1.F 10. An Early Experience in the West

An Early Experience in the West.

It was my lot at first to be placed in a village with a mere handful of inhabitants in one of the Western States. I conceive it to be one of the kind nesses of Providence that I was sent to so small a place. 1 had but one male member in the church, and I wished him out all the time I was there. (Let me illustrate by personal allusions, if you please; for I do not know why you ask ministers from active parishes to advise you, unless they should tell you something of their experience.), practised public speaking from the time of my sophomore year in college. I was addicted to going out and making temperance speeches, and holding conference meetings, so that I acquired considerable confidence, being naturally very diffident. When I went to the seminary I still kept up that habit, practising whenever I had the opportunity. At the end of my three years seminary course six months of which, however, were diverted to editorial work, a loss of time to my studies which was afterwards made up I went to a small town in Indiana, the last one in the State towards Cincinnati, on the Ohio river. It had perhaps rive or six hundred inhabitants. It had in it a Methodist, a Baptist, and this Presbyterian church to which I went. The church would hold, perhaps, from two hundred and fifty to three hundred people. It had no lamps and no hymn-books. It had nineteen female members; and the whole congregation could hardly raise from $200 to $250 as salary. I took that field v and went to work in it.

Among the earliest things I did was to beg money from Cincinnati to buy side-lamps to hang up in the church, so that we could have night service. After being there a month or two I went to Cincinnati again, and collected money enough to buy hymnbooks. I distributed them in the seats. Before this the hymns had been lined out. I recollect one of the first strokes of management I ever attempted in that parish was in regard to these hymn-books.

Instead of asking the people if they were willing to have them, I just put the books into the pews; for there are ten men that will fight a change about which they are consulted, to one that will fight it when it has taken place. I simply made the change for them. There was a little looking up and looking around, but nothing was said. So after that we sang out of books. Then there was nobody in the church to light the lamps, and they could not afford to get a sexton. Such a thing was unknown in the primitive simplicity of that Hoosier time. Well, I unanimously elected myself to be the sexton. I swept out the church, trimmed the lamps and lighted them.

I was, literally, the light of that church. I didn’t stop to groan about it, or moan about it, but I did it. At first the men folk thereabout seemed to think it was chaff to catch them with, or something of that kind; but I went steadily on doing the work. After a month or so two young men, who were clerks in a store there, suggested to me that they would help me. I “didn’t think I wanted any help; it was only what one man could do.” Then they suggested three or four of us taking one month each, and in that way they were worked in.

It was the best thing that ever happened to them.

Having something to do in the church was a means of grace to them. It drew them to me and me to them. None of them were Christian young men; In it I consulted them about various things, and by-and-by I brought a case to them. I said, “Here is a young man who is in great danger of going the wrong way, and losing his soul. What do you think is the best means of getting at him? “ It made them rather sober and thoughtful to be talking about the salvation of that young man’s soul, and the upshot was that they saved their own. They very soon afterward came into the Spirit, and were converted, and became good Christian men.

Now, while I was there I preached the best sermons I knew how to get up. I remember distinctly that every Sunday night I had a headache. I went to bed every Sunday night with a vow registered that I would buy a farm and quit the ministry. If I have said it once 4, I have said it five hundred times, that I spoilt a good farmer to make a poor minister.

I said a great many extravagant things in my pulpit, and preached with a great deal of crudeness.

I preached a great many sermons which, after six months, I would not have preached again. I frequently did as many young men do shaped into a general truth that which was truth only under certain circumstances, and with a particular class of people.

I was a great reader of the old sermonizers. I read old Robert South through and through; I saturated myself with South; I formed much of my style and my handling of texts on his methods. I obtained a vast amount of instruction and assistance from others of those old sermonizers, who were as familiar to me as my own name. I read Barrow, Howe, Sherlock, Butler, and Edwards particularly.

I preached a great many sermons while reading these old men, and upon their discourses I often founded the framework of my own. After I had preached them, I said to myself, “That will never do; I wouldn’t preach that again for all the world.” But I was learning, and nobody ever tripped me up. I had no Board of Elders ready to bring me back to orthodoxy. I had time to sow all my ministerial wild oats, and without damage to my people, for they knew too little to know whether I was orthodox or not. And it was, generally, greatly to their advantage, because people are very much like fishes. Whales take vast quantities of water into their mouths for the sake of the animalcule it contains, and then blow out the water, while keeping in the food. People do pretty much the same. They don’t believe half that you say. The part that is nutritious they keep, and the rest they let alone. This early ministerial training does not hurt them, but it is invaluable to a young man who is getting the bearings of his new station, and learning how to handle the ship that God has given him to sail.