University of Virginia Library

22. CHAPTER XXII.
THE DECISION.

THE austerity of Kike's conscience had slumbered
during his convalescence. It was wide awake
now. He sat that evening in his room trying to see
the right way. According to old Methodist custom
he looked for some inward movement of the spirit—
some “impression”—that should guide him.

During the great religious excitement of the early
part of this century, Western pietists referred everything
to God in prayer, and the belief in immmediate
divine direction was often carried to a ludicrous
extent. It is related that one man retired to the hills
and prayed a week that he might know how he should
be baptized, and that at last he came rushing out of the
woods, shouting “Hallelujah! Immersion!” Various
devices were invented for obtaining divine direction—
devices not unworthy the ancient augurs. Lorenzo
Dow used to suffer his horse to take his own course
at each divergence of the road. It seems to have
been a favorite delusion of pietism, in all ages, that
God could direct an inanimate object, guide a dumb
brute, or impress a blind impulse upon the human
mind, but could not enlighten or guide the judgment
itself. The opening of a Bible at random for a directing
text became so common during the Wesleyan

movement in England, that Dr. Adam Clarke thought
it necessary to utter a stout Irish philippic against
what he called “Bible sortilege.”

These devout divinings, these vanes set to catch
the direction of heavenly breezes, could not but impress
so earnest a nature as Kike's. Now in his
distress he prayed with eagerness and opened his
Bible at random to find his eye lighting, not on any
intelligible or remotely applicable passage, but upon a
bead-roll of unpronounceable names in one of the
early chapters of the Book of Chronicles. This
disappointment he accepted as a trial of his faith.
Faith like Kike's is not to be dashed by disappointment.
He prayed again for direction, and opened
at last at the text: “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest
thou me more than these?” The marked trait in
Kike's piety was an enthusiastic personal loyalty to
the Lord Jesus Christ. This question seemed directed
to him, as it had been to Peter, in reproach. He
would hesitate no longer. Love, and life itself, should
be sacrificed for the Christ who died for him. Then he
prayed once more, and there came to his mind the
memory of that saying about leaving houses and homes
and lands and wives, for Christ's sake. It came to him,
doubtless, by a perfectly natural law of mental association.
But what did Kike know of the association of
ideas, or of any other law of mental action? Wesley's
sermons and Benson's Life of Fletcher constituted his
library. To him it seemed certain that this text of
scripture was “suggested.” It was a call from Christ
to give up all for him. And in the spirit of the

sublimest self-sacrifice, he said: “Lord, I will keep
back nothing!”

But emotions and resolutions that are at high tide
in the evening often ebb before morning. Kike
thought himself strong enough to begin again to rise
at four o'clock, as Wesley had ordained in those “rules
for a preacher's conduct” which every Methodist
preacher even yet promises to keep. Following the
same rules, he proceeded to set apart the first hour
for prayer and meditation. The night before all had
seemed clear; but now that morning had come and
he must soon proceed to execute his stern resolve, he
found himself full of doubt and irresolution. Such
vacillation was not characteristic of Kike, but it marked
the depth of his feeling for Nettie. Doubtless, too,
the enervation of convalescence had to do with it.
Certainly in that raw and foggy dawn the forsaking
of the paradise of rest and love in which he had
lingered seemed to require more courage than he
could muster. After all, why should he leave? Might
he not be mistaken in regard to his duty? Was he
obliged to sacrifice his life?

He conducted his devotions in a state of great
mental distraction. Seeing a copy of Baxter's Reformed
Pastor which belonged to Dr. Morgan lying on the
window-seat, he took it up, hoping to get some light
from its stimulating pages. He remembered that
Wesley spoke well of Baxter; but he could not fix his
mind upon the book. He kept listlessly turning the
leaves until his eye lighted upon a sentence in Latin.
Kike knew not a single word of Latin, and for that

very reason his attention was the more readily attracted
by the sentence in an unknown tongue. He read
it, “Nec propter vitam, vivendi perdere causas.” He
found written in the margin a free rendering: “Let us
not, for the sake of life, sacrifice the only things worth
living for.” He knelt down now and gave thanks for
what seemed to him Divine direction. He had been
delivered from a temptation to sacrifice the great end
of living for the sake of saving his life.

It cost him a pang to bid adieu to Dr. Morgan
and his motherly wife and the excellent Jane. It
cost him a great pang to say good-bye to Nettie
Morgan. Her mobile face could ill conceal her feeling.
She did not venture to come to the door. Kike
found her alone in the little porch at the back of the
house, trying to look unconcerned. Afraid to trust
himself he bade her farewell dryly, taking her hand
coldly for a moment. But the sight of her painstricken
face touched him to the quick: he seized her
hand again, and, with eyes full of tears, said huskily:
“Good-bye, Nettie! God bless you, and keep you forever!”
and then turned suddenly away, bidding the
rest a hasty adieu and riding off eagerly, almost
afraid to look back. He was more severe than ever
in the watch he kept over himself after this. He
could never again trust his treacherous heart.

Kike rode to his old home in the Hissawachee
Settlement. “The Forks” had now come to be quite
a village; the valley was filling with people borne on
that great wave of migration that swept over the
Alleghanies in the first dozen years of the century.

The cabin in which his mother lived was very
little different from what it was when he left it. The
old stick chimney showed signs of decrepitude; the
barrel which served for chimney-pot was canted a
little on one side, giving to the cabin, as Kike
thought, an unpleasant air, as of a man a little exhilarated
with whiskey, who has tipped his hat upon the
side of his head to leer at you saucily. The mother
received him joyously, and wiped her eyes with her
apron when she saw how sick he had been. Brady
was at the widow's cabin, and though he stood by the
fire-place when Kike entered, the two splint-bottomed
chairs sat suspiciously close together. Brady had long
thought of changing his state, but both Brady and the
widow were in mortal fear of Kike, whose severity of
judgment and sternness of reproof appalled them.
“If it wasn't for Koike,” said Brady to himself, “I'd
propose to the widdy. But what would the lad say
to sich follies at my toime of loife? And the widdy's
more afeard of him than I am. Did iver anybody
say the loikes of a b'y that skeers his schoolmasther
out of courtin his mother, and his mother out of
resavin the attintions of a larnt grammairian loike
mesilf? The misfortin' is that Koike don't have no
wakenisses himsilf. I wish he had jist one, and thin
I wouldn't keer. If I could only foind that he'd iver
looked jist a little swate loike at iny young girl, I
wouldn't moind his cinsure. But, somehow, I kape
a-thinkin' what would Koike say, loike a ould coward
that I am.”

Kike had come home to have his tattered wardrobe

improved, and the thoughtful mother had already made
him a warm, though not very shapely, suit of jeans.
It cost Kike a struggle to leave her again. She did
not think him fit to go. But she did not dare to say
so. How should she venture to advise one who
seemed to her wondering heart to live in the very
secrets of the Almighty? God had laid hands on
him—the child was hers no longer. But still she
looked her heart-breaking apprehensions as he set
out from home, leaving her standing disconsolate in
the doorway wiping her eyes with her apron.

And Brady, seeing Kike as he rode by the school-house,
ventured to give him advice—partly by way of
finding out whether Kike had any “wakeniss” or not.

“Now, Koike, me son, as your ould taycher, I
thrust you'll bear with me if I give you some advoice,
though ye have got to be sich a praycher. Ye'll not
take offinse, me lad?”

“O no; certainly not, Mr. Brady,” said Kike,
smiling sadly.

“Will, thin, ye're of a delicate constitooshun as
shure as ye're born, and it's me own opinion as ye
ought to git a good wife to nurse ye, and thin you
could git a home and maybe do more good than ye
do now.”

Kike's face settled into more than its wonted
severity. The remembrance of his recent vacillation
and the sense of his present weakness were fresh in
his mind. He would not again give place to the
devil.

“Mr. Brady, there's something more important

than our own ease or happiness. We were not made
to seek comfort, but to give ourselves to the work of
Christ. And see! your head is already blossoming
for eternity, and yet you talk as if this world were
all.”

Saying this, Kike shook hands with the master
solemnly and rode away, and Mr. Brady was more
appalled than ever.

“The lad haint got a wakeniss,” he said, disconsolately.
“Not a wakeniss,” he repeated, as he walked
gloomily into the school-house, took down a switch
and proceeded to punish Pete Sniger, who, as the
worst boy in the school, and a sort of evil genius,
often suffered on general principles when the master
was out of humor.

Was Kike unhappy when he made his way to the
distant Pottawottomie Creek circuit?

Do you think the Jesuit missionaries, who traversed
the wilds of America at the call of duty as they heard
it, were unhappy men? The highest happiness comes
not from the satisfaction of our desires, but from the
denial of them for the sake of a high purpose. I
doubt not the happiest man that ever sailed through
Levantine seas, or climbed Cappadocian mountains, was
Paul of Tarsus. Do you think that he envied the
voluptuaries of Cyprus, or the rich merchants of
Corinth? Can you believe that one of the idlers in
the Epicurean gardens, or one of the Stoic loafers in
the covered sidewalks of Athens, could imagine the
joy that tided the soul of Paul over all tribulations?
For there is a sort of awful delight in self-sacrifice,

and Kike defied the storms of a northern winter, and all
the difficulties and dangers of the wilderness, and all
the hardships of his lonely lot, with one saying often
on his lips: “O Lord, I have kept back nothing!”

I have heard that about this time young Lumsden
was accustomed to electrify his audiences by his fervent
preaching upon the Christian duty of Glorying
in Tribulation, and that shrewd old country women
would nod their heads one to another as they went
home afterward, and say: “He's seed a mighty sight
o' trouble in his time, I 'low, fer a young man.”
“Yes; but he's got the victory; and how powerful
sweet he talks about it! I never heerd the beat in all
my born days.”