa.s.sing along the road or a street; but after a while your arm gets tired, and the very effort to create the shadow makes you weary. But the rock in the mountains, with fingers of everlasting stone, holds its own shadow. So G.o.d"s sympathy needs no holding up from us.
Though we are too weak from sickness or trouble to do anything but lie down, over us He stretches the shadow of His benediction.
It is our misfortune that we mistake G.o.d"s shadow for the night. If a man come and stand between you and the sun, his shadow falls upon you. So G.o.d sometimes comes and stands between us and worldly successes, and His shadow falls upon us, and we wrongly think that it is night. As a father in a garden stoops down to kiss his child the shadow of his body falls upon it; and so many of the dark misfortunes of our life are not G.o.d going away from us, but our heavenly Father stooping down to give us the kiss of His infinite and everlasting love. It is the shadow of a sheltering Rock, and not of a devouring lion.
Instead of standing right out in the blistering noon-day sun of earthly trial and trouble, come under the Rock. You may drive into it the longest caravan of disasters. Room for the suffering, heated, sunstruck, dying, of all generations, in the shadow of the great Rock:
"Rock of ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee."
CHAPTER XLI.
HIDING EGGS FOR EASTER.
Those who were so unfortunate as to have been born and brought up in the city know nothing about that chapter in a boy"s history of which I speak.
About a month before Easter there comes to the farmhouse a scarcity of eggs. The farmer"s wife begins to abuse the weasels and the cats as the probable cause of the paucity. The feline tribe are a.s.saulted with many a harsh "Scat!" on the suspicion of their fondness for omelets in the raw.
Custards fail from the table. The Dominick hens are denounced as not worth their mush. Meanwhile, the boys stand round the corner in a broad grin at what is the discomfiture of the rest of the family.
The truth must be told that the boys, in antic.i.p.ation of Easter, have, in some hole in the mow or some barrel in the wagon-house, been hiding eggs.
If the youngsters understand their business, they will compromise the matter, and see that at least a small supply goes to the house every day.
Too great greed on the part of the boy will discover the whole plot, and the charge will be made: "De Witt, I believe you are hiding the eggs!"
Forthwith the boy is collared and compelled to disgorge his possessions.
Now, there is nothing more trying to a boy than, after great care in acc.u.mulating these sh.e.l.ly resources, to have to place them in a basket and bring them forth to the light two weeks before Easter. Boys, therefore, manage with skill and dexterity. At this season of the year you see them lurking much about the hayrick and the hay-loft. You see them crawling out from stacks of straw and walking away rapidly with their hands behind them.
They look very innocent, for I have noticed that the look of innocence in boys is proportioned to the amount of mischief with which they are stuffed.
They seem to be determined to risk their lives on mow-poles where the hay lies thin. They come out from under the stable floor in a despicable state of toilet, and cannot give any excuse for their depreciation of apparel.
Hens flutter off the nest with an unusual squawk, for the boys cannot wait any longer for the slow process of laying, and hens have no business to stand in the way of Easter. The most tedious hours of my boyhood were spent in waiting for a hen to get off her nest. No use to scare her off, for then she will get mad, and just as like as not take the egg with her. Indeed, I think the boy is excusable for his haste if his brother has a dozen eggs and he has only eleven.
At this season of the year the hens are melancholy. They want to hatch, but how can they? They have the requisite disposition, and the capacity, and the feathers, and the nest, and everything but the eggs. With that deficit, they sometimes sit obstinately and defy the boy"s approaches. Many a boy has felt the sharp bill of old Dominick strike the back of his hand, inflicting a wound that would have roused up the whole farmhouse to see what was the matter had it not been that the boy wanted to excite no suspicion as to the nature of his expedition. Immediately over the hen"s head comes the boy"s cap, and there is a scatteration of feathers all over the hay-mow, and the boy is victor.
But at last the evening before Easter comes. While the old people are on the piazza the children come in with the acc.u.mulated treasures of many weeks, and put down the baskets. Eggs large and small, white-sh.e.l.led and brown, Cochin-Chinas and Brahmapooters. The character of the hens is vindicated. The cat may now lie in the sun without being kicked by false suspicions. The surprised exclamation of parents more than compensates the boys for the strategy of long concealment. The meanest thing in the world is for father and mother not to look surprised in such circ.u.mstances.
It sometimes happens that, in the agitation of bringing the eggs into the household harbor, the boy drops the hat or the basket, and the whole enterprise is shipwrecked. From our own experience, it is very difficult to pick up eggs after you have once dropped them. You have found the same experience in after life. Your hens laid a whole nestful of golden eggs on Wall street. You had gathered them up. You were bringing them in. You expected a world of congratulations, but just the day before the consummation, something adverse ran against you, and you dropped the basket, and the eggs broke. Wise man were you if, instead of sitting down to cry or attempting to gather up the spilled yolks, you built new nests and invited a new laying.
It is sometimes found on Easter morning that the eggs have been kept too long. The boy"s intentions were good enough, but the enterprise had been too protracted, and the casting out of the dozen was sudden and precipitate. Indeed, that is the trouble with some older boys I wot of.
They keep their money, or their brain, or their influence hidden till it rots. They are not willing to come forth day by day on a humble mission, doing what little good they may, but are keeping themselves hidden till some great Easter-day of triumph, and then they will astonish the Church and the world; but they find that faculties too long hidden are faculties ruined. Better for an egg to have succeeded in making one plain cake for a poor man"s table than to have failed in making a banquet for the House of Lords.
That was a glad time when on Easter morning the eggs went into the saucepan, and came out striped, and spotted, and blue, and yellow, and the entire digestive capacity of the children was tested. You have never had anything so good to eat since. You found the eggs. You hid them. They were your contribution to the table. Since then you have seen eggs scrambled, eggs poached, eggs in omelet, eggs boiled, eggs done on one side and eggs in a nog, but you shall never find anything like the flavor of that Easter morning in boyhood.
Alas for the boys in town! Easter comes to them on stilts, and they buy their eggs out of the store. There is no room for a boy to swing round.
There is no good place in town to fly a kite, or trundle a hoop, or even shout without people"s throwing up the window to see who is killed. The holidays are robbed of half their life because some wiseacre will persist in telling him who Santa Claus is, while yet he is hanging up his first pair of stockings. Here the boy pays half a dollar for a bottle of perfume as big as his finger, when out of town, for nothing but the trouble of breathing it, he may smell a country full of new-mown hay and wild honeysuckle. In a painted bath-tub he takes his Sat.u.r.day bath careful lest he hit his head against the spigot, while in the meadow-brook the boys plunge in wild glee, and pluck up health and long life from the pebbly bottom. Oh, the joy in the spring day, when, after long teasing of mother to let you take off your shoes, you dash out on the cool gra.s.s barefoot, or down the road, the dust curling about the instep in warm enjoyment, and, henceforth, for months, there shall be no shoes to tie or blacken.
Let us send the boys out into the country every year for an airing. If their grandfather and grandmother be yet alive, they will give them a good time. They will learn in a little while the mysteries of the hay-mow, how to drive oxen and how to keep Easter. They will take the old people back to the time when you yourself were a boy. There will be for the grandson an extra cake in each oven. And grandfather and grandmother will sit and watch the prodigy, and wonder if any other family ever had such grandchildren. It will be a good thing when the evenings are short, and the old folks"
eyesight is somewhat dim, if you can set up in their house for a little while one or two of these lights of childhood. For the time the aches and pains of old age will be gone, and they will feel as lithe and merry as when sixty years ago they themselves rummaged hayrick, and mow and wagon-house, hiding eggs for Easter.
CHAPTER XLII.
SINK OR SWIM.
We entered the ministry with a mortal horror of extemporaneous speaking.
Each week we wrote two sermons and a lecture all out, from the text to the amen. We did not dare to give out the notice of a prayer-meeting unless it was on paper. We were a slave to ma.n.u.script, and the chains were galling; and three months more of such work would have put us in the graveyard. We resolved on emanc.i.p.ation. The Sunday night was approaching when we expected to make violent rebellion against this bondage of pen and paper. We had an essay about ten minutes long on some Christian subject, which we proposed to preach as an introduction to the sermon, resolved, at the close of that brief composition, to launch out on the great sea of extemporaneousness.
It so happened that the coming Sabbath night Was to be eventful in the village. The trustees of the church had been building a gasometer back of the church, and the night I speak of the building was for the first time to be lighted in the modern way. The church was, of course, crowded--not so much to hear the preacher as to see how the gas would burn. Many were unbelieving, and said that there would be an explosion, or a big fire, or that in the midst of the service the lights would go out. Several brethren disposed to hang on to old customs declared that candles and oil were the only fit material for lighting a church, and they denounced the innovation as indicative of vanity on the part of the new-comers. They used oil in the ancient temple, and it was that which ran down on Aaron"s beard, and anything that was good enough for the whiskers of an old-time priest was good enough for a country meeting-house. These sticklers for the oil were present that night, hoping--and I think some of them secretly praying--that the gas might go out.
With our ten-minute ma.n.u.script we went into the pulpit, all in a tremor.
Although the gas did not burn as brightly as its friends had hoped, still it was bright enough to show the people the perspiration that stood in beads on our forehead. We began our discourse, and every sentence gave us the feeling that we were one step nearer the gallows. We spoke very slowly, so as to make the ten-minute notes last fifteen minutes. During the preachment of the brief ma.n.u.script we concluded that we had never been called to the ministry. We were in a hot bath of excitement. People noticed our trepidation, and supposed it was because we were afraid the gas would go out. Alas! our fear was that it would not go out. As we came toward the close of our brief we joined the anti-gas party, and prayed that before we came to the last written line something would burst, and leave us in the darkness. Indeed, we discovered an encouraging flicker amid the burners, which gave us the hope that the brief which lay before us would be long enough for all practical purposes, and that the hour of execution might be postponed to some other night. As we came to the sentence next to the last the lights fell down to half their size, and we could just manage to see the audience as they were floating away from our vision. We said to ourselves, "Why can"t these lights be obliging, and go out entirely?" The wish was gratified. As we finished the last line of our brief, and stood on the verge of rhetorical destruction, the last glimmer of light was extinguished. "It is impossible to proceed," we cried out; "receive the benediction!"
We crawled down the pulpit in a state of exhilaration; we never before saw such handsome darkness. The odor of the escaping gas was to us like "gales from Araby." Did a frightened young man ever have such fortunate deliverance? The providence was probably intended to humble the trustees, yet the scared preacher took advantage of it.
But after we got home we saw the wickedness of being in such dread. As the Lord got us out of that predicament, we resolved never again to be cornered in one similar. Forthwith the thralldom was broken, we hope never again to be felt. How demeaning that a man with a message from the Lord Almighty should be dependent upon paper-mills and gasometers! Paper is a non-conductor of gospel electricity. If a man have a five-thousand-dollar bill of goods to sell a customer, he does not go up to the purchaser and say, "I have some remarks to make to you about these goods, but just wait till I get out my ma.n.u.script." Before he got through reading the argument the customer would be in the next door, making purchases from another house.
What cowardice! Because a few critical hearers sit with lead-pencils out to mark down the inaccuracies of extemporaneousness, shall the pulpit cower?
If these critics do not repent, they will go to h.e.l.l, and take their lead-pencils with them. While the great congregation are ready to take the bread hot out of the oven shall the minister be crippled in his work because the village doctor or lawyer sits carping before him? To please a few learned ninnies a thousand ministers sit writing sermons on Sat.u.r.day night till near the break of day, their heads hot, their feet cold, and their nerves a-twitch. Sermons born on Sat.u.r.day night are apt to have the rickets. Instead of cramping our chests over writing-desks, and being the slaves of the pen, let us attend to our physical health, that we may have more pulpit independence.
It would be a grand thing if every minister felt strong enough in body to thrash any man in his audience improperly behaving, but always kept back from such a.s.sault by the fact that it would be wrong to do so. There is a good deal of heart and head in our theology, but not enough liver and backbone. We need a more stalwart Christian character, more roast beef rare, and less calf"s-foot jelly. This will make the pulpit more bold and the pew more manly.
Which thoughts came to us this week as we visited again the village church aforesaid, and preached out of the same old Bible in which, years ago, we laid the ten-minute ma.n.u.script, and we looked upon the same lights that once behaved so badly. But we found it had been snowing since the time we lived there, and heads that then were black are white now, and some of the eyes which looked up to us that memorable night when the gasometer failed us, thirteen years ago, are closed now, and for them all earthly lights have gone out for ever.
CHAPTER XLIII.