The Minister's Wooing
CHAPTER VI.
THE DOCTOR.
IT is seldom that man and woman come together in intimate association,unless influences are at work more subtle and mysterious than thesubjects of them dream. Even in cases where the strongest ruling forceof the two sexes seems out of the question, there is still somethingpeculiar and insidious in their relationship. A fatherly old gentleman,who undertakes the care of a sprightly young girl, finds, to hisastonishment, that little Miss spins all sorts of cobwebs round him.Grave professors and teachers cannot give lessons to their femalepupils just as they give them to the coarser sex; and more than oncehas the fable of ‘Cadenus and Vanessa’ been acted over by the mostunlikely performers.
The Doctor was a philosopher, a metaphysician, a philanthropist, andin the highest and most earnest sense a minister of good on earth. TheNew England clergy had no sentimental affectation of sanctity thatsegregated them from wholesome human relations; and, consequently, ourgood Doctor had always resolved, in a grave and thoughtful spirit,at a suitable time in his worldly affairs, to choose unto himself ahelpmeet. Love, as treated of in romances, he held to be a foolish andprofane matter, unworthy the attention of a serious and reasonablecreature. All the language of poetry on this subject was to him anunknown tongue. He contemplated the entrance on married life somewhatin this wise:—That at a time and place suiting, he should look outunto himself a woman of a pleasant countenance and of good repute, azealous, earnest Christian, and well skilled in the items of householdmanagement, whom, accosting as a stranger and pilgrim to a better life,he should loyally and lovingly entreat, as Isaac did Rebekah, to comeunder the shadow of his tent and be a helpmeet unto him in what yetremained of this mortal journey. But straitened circumstances, and theunsettled times of the Revolution, in which he had taken an earnest andzealous part, had delayed to a late bachelorhood the fulfilment of thisresolution.
When once received under the shadow of Mrs. Scudder’s roof, and withinthe provident sphere of her unfailing housekeeping, all materialnecessity for an immediate choice was taken away; for he was in exactlythat situation dearest to every scholarly and thoughtful man, in whichall that pertained to the outward life appeared to rise under his handat the moment he wished for it, without his knowing how or why.
He was not at the head of a prosperous church and society, rich andwell-to-do in the world,—but, as the pioneer leader of a new theology,in a country where theology was the all-absorbing interest, he had tobreast the reaction that ever attends the advent of new ideas. Hispulpit talents, too, were unattractive. His early training had beenall logical, not in the least æsthetic; for, like the ministry of hiscountry generally, he had been trained always to think more of whathe should say than of how he should say it. Consequently, his style,though not without a certain massive greatness, which always comes fromlargeness of nature, had none of those attractions by which the commonmasses are beguiled into thinking. He gave only the results of thought,not its incipient processes; and the consequence was, that few couldfollow him. In like manner, his religious teachings were characterizedby an ideality so high as quite to discourage ordinary virtue.
There is a ladder to heaven, whose base God has placed in humanaffections, tender instincts, symbolic feelings, sacraments of love,through which the soul rises higher and higher, refining as she goes,till she outgrows the human, and changes, as she rises, into the imageof the divine. At the very top of this ladder, at the threshold ofParadise, blazes dazzling and crystalline that celestial grade wherethe soul knows self no more, having learned, through a long experienceof devotion, how blest it is to lose herself in that eternal Love andBeauty of which all earthly fairness and grandeur are but the dim type,the distant shadow. This highest step, this saintly elevation, whichbut few selectest spirits ever on earth attain, to raise the soul towhich the Eternal Father organized every relation of human existenceand strung every chord of human love, for which this world is one longdiscipline, for which the soul’s human education is constantly varied,for which it is now torn by sorrow, now flooded by joy, to which allits multiplied powers tend with upward hands of dumb and ignorantaspiration,—this Ultima Thule of virtue had been seized upon by oursage as the _all_ of religion. He knocked out every round of the ladderbut the highest, and then, pointing to its hopeless splendour, said tothe world, ‘Go up thither and be saved!’
Short of that absolute self-abnegation, that unconditional surrenderto the Infinite, there was nothing meritorious,—because, if _that_were commanded, every moment of refusal was rebellion. Every prayer,not based on such consecration, he held to be an insult to the DivineMajesty;—the reading of the Word, the conscientious conduct of life,the performance of the duties of man to man, being, without this, thedeeds of a creature in conscious rebellion to its Eternal Sovereign,were all vitiated and made void. Nothing was to be preached to thesinner, but his ability and obligation to rise immediately to thisheight.
It is not wonderful that teaching of this sort should seem to manyunendurable, and that the multitude should desert the preacher withthe cry, ‘This is an hard saying; who can hear it?’ The young andgay were wearied by the dryness of metaphysical discussions which tothem were as unintelligible as a statement of the last results of themathematician to the child commencing the multiplication-table. Thereremained around him only a select circle,—shrewd, hard thinkers, whodelighted in metaphysical subtleties,—deep-hearted, devoted natures,who sympathized with the unworldly purity of his life, his activephilanthropy and untiring benevolence,—courageous men, who admired hisindependence of thought and freedom in breasting received opinions,—andthose unperceiving, dull, good people who are content to go to churchanywhere as convenience and circumstances may drift them,—people whoserve, among the keen-feeling and thinking portion of the world, muchthe same purpose as adipose matter in the human system, as a softcushion between the nerves of feeling and the muscles of activity.
There was something affecting in the pertinacity with which the goodDoctor persevered in saying his say to his discouraging minority ofhearers. His salary was small; his meeting-house, damaged during theRevolutionary struggle, was dilapidated and forlorn,—fireless inwinter, and in summer admitting a flood of sun and dust through thosegreat windows which formed so principal a feature in those firstefforts of Puritan architecture.
Still, grand in his humility, he preached on,—and as a soldier neverasks why, but stands at apparently the most useless post, so he wenton from Sunday to Sunday, comforting himself with the reflectionthat no one could think more meanly of his ministrations than he didhimself. ‘I am like Moses only in not being eloquent,’ he said in hissimplicity. ‘My preaching is barren and dull, my voice is hard andharsh; but then the Lord is a Sovereign, and may work through me. Hefed Elijah once through a raven, and he may feed some poor wanderingsoul through me.’
The only mistake made by the good man was that of supposing that theelaboration of theology was preaching the gospel. The gospel he waspreaching constantly, by his pure, unworldly living, by his visitationsto homes of poverty and sorrow, by his searching out of the lowlyAfrican slaves, his teaching of those whom no one else in those dayshad thought of teaching, and by the grand humanity, outrunning his age,in which he protested against the then admitted system of slavery andthe slave-trade. But when, rising in the pulpit, he followed trains ofthought suited only to the desk of the theological lecture-room, he didit blindly, following that law of self-development by which minds ofa certain amount of fervour _must_ utter what is in them, whether menwill hear or whether they will forbear.
But the place where our Doctor was happiest was his study. There heexplored, and wandered, and read, and thought, and lived a life aswholly ideal and intellectual as heart could conceive.
And could _Love_ enter a reverend doctor’s study, and find his way intoa heart empty and swept of all those shreds of poetry and romance inwhich he usually finds the material of his incantations? Even so;—buthe came so thoughtfully, so reverently, with so wise and ca
utious afootfall, that the good Doctor never even raised his spectacles tosee who was there. The first that he knew, poor man, he was breathingan air of strange and subtile sweetness,—from what Paradise he neverstopped his studies to inquire. He was like a great, rugged elm, withall its lacings and archings of boughs and twigs, which has stoodcold and frozen against the metallic blue of winter sky, forgetfulof leaves, and patient in its bareness, calmly content in its nakedstrength and crystalline definiteness of outline. But in April thereis a rising and stirring within the grand old monster,—a whispering ofknotted buds, a mounting of sap coursing ethereally from bough to boughwith a warm and gentle life; and though the old elm knows it not, a newcreation is at hand. Just so, ever since the good man had lived at Mrs.Scudder’s, and had the gentle Mary for his catechumen, a richer lifeseemed to have coloured his thoughts,—his mind seemed to work with apleasure never felt before.
Whoever looked on the forehead of the good Doctor must have seen thesquareness of ideality giving marked effect to its outline. As yetideality had dealt only with the intellectual and invisible, leading tosubtile refinements of argument and exalted ideas of morals. But therewas lying in him, crude and unworked, a whole mine of those artisticfeelings and perceptions which are awakened and developed only by thetouch of beauty. Had he been born beneath the shadow of the great Duomoof Florence, where Giotto’s Campanile rises like the slender stalk ofa celestial lily, where varied marbles and rainbow glass and gorgeouspaintings and lofty statuary call forth, even from childhood, thesoul’s reminiscences of the bygone glories of its pristine state, hiswould have been a soul as rounded and full in its sphere of facultiesas that of Da Vinci or Michael Angelo. But of all that he was asignorant as a child; and the first revelation of his dormant naturewas to come to him through the face of woman,—that work of the MightyMaster which is to be found in all lands and ages.
What makes the love of a great mind something fearful in its inceptionis, that it is often the unsealing of a hitherto undeveloped portion ofa large and powerful being: the woman may or may not seem to other eyesadequate to the effect produced, but the man cannot forget her, becausewith her came a change which makes him for ever a different being. Soit was with our friend. A woman it was that was destined to awaken inhim all that consciousness which music, painting, poetry awaken in moreevenly-developed minds; and it is the silent breathing of her creativepresence that is even now creating him anew, while as yet he knows itnot.
He never thought, this good old soul, whether Mary were beautiful ornot; he never even knew that he looked at her; nor did he know why itwas that the truths of his theology, when uttered by her tongue, hadsuch a wondrous beauty as he never felt before. He did not know why itwas, that, when she silently sat by him, copying tangled manuscript forthe press, as she sometimes did, his whole study seemed so full of somedivine influence, as if, like St. Dorothea, she had worn in her bosom,invisibly, the celestial roses of Paradise. He recorded honestly in hisdiary what marvellous freshness of spirit the Lord had given him, andhow he seemed to be uplifted in his communings with heaven, withoutonce thinking from the robes of what angel this sweetness had exhaled.
On Sundays, when he saw good Mrs. Jones asleep, and Simon Brown’s hard,sharp eyes, and Deacon Twitchel mournfully rocking to and fro, and hiswife handing fennel to keep the children awake, his eye glanced acrossto the front gallery, where one earnest young face, ever kindlingwith feeling and bright with intellect, followed on his way, and hefelt uplifted and comforted. On Sunday mornings, when Mary came outof her little room, in clean white dress, with her singing-book andpsalm-book in her hands, her deep eyes solemn from recent prayer, hethought of that fair and mystical bride, the Lamb’s wife, whose unionwith her Divine Redeemer in a future millenial age was a frequent andfavourite subject of his musings; yet he knew not that this celestialbride, clothed in fine linen, clean and white, veiled in humility andmeekness, bore in his mind those earthly features. No, he never haddreamed of that! But only after she had passed by, that mystical visionseemed to him more radiant, more easy to be conceived.
It is said that, if a grape-vine be planted in the neighbourhood ofa well, its roots, running silently under ground, wreathe themselvesin a network around the cold clear waters, and the vine’s putting onoutward greenness and unwonted clusters and fruit is all that tellswhere every root and fibre of its being has been silently stealing. Sothose loves are most fatal, most absorbing, in which, with unheededquietness, every thought and fibre of our life twines gradually aroundsome human soul, to us the unsuspected well-spring of our being.Fearful it is, because so often the vine must be uprooted, and all itsfibres wrenched away; but till the hour of discovery comes, how is ittransfigured by a new and beautiful life!
There is nothing in life more beautiful than that trancelike quietdawn which precedes the rising of love in the soul. When the wholebeing is pervaded imperceptibly and tranquilly by another being, andwe are happy, we know not and ask not why, the soul is then receivingall and asking nothing. At a later day she becomes self-conscious, andthen come craving exactions, endless questions,—the whole world of thematerial comes in with its hard counsels and consultations, and thebeautiful trance fades for ever.
Of course all this is not so to _you_, my good friends, who read itwithout the most distant idea what it can mean; but there are people inthe world to whom it has meant and will mean much, and who will see inthe present happiness of our respectable friend something even ominousand sorrowful.
It had not escaped the keen eye of the mother how quickly andinnocently the good Doctor was absorbed by her daughter, and thereuponhad come long trains of practical reflections.
The Doctor, though not popular indeed as a preacher, was a noted man inhis age. Her deceased husband had regarded him with something of thesame veneration which might have been accorded to a divine messenger,and Mrs. Scudder had received and kept this veneration as a preciouslegacy. Then, although not handsome, the Doctor had decidedly a grandand imposing appearance. There was nothing common or insignificantabout him. Indeed, it had been said, that, when, just after thedeclaration of peace, he walked through the town in the commemorativeprocession side by side with General Washington, the minister, in themajesty of his gown, bands, cocked hat, and full flowing wig, wasthought by many to be the more majestic and personable figure of thetwo.
In those days, the minister united in himself all those ideas ofsuperior position and cultivation with which the theocratic system ofthe New England community had invested him. Mrs. Scudder’s notions ofsocial rank could reach no higher than to place her daughter on thethrone of such pre-eminence.
Her Mary, she pondered, was no common girl. In those days it was arare thing for young persons to devote themselves to religion or makeany professions of devout life. The church, or that body of people whoprofessed to have passed through a divine regeneration, was almostentirely confined to middle-aged and elderly people, and it was lookedupon as a singular and unwonted call of divine grace when young personscame forward to attach themselves to it. When Mary, therefore, at quitean early age, in all the bloom of her youthful beauty, arose, accordingto the simple and impressive New England rite, to consecrate herselfpublicly to a religious life, and to join the company of professingChristians, she was regarded with a species of deference amountingeven to awe. Had it not been for the childlike, unconscious simplicityof her manners, the young people of her age would have shrunk awayfrom her, as from one entirely out of their line of thought andfeeling; but a certain natural and innocent playfulness and amiableself-forgetfulness made her a general favourite.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Scudder knew no young man whom she deemed worthy tohave and hold a heart which she prized so highly. As to James, he stoodat double disadvantage, because, as her cousin’s son, he had grown upfrom childhood under her eye, and all those sins and iniquities intowhich gay and adventurous youngsters will be falling had come to herknowledge. She felt kindly to the youth; she wished him well; but asto giving him her Mary!—the
very suggestion made her dislike him. Shewas quite sure he must have tried to beguile her—he must have tamperedwith her feelings to arouse in her pure and well-ordered mind so muchemotion and devotedness as she had witnessed.
How encouraging a Providence, then, was it that he was gone to sea forthree years!—how fortunate that Mary had been prevented in any wayfrom committing herself with him!—how encouraging that the only man inthose parts, in the least fitted to appreciate her, seemed so greatlypleased and absorbed in her society!—how easily might Mary’s dutifulreverence be changed to a warmer sentiment, when she should find thatso great a man could descend from his lofty thoughts to think of her!
In fact, before Mrs. Scudder had gone to sleep the first night afterJames’s departure, she had settled upon the house where the ministerand his young wife were to live, had reviewed the window-curtains andbed-quilts for each room, and glanced complacently at an improvedreceipt for wedding-cake, which might be brought out to glorify acertain occasion!