The Lions of the Lord: A Tale of the Old West

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  _Just Before the End of the World_

  The years of the Civil War passed by, and the prayer of Joel Rae wasanswered. But the time was now rapidly approaching when the Son of Manwas to come in person to judge Israel and begin his reign of a thousandyears on the purified earth. The Twelve, confirmed by Brigham, had longheld that this day of wrath would not be deferred past 1870. In the mindof Joel Rae the time had thus been authoritatively fixed. The date hadbeen further confirmed by the fulfilment of Joseph's prophecy of war.The great event was now to be prepared for and met in all readiness.

  It was at this time that he betrayed in the pulpit a leaning towardviews that many believed to be heterodox. "A likely man is a likelyman," he preached, "and a good man is a good man--whether in this Churchor out of it." He also went so far as to intimate that being in theChurch would not of itself suffice to the attainment of glory; thatthere were, to put it bluntly, all kinds of fish in the gospel net;sinners not a few in Zion who would have to be forgiven their misdeedsseventy times seven on that fateful day drawing near.

  Bishop Wright, who followed him on this Sabbath, was bold to speak toanother effect.

  "Me and my brethren," he insisted, "have received our endowments, keys,and blessings--all the tokens and signs that can be given to man for hisentrance through the celestial gate. If you have had these in the houseof the Lord, when you depart this life you will be able to walk back tothe presence of the Father, passing the angels that stand as sentinels;because why?--because you can give them the tokens, signs, and gripspertaining to the holy priesthood and gain your eternal exaltation inspite of earth and hell. But how about the likely and good man outsidethis Church who has rejected the message of the Book of Mormon and ain'tgot these signs and passwords? If he's going to be let in, too, why havedoorkeepers, and what's the use of the whole business? Why in time didthe Lord go to all this trouble, any way, if Brother Rae is right? Whywas Joseph Smith visited by an angel clad in robes of light, who toldhim where the golden plates had been hid up by the Lord, and the Urimand Thummim, and who laid hands on him and give him the Holy Ghost? Andafter all that trouble He's took, do you think He's going to leteverybody in? Not much, Mary Ann! The likely men may come the roots onsome of our soft-hearted Elders, but they won't fool the Lord's Christand His angel gatekeepers."

  Elder Beil Wardle, on the other hand, showed a tendency to side withthe liberalism of Brother Rae. He cited the fact that not allrevelations were from God. Some were from perverse human spirits andsome from the very Devil himself. There was Elder Sidney Roberts, whohad once suffered a revelation that a certain brother must give him asuit of finest broadcloth and a gold watch, the best to be had; andanother revelation directing him to salute all the younger sisters,married or single, with a kiss of holiness. Urged to confess that theserevelations were from the Devil, he had refused, and so had been cut offand delivered over to the buffetings of Satan in the flesh.

  "And you can't always be sure of the Holy Ghost, either," he continued."When the Lord pours out the Holy Ghost on an individual, he will havespasms, and you would think he was going to have fits; but it don't makehim get up and go pay his debts--not by a long shot. Of course I don'tfeel to mention any names, but what can you expect, anyway? A flock of athousand sheep has got to be mighty clean if some of them ain't smutty.This is a large flock of sheep that has come up into this valley of themountains, and some of them have got tag-locks hanging about them. Butit don't seem to pester the Lord any. He sifted us good in Missouri, andHe put us into another sieve at Nauvoo, and I reckon His sieve will bebrought along with Him on the day of judgment. And if there are somelost sheep in the fold of Zion, maybe, on the other hand, there's someoutside the fold that will be worth saving; that will be broke off fromthe wild olive-tree and grafted on to the tame olive-tree to partake ofits sap and fatness."

  Joel Rae would have taken more comfort in this championship of his viewsif it were not for his suspicion that Elder Wardle sometimes spoke in atone of levity, and had indeed more than once been reckoned as adoubter. It was even related of him that a perverted sense of humour hadonce inspired him to deliver an irreverent and wholly immaterial addressin pure Choctaw at a service where many others of the faithful had beenmoved to speak in tongues; and that an earnest sister, believing theHoly Ghost to be strong upon her, had thereupon arisen and interpretedhis speech to be the Lord's description of the glories of their newtemple, which it had not been at all. Such a man might have a goodheart, as he knew Elder Wardle to have; but he must be an inferior guideto the Father's presence. He was even less inclined to trust him whenWardle announced confidentially at the close of the meeting that day,"Brother Wright talks a good deal jest to hear his head roar. You'dthink he'd been the midwife at the borning of the world, and helped tonurse it and bring it up--he's that knowing about it. My opinion is hedon't know twice across or straight up about the Lord's secret doings!"

  Yet if he had sought to render a little elastic the rigid teachings ofthe priesthood, he had done so innocently. The foundations of his faithwere unshaken; for him the rock upon which his Church was built hadnever been more stable. As to doubting its firmness, he would as soonhave blasphemed the Holy Ghost or disputed the authority of Brigham,with whom was the sacred deposit of doctrine and all temporal andspiritual power.

  So he sighed often for those Gentile sheep on whom the wrath of God wasso soon to fall. Even with the utmost stretching of the divine mercy,the greater part of them must perish; and for the lost souls of these hegrieved much and prayed each day.

  It was more than ten years since that day in the Meadows, and the blightthere put upon his person had waxed with each year. His hair showed nowbut the faintest sprinkle of black, his shoulders were bent and roundedas if bearing invisible burdens, and his face had the look of droopingin grief and despair, as one who was made constantly to look upon allthe suffering of all the world. Yet he wore always, except when alone, anot unpleasant little effort of a smile, as if he would conceal hispain. But this deceived few. The women of the settlement had come tocall him "the little man of sorrows." Even his wife, Lorena, had divinedthat his mind was not one with hers; that, somehow, there was a gulfbetween them which her best-meant cheerfulness could not span. In ameasure she had ceased to try, doing little more than to sing, when hewas near, some hymn which she considered suitable to his condition. Onefavourite at such times began:--

  "Lord, we are vile, conceived in sin, And born unholy and unclean; Sprung from the man whose guilty fall Corrupts his race and taints us all.

  "Soon as we draw our infant breath, The seeds of sin grow up for death; The law demands a perfect heart, But we're defiled in every part."

  She would sing many verses of this with appealing unction, so long as hewas near; yet when he came upon her unawares he might hear her voicingsome cheerful, secular ballad, like--

  "As I went down to Coffey's mills Some pleasure for to see, I fell in love with a railroad-er, He fell in love with me."

  The stolid Christina listened entranced to all of Lorena's songs,charmed by the melody not less than she was awed by her sister-wife'ssuperior gifts of language. The husband, too, listened not withoutresignation, reflecting that, when Lorena did not sing, she talked. Forthe unspeaking Christina he had learned to feel an admiration thatbordered upon reverence, finding in her silence something spirituallygreat. Yet of the many-worded Lorena he was never heard to complainthrough all the years. The nearest he approached to it was on a daywhen Elder Beil Wardle had sought to condole with him on the afflictionof her ready speech.

  "That woman of yours," said this observant friend, "sure takes largepie-bites out of any little talk that happens to get going."

  "She _does_ have the gift of continuance," her husband had admitted. Buthe had added, hastily, "Though her heart is perfect with the Lord."

  The fact that she was sealed to him for eternity, and that she believedshe would constitute one of his claims to e
xaltation in the celestialworld, were often matters of pious speculation with him. He wondered ifhe had done right by her. She deserved a husband who would be saved intothe kingdom, while he who had married her was irrevocably lost.

  There had been a time when he read with freshened hope the promises offorgiveness in that strange New Testament. Once he had even believedthat these might save him; that he was again numbered with the elect.But when this belief had grown firm, so that he could seem to rest hisweight upon it, he felt it fall away to nothing under him, and the truthhe had divined that day in the desert was again bared before him. He sawthat how many times soever God might forgive the sins of a man, it wouldavail that man nothing unless he could forgive himself. He knew at lastthat in his own soul was fixed a gauge of right, unbending andimplacable when wrong had been done, waiting to be reckoned with at thevery last even though the great God should condone his sin. It seemed tohim that, however surely his endowments took him through the gates ofthe Kingdom, with whatsoever power they raised him to dominion; eventhough he came into the Father's presence and sat a throne of his own bythe side of Joseph and Brigham, that there would still ring in his earsthe cries of those who had been murdered at the priesthood's command;that there would leap before his eyes fountains of blood from thebreasts of living women who knelt and clung to the knees of theirslayers--to the knees of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-daySaints; that he would see two spots of white in the dim light of amorning where the two little girls lay who had been sent for water; thathe would see the two boys taken out to the desert, one to die at once,the other to wander to a slower death; that before his sinful eyes wouldcome the dying face of the woman who had loved him and lost her soulrather than betray him. He knew that, even in celestial realms exaltedbeyond the highest visions of their priesthood, his soul would stillburn in this fire that he could not extinguish within his own breast. Heknew that he carried hell as an inseparable part of himself, and thatthe forgiveness of no other power could avail him. He no longer fearedGod, but himself alone.

  From this fire of his own building it seemed to him that he could obtainsurcease only by reducing the self within him. As surely as he let itfeel a want, all the torture came back upon him. When his pride liftedup its head, when he desired any satisfaction for himself, when he wastempted for a moment to lay down his cross, the cries came back, the seaof blood surged before him, and close behind came the shapes thatcrawled or moved furtively, ever about to spring in front and turn uponhim. Small wonder, then, that his shoulders bent beneath unseen burdens,that his air was of one who suffered for all the world, and that theycalled him "the little man of sorrows."

  With this knowledge he learned to permit himself only one great love, alove for the child Prudence. He was sure that no punishment could comethrough that. It was his day-star and his life, the one pleasure thatbrought no suffering with it. She was a child of fourteen now, ahalf-wild, firm-fleshed, glowing creature of the out-of-doors, who hadlost with her baby softness all her resemblance to her mother. Her hairand eyes had darkened as she grew, and she was to be a larger woman,graver, deeper, more reserved; perhaps better calculated for the Kingdomby reason of a more reflective mind. He adored her, and was awed by hereven when he taught her the truths of revealed religion. He closed hiseyes at night upon a never-ending prayer for her soul; and opened themeach day to a love of her that grew insidiously to enthrall him while hewas all unconscious of its power--even while he knew with an awfulcertainty that he must have no treasure of his own which he could notwillingly relinquish at the first call. She, in turn, loved andconfided in her father, the shy, bent, shrunken little man with thesmile.

  "He always smiles as if he'd hurt himself and didn't want to show itbefore company," were the words in which she announced one of her earlydiscoveries about him. But she liked and ruled him, and came to him forcomfort when she was hurt or when Lorena scolded. For the third wife didnot hesitate to characterise the child as "ready-made sin," and todeclare that it took all her spare time, "and a lot that ain't spare,"to neat up the house after her. "And her paw--though Lord knows who hermaw was--a-dressing her to beat the cars; while he ain't never made overme since the blessed day I married him--not that _much_! But, thankheavens, it can't last very long, with the Son of Man already started,like you might say."