For some weeks the Rev.Theron Ware saw nothing of either the priest or the doctor, or the interesting Miss Madden.
There were, indeed, more urgent matters to think about.
June had come; and every succeeding day brought closer to hand the ordeal of his first Quarterly Conference in Octavius.
The waters grew distinctly rougher as his pastoral bark neared this difficult passage.
He would have approached the great event with an easier mind if he could have made out just how he stood with his congregation.Unfortunately nothing in his previous experiences helped him in the least to measure or guess at the feelings of these curious Octavians.
Their Methodism seemed to be sound enough, and to stick quite to the letter of the Discipline, so long as it was expressed in formulae.It was its spirit which he felt to be complicated by all sorts of conditions wholly novel to him.
The existence of a line of street-cars in the town, for example, would not impress the casual thinker as likely to prove a rock in the path of peaceful religion.
Theron, in his simplicity, had even thought, when he first saw these bobtailed cars bumping along the rails in the middle of the main street, that they must be a great convenience to people living in the outskirts, who wished to get in to church of a Sunday morning.
He was imprudent enough to mention this in conversation with one of his new parishioners.Then he learned, to his considerable chagrin, that when this line was built, some years before, a bitter war of words had been fought upon the question of its being worked on the Sabbath day.
The then occupant of the Methodist pulpit had so distinguished himself above the rest by the solemnity and fervor of his protests against this insolent desecration of God's day that the Methodists of Octavius still felt themselves peculiarly bound to hold this horse-car line, its management, and everything connected with it, in unbending aversion.
At least once a year they were accustomed to expect a sermon denouncing it and all its impious Sunday patrons.
Theron made a mental resolve that this year they should be disappointed.
Another burning problem, which he had not been called upon before to confront, he found now entangled with the mysterious line which divided a circus from a menagerie.
Those itinerant tent-shows had never come his way heretofore, and he knew nothing of that fine balancing proportion between ladies in tights on horseback and cages full of deeply educational animals, which, even as the impartial rain, was designed to embrace alike the just and the unjust.
There had arisen inside the Methodist society of Octavius some painful episodes, connected with members who took their children "just to see the animals," and were convicted of having also watched the Rose-Queen of the Arena, in her unequalled flying leap through eight hoops, with an ardent and unashamed eye.One of these cases still remained on the censorial docket of the church;and Theron understood that he was expected to name a committee of five to examine and try it.This he neglected to do.
He was no longer at all certain that the congregation as a whole liked his sermons.The truth was, no doubt, that he had learned enough to cease regarding the congregation as a whole.He could still rely upon carrying along with him in his discourses from the pulpit a large majority of interested and approving faces.
But here, unhappily, was a case where the majority did not rule.The minority, relatively small in numbers, was prodigious in virile force.
More than twenty years had now elapsed since that minor schism in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the result of which was the independent body known as Free Methodists, had relieved the parent flock of its principal disturbing element.
The rupture came fittingly at that time when all the "isms" of the argumentative fifties were hurled violently together into the melting-pot of civil war.
The great Methodist Church, South, had broken bodily off on the question of State Rights.The smaller and domestic fraction of Free Methodism separated itself upon an issue which may be most readily described as one of civilization.
The seceders resented growth in material prosperity;they repudiated the introduction of written sermons and organ-music; they deplored the increasing laxity in meddlesome piety, the introduction of polite manners in the pulpit and classroom, and the development of even a rudimentary desire among the younger people of the church to be like others outside in dress and speech and deportment.They did battle as long as they could, inside the fold, to restore it to the severely straight and narrow path of primitive Methodism.
When the adverse odds became too strong for them, they quitted the church and set up a Bethel for themselves.
Octavius chanced to be one of the places where they were able to hold their own within the church organization.
The Methodism of the town had gone along without any local secession.It still held in full fellowship the radicals who elsewhere had followed their unbridled bent into the strongest emotional vagaries--where excited brethren worked themselves up into epileptic fits, and women whirled themselves about in weird religious ecstasies, like dervishes of the Orient, till they fell headlong in a state of trance.Octavian Methodism was spared extravagances of this sort, it is true, but it paid a price for the immunity.The people whom an open split would have taken away remained to leaven and dominate the whole lump.This small advanced section, with its men of a type all the more aggressive from its narrowness, and women who went about solemnly in plain gray garments, with tight-fitting, unadorned, mouse-colored sunbonnets, had not been able wholly to enforce its views upon the social life of the church members, but of its controlling influence upon their official and public actions there could be no doubt.
