FullReads

At last he broke silence. “Children, there is something I must say to you this morning. I’m going to have meeting here to-night, and it may be I shall not be your teacher any more–I mean in school. I wish you’d go home to-day and tell your people to come to church here to-night. I wish you’d all come yourselves. I want you to be good. I want you to love God and be good. I want you to go home and tell your people the teacher can’t teach children how to read till he has taught the older people to be kind and generous. You may put your books away, and school will be dismissed.”

The wondering children obeyed–some with glad promptness, others with sadness, for they had already come to like their teacher very much.

As he sat by the door and watched them file out, it was as if he were a king abdicating a throne, and these his faithful subjects.

Mrs. Allen came over with Mattie to see him that day. She was a good woman, gentle and prayerful, and she said, with much emotion:

“Oh, Mr. Stacey, I do hope you can patch things up here. If you could only touch his heart! He don’t mean to do wrong, but he’s so set in his ways–if he says a thing he sticks to it.”

Stacey turned to Mattie for a word of encouragement, but she only looked away. It was impossible for her to put into words her feeling in the matter, which was more of admiration for his courage than for any part of his religious zeal. He was so different from other men.

It did him good to have these women come, and he repeated his vow:

“By the grace of our Lord, I am going to rebuild the Cyene Church!” and his face paled and his eyes grew luminous.

The girl shivered with emotion. He seemed to recede from her as he spoke, and to grow larger, too. Such nobility of purpose was new and splendid to her.

* * * * *

The revival was wondrously dramatic. The little schoolhouse was crowded to the doors night by night. The reek of stable-stained coats and boots, the smell of strong tobacco, the effluvia of many breaths, the heat, the closeness were forgotten in the fervor of the young evangelist’s utterances. His voice took on wild emotional cadences which sounded deep places in the heart. To these people, long unused to religious oratory, it was like the return of John and Isaiah. It was poetry and the drama, and processions and apocalyptic visions. This youth had the histrionic spell, too, and his slender body lifted and dilated, and his head took on majesty and power, and the fling of his white hand was a challenge and an appeal.

A series of stirring events took place on the third night.

On Wednesday Jacob Turner rose and asked the prayers of his neighbors, and was followed by two Baptist spearmen of the front rank. On Thursday the women were weeping on one another’s bosoms; only one or two of the men held out–old Deacon Allen and his antagonist, Stewart Marsden. Grim-visaged old figures they were, placed among repentant men and weeping women. They sat like rocks in the rush of the two factions moving toward each other for peaceful union. Granitic, narrow, keen of thrust, they seemed unmoved, while all around them, one by one, skeptics acknowledged the pathos and dignity of the preacher’s views of life and death.

Meanwhile the young evangelist lived at high pressure. He grew thinner and whiter each night. He toiled in the daytime to formulate his thoughts for the evening. He could not sleep till far toward morning. The food he ate did him little good, while his heart went out constantly to his people in strenuous supplication. It was testimony of his human quality that he never for one moment lost that shining girl face out of his thought. He looked for it there night after night. It was his inspiration in speaking, as at the first.