No such throng had ever before been seen in the building
during all its eight years of existence. People were
wedged together most uncomfortably upon the seats;
they stood packed in the aisles and overflowed the galleries;
at the back, in the shadows underneath these galleries,
they formed broad, dense masses about the doors,
through which it would be hopeless to attempt a passage.
The light, given out from numerous tin-lined circles
of flaring gas-jets arranged on the ceiling,
fell full upon a thousand uplifted faces--some framed
in bonnets or juvenile curls, others bearded or crowned
with shining baldness--but all alike under the spell
of a dominant emotion which held features in abstracted
suspense and focussed every eye upon a common objective point.
The excitement of expectancy reigned upon each row
of countenances, was visible in every attitude
--nay, seemed a part of the close, overheated atmosphere itself.
An observer, looking over these compact lines of faces
and noting the uniform concentration of eagerness
they exhibited, might have guessed that they were watching
for either the jury's verdict in some peculiarly absorbing
criminal trial, or the announcement of the lucky numbers
in a great lottery. These two expressions seemed
to alternate, and even to mingle vaguely, upon the
upturned lineaments of the waiting throng--the hope
of some unnamed stroke of fortune and the dread of some adverse decree.
But a glance forward at the object of this universal
gaze would have sufficed to shatter both hypotheses.
Here was neither a court of justice nor a tombola.
It was instead the closing session of the annual
Nedahma Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church,
and the Bishop was about to read out the list
of ministerial appointments for the coming year.
This list was evidently written in a hand strange to him,
and the slow, near-sighted old gentleman, having at last
sufficiently rubbed the glasses of his spectacles, and then
adjusted them over his nose with annoying deliberation,
was now silently rehearsing his task to himself
--the while the clergymen round about ground their teeth
and restlessly shuffled their feet in impatience.
Upon a closer inspection of the assemblage, there were a
great many of these clergymen. A dozen or more dignified,
and for the most part elderly, brethren sat grouped
about the Bishop in the pulpit. As many others,
not quite so staid in mien, and indeed with here and there
almost a suggestion of frivolity in their postures,
were seated on the steps leading down from this platform.
A score of their fellows sat facing the audience, on chairs
tightly wedged into the space railed off round the pulpit;
and then came five or six rows of pews, stretching across
the whole breadth of the church, and almost solidly filled
with preachers of the Word.
There were very old men among these--bent and decrepit
veterans who had known Lorenzo Dow, and had been ordained
by elders who remembered Francis Asbury and even Whitefield.
They sat now in front places, leaning forward with trembling
and misshapen hands behind their hairy ears, waiting to
hear their names read out on the superannuated list,
it might be for the last time.
The sight of these venerable Fathers in Israel was good
to the eyes, conjuring up, as it did, pictures of a time
when a plain and homely people had been served by a fervent
and devoted clergy--by preachers who lacked in learning
and polish, no doubt, but who gave their lives without dream
of earthly reward to poverty and to the danger and wearing toil
of itinerant missions through the rude frontier settlements.
These pictures had for their primitive accessories log-huts,
rough household implements, coarse clothes, and patched
old saddles which told of weary years of journeying;
but to even the least sympathetic vision there shone
upon them the glorified light of the Cross and Crown.
Reverend survivors of the heroic times, their very
presence there--sitting meekly at the altar-rail to hear
again the published record of their uselessness and of their
dependence upon church charity--was in the nature of a benediction.
The large majority of those surrounding these patriarchs
were middle-aged men, generally of a robust type,
with burly shoulders, and bushing beards framing shaven
upper lips, and who looked for the most part like honest
and prosperous farmers attired in their Sunday clothes.
As exceptions to this rule, there were scattered stray
specimens of a more urban class, worthies with neatly
trimmed whiskers, white neckcloths, and even indications
of hair-oil--all eloquent of citified charges; and now and
again the eye singled out a striking and scholarly face,
at once strong and simple, and instinctively referred it
to the faculty of one of the several theological seminaries
belonging to the Conference.
The effect of these faces as a whole was toward goodness,
candor, and imperturbable self-complacency rather than
learning or mental astuteness; and curiously enough it wore
its pleasantest aspect on the countenances of the older men.
The impress of zeal and moral worth seemed to diminish
by regular gradations as one passed to younger faces;
and among the very beginners, who had been ordained only within
the past day or two, this decline was peculiarly marked.
It was almost a relief to note the relative smallness
of their number, so plainly was it to be seen that they
were not the men their forbears had been.
And if those aged, worn-out preachers facing the pulpit
had gazed instead backward over the congregation,
it may be that here too their old eyes would have detected
a difference--what at least they would have deemed a decline.
But nothing was further from the minds of the members of the
First M. E. Church of Tecumseh than the suggestion that they
were not an improvement on those who had gone before them.
They were undoubtedly the smartest and most important
congregation within the limits of the Nedahma Conference,
and this new church edifice of theirs represented alike
a scale of outlay and a standard of progressive taste
in devotional architecture unique in the Methodism of that
whole section of the State. They had a right to be proud
of themselves, too. They belonged to the substantial
order of the community, with perhaps not so many very rich
men as the Presbyterians had, but on the other hand
with far fewer extremely poor folk than the Baptists
were encumbered with. The pews in the first four rows
of their church rented for one hundred dollars apiece
--quite up to the Presbyterian highwater mark--and they
now had almost abolished free pews altogether. The oyster
suppers given by their Ladies' Aid Society in the basement
of the church during the winter had established rank
among the fashionable events in Tecumseh's social calendar.
A comprehensive and satisfied perception of these advantages
was uppermost in the minds of this local audience,
as they waited for the Bishop to begin his reading.
They had entertained this Bishop and his Presiding Elders,
and the rank and file of common preachers, in a style
which could not have been remotely approached by any
other congregation in the Conference. Where else,
one would like to know, could the Bishop have been domiciled
in a Methodist house where he might have a sitting-room
all to himself, with his bedroom leading out of it?
Every clergyman present had been provided for in a
private residence--even down to the Licensed Exhorters,
who were not really ministers at all when you came to think
of it, and who might well thank their stars that the
Conference had assembled among such open-handed people.
There existed a dim feeling that these Licensed Exhorters
--an uncouth crew, with country store-keepers and lumbermen
and even a horse-doctor among their number--had taken
rather too much for granted, and were not exhibiting quite
the proper degree of gratitude over their reception.
But a more important issue hung now imminent in the balance
--was Tecumseh to be fairly and honorably rewarded for her
hospitality by being given the pastor of her choice?
All were agreed--at least among those who paid pew-rents
--upon the great importance of a change in the pulpit
of the First M. E. Church. A change in persons must
of course take place, for their present pastor had
exhausted the three-year maximum of the itinerant system,
but there was needed much more than that. For a handsome
and expensive church building like this, and with such
a modern and go-ahead congregation, it was simply a vital
necessity to secure an attractive and fashionable preacher.
They had held their own against the Presbyterians
these past few years only by the most strenuous efforts,
and under the depressing disadvantage of a minister
who preached dreary out-of-date sermons, and who lacked
even the most rudimentary sense of social distinctions.
The Presbyterians had captured the new cashier of the
Adams County Bank, who had always gone to the Methodist
Church in the town he came from, but now was lost
solely because of this tiresome old fossil of theirs;
and there were numerous other instances of the same sort,
scarcely less grievous. That this state of things must
be altered was clear.
The unusually large local attendance upon the sessions
of the Conference had given some of the more guileless
of visiting brethren a high notion of Tecumseh's piety;
and perhaps even the most sophisticated stranger never
quite realized how strictly it was to be explained by the
anxiety to pick out a suitable champion for the fierce
Presbyterian competition. Big gatherings assembled evening
after evening to hear the sermons of those selected to preach,
and the church had been almost impossibly crowded at each of
the three Sunday services. Opinions had naturally differed
a good deal during the earlier stages of this scrutiny,
but after last night's sermon there could be but one feeling.
The man for Tecumseh was the Reverend Theron Ware.
The choice was an admirable one, from points of view much
more exalted than those of the local congregation.
You could see Mr. Ware sitting there at the end of the
row inside the altar-rail--the tall, slender young
man with the broad white brow, thoughtful eyes,
and features moulded into that regularity of strength
which used to characterize the American Senatorial type
in those far-away days of clean-shaven faces and moderate
incomes before the War. The bright-faced, comely,
and vivacious young woman in the second side pew was
his wife--and Tecumseh noted with approbation that she
knew how to dress. There were really no two better or
worthier people in the building than this young couple,
who sat waiting along with the rest to hear their fate.
But unhappily they had come to know of the effort being
made to bring them to Tecumseh; and their simple pride
in the triumph of the husband's fine sermon had become
swallowed up in a terribly anxious conflict of hope
and fear. Neither of them could maintain a satisfactory
show of composure as the decisive moment approached.
The vision of translation from poverty and obscurity
to such a splendid post as this--truly it was too dazzling
for tranquil nerves.
The tedious Bishop had at last begun to call his roll
of names, and the good people of Tecumseh mentally
ticked them off, one by one, as the list expanded.
They felt that it was like this Bishop--an unimportant
and commonplace figure in Methodism, not to be mentioned
in the same breath with Simpson and Janes and Kingsley
--that he should begin with the backwoods counties,
and thrust all these remote and pitifully rustic stations
ahead of their own metropolitan charge. To these they
listened but listlessly--indifferent alike to the joy
and to the dismay which he was scattering among the divines
before him.
The announcements were being doled out with stumbling hesitation.
After each one a little half-rustling movement through
the crowded rows of clergymen passed mute judgment upon
the cruel blow this brother had received, the reward justly
given to this other, the favoritism by which a third
had profited. The Presiding Elders, whose work all this was,
stared with gloomy and impersonal abstraction down upon
the rows of blackcoated humanity spread before them.
The ministers returned this fixed and perfunctory gaze
with pale, set faces, only feebly masking the emotions
which each new name stirred somewhere among them.
The Bishop droned on laboriously, mispronouncing words
and repeating himself as if he were reading a catalogue
of unfamiliar seeds.
"First church of Tecumseh--Brother Abram C. Tisdale!"
There was no doubt about it! These were actually the
words that had been uttered. After all this outlay,
all this lavish hospitality, all this sacrifice of time
and patience in sitting through those sermons, to draw
from the grab-bag nothing better than--a Tisdale!
A hum of outraged astonishment--half groan, half wrathful
snort--bounded along from pew to pew throughout the body
of the church. An echo of it reached the Bishop, and so
confused him that he haltingly repeated the obnoxious line.
Every local eye turned as by intuition to where the
calamitous Tisdale sat, and fastened malignantly upon him.
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