CHAPTER x.x.x.

Mr. Hardcap's Family Prayers.

"JENNIE," said I, the other evening, "I should like to go and make a call at Mr. Hardcap's."

Our new pastor had preached a sermon on that unapplied pa.s.sage of Scripture, Luke xiv: 12-14. It had made a great stir in our little village. Mr. Wheaton thought it was a grand sermon, but impracticable. Mrs. Potiphar resented it as personal. Deacon Goodsole thought it was good sound doctrine. I thought I would give the sermon a trial; meanwhile I reserved my judgment.

It is not a bad method, by the way, of judging a sermon to try it and see how it works in actual experiment.

Jennie a.s.sented with alacrity to my proposition; her toilet did not take long, and to Mr. Hardcap's we went.

It was very evident that they did not go into society or expect callers. In answer to our knock we heard the patter of a child's feet on the hall floor and Susie opened the door. As good fortune would have it, the sitting-room door at the other end of the hall stood invitingly open, and so, without waiting for ceremony, I pushed right forward to the common room, which a great blazing wood fire illuminated so thoroughly that the candles were hardly necessary. Mrs. Hardcap started in dismay to gather up her basket of stockings, but on my positive a.s.surance that we should leave forthwith if she stopped her work she sat down to it again. Luckily the night was cold and there was no fire in the stove of the cheerless and inhospitable parlor. So they were fain to let us share with them the cheery blaze of the cozy sitting-room. We did not start out till after seven, and we had not been in the room more than ten minutes before the old-fashioned clock in the corner rang out the departure of the hour and ushered in eight o'clock--whereat James laid aside his book, and at a signal from his father brought him the family Bible.

"We always have family prayers at eight o'clock," said Mr. Hardcap, "before the children go to bed; and I never let anything interfere with it."

This in the tone of a defiant martyr; as one under the impression that we were living in the middle ages and that I was an Inquisitor ready to march the united family to the stake on the satisfactory evidence that the reading of the Bible was maintained in it.

I begged him to proceed, and he did so, the defiant spirit a little mollified.

He opened at a mark somewhere in Numbers. It was a chapter devoted to the names of the tribes and their families. Poor Mr. Hardcap! If he was defiant at the first threatening of martyrdom, he endured the infliction of the torture with a resolute bravery worthy of a covenanter. The extent to which he became entangled in those names, the new baptism they received at his hands, the singular contortions of which he proved himself capable in reproducing them, the extraordinary and entirely novel methods of p.r.o.nunciation which he evolved for that occasion, and the heroic bravery with which he struggled through, awoke my keenest sympathies. Words which he fought and vanquished in the first paragraph rose in rebellion in a second to be fought and vanquished yet again. The chapter at length drew to an end. I saw to my infinite relief that he was at last emerging from this interminable feast of names. What was my horror to see him turn the page and enter with fresh zeal upon the conquest of a second chapter.

Little Charlie (five years old) was sound asleep in his mother's arms. Her eyes were fixed on vacancy and her mind interiorly calculating something. I wondered not that James snored audibly on the sofa. Susie never took her eyes off her father, but sat as one that watches to see how a task is done. My wife listened for a little while with averted face, then wandered off, as she afterwards told me, to a mental calculation of her resources and expenses for the next month. And still Mr. Hardcap rolled out those census tables of Judea's ancient history. It was not till he had finished three chapters that at length he closed the book and invited me to lead in prayer.

Half an hour later, after Jamie had been roused up from his corner of the sofa and sent off to bed, and Charlie had been undressed and put to bed without being more than half aroused, Mrs. Hardcap asked my advice as to this method of reading the Bible.

"Mr. Hardcap," said she, "read a statement the other day to the effect that by reading three chapters every day and five on Sunday he could finish the Bible in a year. And he is going through it in regular course. But I sometimes doubt whether that is the best way.

I am sure our children do not take the interest in it which they ought to; and I am afraid those chapters of hard names do not always profit me."

The martyr in Mr. Hardcap re-a.s.serted itself.

"All Scripture," said he solemnly, "is given by inspiration of G.o.d and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction and for instruction in righteousness. We cannot afford to pa.s.s by any part of the word of G.o.d."

"What do you think about it, Mr. Laicus?" said Mrs. Hardcap.

"Think!" said I; "I should be afraid to say what I think lest your husband should account me a hopeless and irreclaimable unbeliever."

"Speak out," said Mr. Hardcap; "as one who at the stake should say, 'pile the fuel on the flame, and try my constancy to its utmost.'

"Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom."

"Well," said I, "if I were to speak out, I should say that this way of reading the Bible reminds me of the countryman who went to a city hotel and undertook to eat right down the bill of fare, supposing he ought not to call for fish till he had eaten every kind of soup. It is as if one being sick, should go to the apothecary's shop, and beginning on one side, go right down the store taking in due order every pill, potion, and powder, till he was cured-or killed."

Mr. Hardcap shook his head resolutely. "Is it not true," said he, "that all Scripture is profitable?"

"Yes," said I, "but not that it is all equally profitable for all occasions. All the food on the table is profitable, but not to be eaten at one meal. All the medicine in the apothecary's shop is profitable, but not for the same disease."

"There is another thing," said Mrs. Hardcap, "that I cannot help being doubtful about. James is learning the New Testament through as a punishment."

"As a punishment!" I exclaimed.

"Yes," said she. "That is, Mr. Hardcap has given him the New Testament, and for his little offences about the house he allots him so many verses to learn; sometimes only ten or twelve, sometimes a whole chapter. I am afraid it will give the poor boy a distaste for the word of G.o.d."

"There is no danger," said Mr. Hardcap, oracularly. "The word of G.o.d is sharper than a two edged sword, and is quick even to the dividing asunder of the joints and the marrow. It is the book to awaken conviction of sin, the proper book for the sinner. There is no book so fitting to bring him to a sense of his sinfulness and awaken in him a better mind."

"And how," said I, "do you find it practically works? Does he seem to love his Bible?"

"Says he hates it awfully," said his mother.

"Such," said Mr. Hardcap, "is the dreadful depravity of the human heart. It is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked."

It was quite idle to argue with Mr. Hardcap. We left him unconvinced, and I doubt not he is still reading his three chapters a day and five on Sunday. But I pity poor James from the bottom of my heart; and as my wife and I walked home I could not but help contrasting in my own mind Mr. Hardcap's way of reading the Bible and that which Deacon Goodsole pursues in his family.

CHAPTER x.x.xI.

In Darkness.

LAST Tuesday night Jennie met me at the station. It is unusual for her to do so. The surprise was a delightful one to me. But as I sat down beside her in the basket wagon she did not greet me as joyously as usual. Her mien was so sober that I asked her at once the question:

"Jennie, what is the matter? You look sick."

"I am sick, John," said she; "sick at heart. Willie Gear is dead."

"Willie Gear dead!" I exclaimed.

"Yes," said Jennie. "He was skating on the pond. I suppose this warm weather has weakened the ice. It gave way. Three of the boys went in together. The other two got out. But Willie was carried under the ice."

Jennie was driving. Instead of turning up the hill from the depot she kept down the river road. "I thought you would want to go down there at once," said she. "And so I left baby with Nell and came down for you."

We rode along in silence. Willie Gear was his father's pride and pet. He was a n.o.ble boy. He inherited his mother's tenderness and patience, and with them his father's acute and questioning intellect. He was a curious combination of a natural skeptic and a natural believer. He had welcomed the first step toward converting our Bible-cla.s.s into a mission Sabbath-school, and had done more than any one else to fill it up with boys from the Mill village. He was a great favorite with them all and their natural leader in village sports and games. There was no such skater or swimmer for his age as Willie Gear, and he was the champion ball-player of the village. But I remember him best as a Sabbath-school scholar. I can see even now his earnest upturned face and his large blue eyes, looking strait into his mother's answering gaze, and drinking in every word she uttered to that mission-cla.s.s which he had gathered and which she every Sabbath taught. He was not very fortunate in his teacher in our own church Sabbath-school. For he took nothing on trust and his teacher doubted nothing. I can easily imagine how his soul filled with indignation at the thought of Abraham's offering up his only son as a burnt sacrifice, and how with eager questioning he plied his father, unsatisfied himself with the a.s.surances of one who had never experienced a like perplexity, and therefore did not know how to cure it.

And Willie was really gone. Would it soften the father's heart and teach him the truth of Pascal's proverb that "The heart has reasons of its own that the reason knows not of;" or would it blot out the last remnant of faith, and leave Mr. Gear without a G.o.d as he had been without a Bible and without a Saviour?

I was still pondering these problems, wildly thinking, not aimlessly, yet to no purpose, when we reached the familiar cottage.

Is it indeed true that nature has no sympathy? There seemed to me to be on all around a hush that spoke of death. There needed no sorrowful symbol of c.r.a.pe upon the door; and there was none. I almost think I should have known that death was in the house had no one told me.