Chapter XVI Visions, Hysteria, Dogma, and Poor Lessons to the Front When the Revivalists Arrived — How Natural It Sounded When “Bird” Thurlow Asked a Flippant Question
Then the annual winter revival was announced. Upon this event the University centered all its prayers, its hopes, its attention, as the banner event of the year. In the church papers where the advertisement of the University appeared, the annual revival was featured. Several of the students had been sent to the institution by their parents principally for the spiritual benefits that might come to them in the atmosphere of the revival.
The whole air began to stir with the throb of revival preparation. A spiritual census of the students was taken, not officially or in any stereotyped way, and all the energy of Christian effort was brought to bear on creating the right, psychological mood for the time the evangelists should arrive. The prayer bands wove in extra meetings and increased their unction. Neglected, after-supper prayer-services were suddenly filled. Bands of earnest, zealous men and women roamed from room to room holding spiritual inquisitions over “The Clamorous Eight” and any others who were thought to need special portions of grace.
“I’m heartily in favor of Christian effort,” I said to Jason, one day, when we were talking over the coming revival, “but take last year and think how many hours were lost to study and given to the meetings! I should think that those things might be left to camp-meetings and churches—there were three long revivals in the village last winter—and we ought to center our precious time on study!”
Jason declared, emphatically and finally, “Brother Priddy, what are heads compared to souls?”
“Oh, I don’t object to any sort of efforts being indulged if people are to be made Christian, Jason, but according to what you said in the prayer-meeting last night, there are only three in the whole University who do not make any profession of religious faith: just three, and yet two whole weeks are to be set apart to the Evangelists who will come and preach the ‘third-birth doctrine’ and other dogmatic matters. That is what I protest against.”
Again Jason answered with his inclusive, “Brother Priddy, what are heads compared to souls?”
By the time the revivalists appeared it had been announced in the prayer-service that not one of the students stood “outside the Christian fold.” The revivalists had a clear chance, then, to preach the special doctrine of “the third-birth,” without any further parley.
The revivalists were a man and his wife, both of them uneducated, whose chief claim to merit in their field lay in the fact that they were said to be “filled with the Spirit.” In spite of the bad grammar, the mixed figures of rhetoric, traces of demagogism, and an excessive ex cathedra tone, the revivalists were given full power in the meetings. All interests in pure scholarship were crowded aside. The valedictorian, the temperance orator who had won the interstate oratorical prize, the professors, and the humble seeker after knowledge were subordinated to the zealot, the exhorter, the unctuous pleader.
In morning chapel the time was generously lengthened to accommodate the doctrinal exhortations of the revivalist and his wife, who spake not so much of practical concerns, but entered into a bewildering maze of Scripture quibblings, text jugglings, super-rational conclusions, and a daze of fantastic analogies. When the closing bell sounded, the speaker would turn to the President and say, familiarly—even commandingly, “Well, brother, studies can wait on the Lord, can’t they?” and the President had nothing to say but, “Yes.” The morning exhortations infringed on our nine o’clock classes so that often they had to be discontinued; much to the reluctance of the professors who had to bear the brunt of the intellectual disqualifications of students at graduation time.
As the meetings continued, in the evenings, the enthusiasm increased. When emotions were running at flood the meetings were carried well into the night and Thropper and I often did not reach our room until eleven o’clock—with all opportunity for study taken away. But again the professors had to lose, for if any of us were backward with lessons the next morning, by saying, “Professor, I was at the meeting last night. I did not have any opportunity to study,” a proper adjustment was made in our favor. For, as Jason had said, the theory at that time was, “What are heads compared to souls?”
At the conclusion of the first Thursday evening’s meeting, the revivalist and his wife let it be known that “At last God is blessing us!” High tide had been reached. That meeting had been given into the hands of the students after the leader had preached for an hour on a doctrinal theme. A hymn was started by a young woman. She stood while she led the singing and at the conclusion she still stood erect, with her eyes fixed on the ceiling. She had thrown herself into a trance and spoke in a jumble some words nobody could decipher but which were understood to be a “revelation.” That was the signal for a wild demonstration. Jason leaped to his feet and after shouting, “God is with us! Emmanuel!” he sat shivering in his seat as if his body were in the grasp of angry spirits. A group of young women paraded down the aisles and before the pulpit waving their handkerchiefs and shouting in shrill ecstasy. Suddenly one of the young men near me burst into lamentations and tears, moaning as if his heart would break. Meanwhile the evangelists knelt at the front of the platform in prayer; praying for people by name. Then the young man who had been crying suddenly darted to his feet and broke into a torrent of wild, hysterical laughter and ran to the upper end of the room clapping his hands. Hymns of different sorts and tunes had broken out in different parts of the room, making a musical Babel. The young woman who had had the trance came into consciousness again, and, on the urgence of the revivalists, ascended the platform from whence she described a vision fit to be framed in Miltonic verse. At eleven o’clock hands were joined, a hymn was sung, and after a benediction from “Pa” Borden, we went back to our rooms.
Then the revivalists with their honors full on them departed, and the emotional tension left us. It was a distinct relief, like a bit of bird’s chatter after the epic storm, to hear “Bird” Thurlow shout across the walk, one morning, “Hey, Paddy, going to take Miss Adee to the lecture next Wednesday?”
Chapter XVII. My Presidential
Pose and its Central Place in “The
Record.” A Wistful Glance and
Some Practical Plans towards
Eastern Education. How the
Little Sparrow Brought my Class
Colors to me as I Gave the Class
“Oration.” Ends in a Fight
IN the spring, when announcements of Commencement and Graduation were in the air, a gathering of four members of the collegiate department, as many members of the preparatory division, two business students, and five who could not be classified by reason of their slowness to master their studies, met in response to a call, sent out by the Seniors, for the members of the Freshmen Class to elect officers, and after due deliberation made me their president.
With this honor thrust on me, I was immediately in a dilemma, for the main purpose of the class organization was to have each member’s photograph in the Senior’s “Record,” a souvenir book of the University life. Had I been other than the president, I should not have fretted about my inability to afford a visit to the picture gallery, but there I was: due to have my picture in the middle of the group. I was in despair until finally I thought of little Jack Borden, who owned a three-dollar camera. I told him my predicament and he consented to make a snap-shot of me for ten cents that should be fit to be in the center of a group of “gallery ones” as he termed those that the official photographer would take.
As Jack had no photographer’s background, he snapped me with my back to the flowered wall paper, and when the finished picture was handed me, there I sat, outlined against a mass of conventional crocus leaves and a picture of “Pa” Borden hung on the wall above my head! I was told by one of “The Record” Committee that the picture would never be fit to reproduce with such a background: that it should be in relief against a plain one. I returned to my room in despair, but finally resolved to cut my picture out from the wall paper and paste it on a piece of plain, black pasteboard. After going over the outline with the scissors I finally succeeded in accomplishing the feat and the picture went in the middle of the group, an undignified, flat, ill-posed, and somewhat jagged outline of myself, most conspicuous as “the president.”
As the year drew to an end, and the students began to talk so emotionally of home and friends, I began to feel that I had been long enough in exile from my eastern home and friendships. I also began to wonder if now that I had learned the art of working a way through school I should not be more comfortable in Massachusetts. I had heard the graduating students talk of “Dartmouth” and “Boston University” and “Yale” and “Harvard,” with a sort of worshipful accent, not far short of reverence. One or two graduates in the past, so the local legend ran, had even attained to post-graduate work in Yale and Harvard! Therefore, as I heard this talk, listened to this semi-worship of New England education, and realized that it was my home, my own environment, I also asked myself the question: “Why not go and complete your education in that atmosphere?”
I mentioned this fact to Thropper. He said to me:
“I have often wondered, Priddy, why you came away out here for your education when you have such good schools in New England. I should think you’d be able to work your way along out there and get some mighty fine chances. I just wish I had been an Easterner!”
“I’ve a good mind to go East when school closes, Thropper, and try. I must confess I feel lonesome, homesick out here. I miss the ocean and the hills. I can’t help it. I suppose I run the risk of not getting to school next year, though, if I break off now!”
“Not if you’re willing to work as you have,” said Thropper. “Though I’d hate to have you go. I thought you might be my right hand man when I marry, next fall!”
“Marry?”
“Yes, in September. Oh, you’ll get an invitation even if you won’t be able to attend, Priddy,” he added, solemnly, “I wouldn’t try to keep you from going East even with my wedding. Try it, old fellow. You owe it to yourself, now that you’ve got such a good start here. This place doesn’t pretend to be in competition with the big Eastern institutions. Evangelical University is concerned mostly with giving a fellow a start towards them. The faculty would be only too glad to have you leave here, if they knew you were going to stick to your education in the East.”
“I’ll do it, Thropper!” I replied.
The busy season of Commencement was ushered in: a busy time even for those of us who were far, very far from graduation. My “class” voted that I represent them with an oration on “Class Day.” No classic, intellectual, or sentimental event was Class Day at Evangelical University, but, rather, a Western outflow of burlesque and banter. Every day for a week I practised my “oration” in the attic of the University building. In this speech I had put, as all previous Class Day orators had made a practise of putting, puns, alliterations, pompous passages, personalities, and much bathos. I tried to perfect myself in its delivery, not knowing just what experiences I should encounter on the day I should speak it.
A wild, untamed, yelling, crowding procession filled the chapel hall, each class in a section by itself and the “orators” seated on the platform.
It came my turn. I stepped to the front and raised my hand for the first word when suddenly the class next above mine yelled, poked up slang signs, and then from the square ventilator hole high above my head darted a sparrow with a trailing streamer of our class ribbon fluttering from its tail. At every sentence, nearly every word, I had to pause on account of the yellings, the banter, and the interruptions caused by flying hats and scudding pieces of pasteboard. After about a half hour of disciplined posing, I finally concluded the “oration” amid the admiring plaudits of my class. Thus orator followed orator, each one outdoing the other with satire, pun, and rhetorical nonsense. To the accompaniment of a thudding fight which was taking place between the representatives of two classes over our heads where the bird had been sent down, Class Day came to an end, and my active life at Evangelical University likewise.