第27章

I don't know whether you have had any experience with Greater Testimonies and with Beacons set on Hills.If you have, you will realize how, at first gradually, and then rapidly, their position from year to year grows more distressing.What with the building loan and the organ instalment, and the fire insurance,--a cruel charge,--and the heat and light, the rector began to realize as he added up the figures that nothing but logarithms could solve them.Then the time came when not only the rector, but all the wardens knew and the sidesmen knew that the debt was more than the church could carry;then the choir knew and the congregation knew and at last everybody knew; and there were special collections at Easter and special days of giving, and special weeks of tribulation, and special arrangements with the Hosanna Pipe and Steam Organ Co.And it was noticed that when the Rural Dean announced a service of Lenten Sorrow,--aimed more especially at the business men,--the congregation had diminished by forty per cent.

I suppose things are just the same elsewhere,--I mean the peculiar kind of discontent that crept into the Church of England congregation in Mariposa after the setting up of the Beacon.There were those who claimed that they had seen the error from the first, though they had kept quiet, as such people always do, from breadth of mind.There were those who had felt years before how it would end, but their lips were sealed from humility of spirit.What was worse was that there were others who grew dissatisfied with the whole conduct of the church.

Yodel, the auctioneer, for example, narrated how he had been to the city and had gone into a service of the Roman Catholic church: Ibelieve, to state it more fairly, he had "dropped in,"--the only recognized means of access to such a service.He claimed that the music that he had heard there was music, and that (outside of his profession) the chanting and intoning could not be touched.

Ed Moore, the photographer, also related that he had listened to a sermon in the city, and that if anyone would guarantee him a sermon like that he would defy you to keep him away from church.Meanwhile, failing the guarantee, he stayed away.

The very doctrines were impeached.Some of the congregation began to cast doubts on eternal punishment,--doubts so grave as to keep them absent from the Lenten Services of Sorrow.Indeed, Lawyer Macartney took up the whole question of the Athanasian Creed one afternoon with Joe Milligan, the dentist, and hardly left a clause of it intact.

All this time, you will understand, Dean Drone kept on with his special services, and leaflets, calls, and appeals went out from the Ark of Gideon like rockets from a sinking ship.More and more with every month the debt of the church lay heavy on his mind.At times he forgot it.At other times he woke up in the night and thought about it.Sometimes as he went down the street from the lighted precincts of the Greater Testimony and passed the Salvation Army, praying around a naphtha lamp under the open sky, it smote him to the heart with a stab.

But the congregation were wrong, I think, in imputing fault to the sermons of Dean Drone.There I do think they were wrong.I can speak from personal knowledge when I say that the rector's sermons were not only stimulating in matters of faith, but contained valuable material in regard to the Greek language, to modern machinery and to a variety of things that should have proved of the highest advantage to the congregation.

There was, I say, the Greek language.The Dean always showed the greatest delicacy of feeling in regard to any translation in or out of it that he made from the pulpit.He was never willing to accept even the faintest shade of rendering different from that commonly given without being assured of the full concurrence of the congregation.Either the translation must be unanimous and without contradiction, or he could not pass it.He would pause in his sermon and would say: "The original Greek is 'Hoson,' but perhaps you will allow me to translate it as equivalent to 'Hoyon.'" And they did.So that if there was any fault to be found it was purely on the side of the congregation for not entering a protest at the time.

It was the same way in regard to machinery.After all, what better illustrates the supreme purpose of the All Wise than such a thing as the dynamo or the reciprocating marine engine or the pictures in the Scientific American?

Then, too, if a man has had the opportunity to travel and has seen the great lakes spread out by the hand of Providence from where one leaves the new dock at the Sound to where one arrives safe and thankful with one's dear fellow-passengers in the spirit at the concrete landing stage at Mackinaw--is not this fit and proper material for the construction of an analogy or illustration? Indeed, even apart from an analogy, is it not mighty interesting to narrate, anyway? In any case, why should the.church-wardens have sent the rector on the Mackinaw trip, if they had not expected him to make some little return for it?

I lay some stress on this point because the criticisms directed against the Mackinaw sermons always seemed so unfair.If the rector had described his experiences in the crude language of the ordinary newspaper, there might, I admit, have been something unfitting about it.But he was always careful to express himself in a way that showed,--or, listen, let me explain with an example.

"It happened to be my lot some years ago," he would say, "to find myself a voyager, just as one is a voyager on the sea of life, on the broad expanse of water which has been spread out to the north-west of us by the hand of Providence, at a height of five hundred and eighty-one feet above the level of the sea,--I refer, I may say, to Lake Huron." Now, how different that is from saying: "I'll never forget the time I went on the Mackinaw trip." The whole thing has a different sound entirely.In the same way the Dean would go on: