Chapter XIV Kike’s Sermon
During the time that had intervened between Kike’s conversion and Magruder’s second visit to the settlement, Kike had developed a very considerable gift for earnest speech in the class meetings. In that day every influence in Methodist association contributed to make a preacher of a man of force. The reverence with which a self-denying preacher was regarded by the people was a great compensation for the poverty and toil that pertained to the office. To be a preacher was to be canonized during one’s lifetime. The moment a young man showed zeal and fluency he was pitched on by all the brethren and sisters as one whose duty it was to preach the Gospel; he was asked whether he did not feel that he had a divine call; he was set upon watching the movements within him to see whether or not he ought to be among the sons of the prophets. Oftentimes a man was made to feel, in spite of his own better judgment, that he was a veritable Jonah, slinking from duty, and in imminent peril of a whale in the shape of some providential disaster. Kike, indeed, needed none of these urgings to impel him toward the ministry. He was a man of the prophetic temperament—one of those men whose beliefs take hold of them more strongly than the objects of sense. The future life, as preached by the early Methodists, with all its joys and all its awful torments, became the most substantial of realities to him. He was in constant astonishment that people could believe these things theoretically and ignore them in practice. If men were going headlong to perdition, and could be saved and brought into a paradise of eternal bliss by preaching, then what nobler work could there be than that of saving them? And, let a man take what view he may of a future life, Kike’s opinion was the right one—no work can be so excellent as that of helping men to better living.
Kike had been poring over some works of Methodist biography which he had borrowed, and the sublimated life of Fletcher was the only one that fulfilled his ideal. Methodism preached consecration to its disciples. Kike had already learned from Mrs. Wheeler, who was the class-leader at Hissawachee settlement, and from Methodist literature, that he must “keep all on the altar.” He must be ready to do, to suffer, or to perish, for the Master. The sternest sayings of Christ about forsaking father and mother, and hating one’s own life and kindred, he heard often repeated in exhortations. Most people are not harmed by a literal understanding of hyperbolical expressions. Laziness and selfishness are great antidotes to fanaticism, and often pass current for common sense. Kike had no such buffers; taught to accept the words of the Gospel with the dry literalness of statutory enactments, he was too honest to evade their force, too earnest to slacken his obedience. He was already prepared to accept any burden and endure any trial that might be given as a test of discipleship. All his natural ambition, vehemence, and persistence, found exercise in his religious life; and the simple-hearted brethren, not knowing that the one sort of intensity was but the counter-part of the other, pointed to the transformation as a “beautiful conversion,” a standing miracle. So it was, indeed, and, like all moral miracles, it was worked in the direction of individuality, not in opposition to it.
It was a grievous disappointment to the little band of Methodists that Brother Magruder’s face was so swollen, after his encounter, as to prevent his preaching. They had counted much upon the success of this day’s work, and now the devil seemed about to snatch the victory. Mrs. Wheeler enthusiastically recommended Kike as a substitute, and Magruder sent for him in haste. Kike was gratified to hear that the preacher wanted to see him personally. His sallow face flushed with pleasure as he stood, a slender stripling, before the messenger of God.
“Brother Lumsden,” said Mr. Magruder, “are you ready to do and to suffer for Christ?”
“I trust I am,” said Kike, wondering what the preacher could mean.
“You see how the devil has planned to defeat the Lord’s work to-day. My lip is swelled, and my jaw so stiff that I can hardly speak. Are you ready to do the duty the Lord shall put upon you?”
Kike trembled from head to foot. He had often fancied himself preaching his first sermon in a strange neighborhood, and he had even picked out his text; but to stand up suddenly before his school-mates, before his mother, before Brady, and, worse than all, before Morton, was terrible. And yet, had he not that very morning made a solemn vow that he would not shrink from death itself!
“Do you think I am fit to preach?” he asked, evasively.
“None of us are fit; but here will be two or three hundred people hungry for the bread of life. The Master has fed you; he offers you the bread to distribute among your friends and neighbors. Now, will you let the fear of man make you deny the blessed Lord who has taken you out of a horrible pit and set your feet upon the Rock of Ages?”
Kike trembled a moment, and then said: “I will do whatever you say, if you will pray for me.”
“I’ll do that, my brother. And now take your Bible, and go into the woods and pray. The Lord will show you the way, if you put your whole trust in him.”
The preacher’s allusion to the bread of life gave Kike his subject, and he soon gathered a few thoughts which he wrote down on a fly-leaf of the Bible, in the shape of a skeleton. But it occurred to him that he had not one word to say on the subject of the bread of life beyond the sentences of his skeleton. The more this became evident to him, the greater was his agony of fear. He knelt on the brown leaves by a prostrate log; he made a “new consecration” of himself; he tried to feel willing to fail, so far as his own feelings were involved; he reminded the Lord of his promises to be with them he had sent; and then there came into his memory a text of Scripture: “For it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak.” Taking it, after the manner of the early Methodist mysticism, that the text had been supernaturally “suggested” to him, he became calm; and finding, from the height of the sun, that it was about the hour for meeting, he returned to the house of Colonel Wheeler, and was appalled at the sight that met his eyes. All the settlement, and many from other settlements, had come. The house, the yard, the fences, were full of people. Kike was seized with a tremor. He did not feel able to run the gauntlet of such a throng. He made a detour, and crept in at the back door like a criminal. For stage-fright—this fear of human presence—is not a thing to be overcome by the will. Susceptible natures are always liable to it, and neither moral nor physical courage can avert it.
A chair had been placed in the front door of the log house, for Kike, that he might preach to the congregation indoors and the much larger one outdoors. Mr. Magruder, much battered up, sat on a wooden bench just outside. Kike crept into the empty chair in the doorway with the feeling of one who intrudes where he does not belong. The brethren were singing, as a congregational voluntary, to the solemn tune of “Kentucky,” the hymn which begins:
“A charge to keep I have,
A God to glorify;
A never-dying soul to save
And fit it for the sky.”
Magruder saw Kike’s fright, and, leaning over to him, said: “If you get confused, tell your own experience.” The early preacher’s universal refuge was his own experience. It was a sure key to the sympathies of the audience.
Kike got through the opening exercises very well. He could pray, for in praying he shut his eyes and uttered the cry of his trembling soul for help. He had been beating about among two or three texts, either of which would do for a head-piece to the remarks he intended to make; but now one fixed itself in his mind as he stood appalled by his situation in the presence of such a throng. He rose and read, with a tremulous voice:
“There is a lad here which hath five barley loaves and two small fishes; but what are they among so many?”
The text arrested the attention of all. Magruder, though unable to speak without pain, could not refrain from saying aloud, after the free old Methodist fashion: “The Lord multiply the loaves! Bless and break to the multitude!” “Amen!” responded an old brother from another settlement, “and the Lord help the lad!” But Kike felt that the advantage which the text had given him would be of short duration. The novelty of his position bewildered him. His face flushed; his thoughts became confused; he turned his back on the audience out of doors, and talked rapidly to the few friends in the house: the old brethren leaned their heads upon their hands and began to pray. Whatever spiritual help their prayers may have brought him, their lugubrious groaning, and their doleful, audible prayers of “Lord, help!” depressed Kike immeasurably, and kept the precipice on which he stood constantly present to him. He tried in succession each division that he had sketched on the fly-leaf of the Bible, and found little to say on any of them. At last, he could not see the audience distinctly for confusion—there was a dim vision of heads swimming before him. He stopped still, and Magruder, expecting him to sit down, resolved to “exhort” if the pain should kill him. The Philistines meanwhile were laughing at Kike’s evident discomfiture.
But Kike had no notion of sitting down. The laughter awakened his combativeness, and his combativeness restored his self-control. Persistent people begin their success where others end in failure. He was through with the sermon, and it had occupied just six minutes. The lad’s scanty provisions had not been multiplied. But he felt relieved. The sermon over, there was no longer necessity for trying to speak against time, nor for observing the outward manner of a preacher.
“Now,” he said, doggedly, “you have all seen that I cannot preach worth a cent. When David went out to fight, he had the good sense not to put on Saul’s armor. I was fool enough to try to wear Brother Magruder’s. Now, I’m done with that. The text and sermon are gone. But I’m not ashamed of Jesus Christ. And before I sit down, I am going to tell you all what he has done for a poor lost sinner like me.”
Kike told the story with sincere directness. His recital of his own sins was a rebuke to others; with a trembling voice and a simple earnestness absolutely electrical, he told of his revengefulness, and of the effect of Magruder’s preaching on him. And now that the flood-gates of emotion were opened, all trepidation departed, and there came instead the fine glow of martial courage. He could have faced the universe. From his own life the transition to the lives of those around him was easy. He hit right and left. The excitable crowd swayed with consternation as, in a rapid and vehement utterance, he denounced their sins with the particularity of one who had been familiar with them all his life. Magruder forgot to respond; he only leaned back and looked in bewilderment, with open eyes and mouth, at the fiery boy whose contagious excitement was fast setting the whole audience ablaze. Slowly the people pressed forward off the fences. All at once there was a loud bellowing cry from some one who had fallen prostrate outside the fence, and who began to cry aloud as if the portals of an endless perdition were yawning in his face. Magruder pressed through the crowd to find that the fallen man was his antagonist of the morning—Bill McConkey! Bill had concealed his bruised nose behind a tree, but had been drawn forth by the fascination of Kike’s earnestness, and had finally fallen under the effect of his own terror. This outburst of agony from McConkey was fuel to the flames, and the excitement now spread to all parts of the audience. Kike went from man to man, and exhorted and rebuked each one in particular. Brady, not wishing to hear a public commentary on his own life, waddled away when he saw Kike coming; his mother wept bitterly under his exhortation; and Morton sat stock still on the fence listening, half in anguish and half in anger, to Kike’s public recital of his sins.
At last Kike approached his uncle; for Captain Lumsden had come on purpose to enjoy Morton’s proposed interruption. He listened a minute to Kike’s exhortation, and the contrary emotions of alarm at the thought of God’s judgment and anger at Kike’s impudence contended within him until he started for his horse and was seized with that curious nervous affection which originated in these religious excitements and disappeared with them.* He jerked violently—his jerking only adding to his excitement, which in turn increased the severity of his contortions. This nervous affection was doubtless a natural physical result of violent excitement; but the people of that day imagined that it was produced by some supernatural agency, some attributing it to God, others to the devil, and yet others to some subtle charm voluntarily exercised by the preachers. Lumsden went home jerking all the way, and cursing the Methodists more bitterly than ever.
Notes
* It bore, however, a curious resemblance to the “dancing disease” which prevailed in Italy in the Middle Ages.