24. CHAPTER XXIV.
THE GOOD SAMARITAN.
THE Methodist Church to which Mrs. Matilda
White and Miss Nancy Sawyer belonged was the
leading one in Lewisburg, as it is in most county-seat
villages in Indiana. If I may be permitted to
express my candid and charitable opinion of the
difference between the two women, I shall have to use the old
Quaker locution, and say that Miss Sawyer was a Methodist
and likewise a Christian; Mrs. White was a Methodist, but I
fear she was not likewise.
As to the first part of this assertion, there was no room to
doubt Miss Nancy's piety. She could get happy in class-meeting
(for who had a better right?), and could witness a
good experience in the quarterly love-feast. But it is not upon
these grounds that I base my opinion of Miss Nancy. Do not
even the Pharisees the same? She never dreamed that she had
any right to speak of “Christian Perfection” (which, as Mrs.
Partington said of total depravity, is an excellent doctrine if it
is lived up to); but when a woman's heart is full of devout
affections and good purposes, when her head devises liberal and
Christlike things, when her hands are always open to the poor
and always busy with acts of love and self-denial, and when
her feet are ever eager to run upon errands of mercy, why, if
there be anything worthy of being called Christian Perfection
in this world of imperfection, I do not know why such an one
does not possess it. What need of analyzing her experiences
in
vacuo to find out the state of her soul?
How Miss Nancy managed to live on her slender income and
be so generous was a perpetual source of perplexity to the
gossips of Lewisburg. And now that she declared that Mrs.
Thomson and Shocky should not return to the poor-house
there was a general outcry from the whole Committee of
Intermeddlers that she would bring herself to the poor-house
before she died. But Nancy Sawyer was the richest woman
in Lewisburg, though nobody knew it, and she herself did not
once suspect it.
How Miss Nancy and the preacher conspired together, and
how they managed to bring Mrs. Thomson's case up at the
time of the “Sacramental Service” in the afternoon of that
Sunday in Lewisburg, and how the preacher made a touching
statement of it just before the regular “Collection for the
Poor” was taken, and how the warm-hearted Methodists put
in dollars instead of dimes while the Presiding Elder read
those passages about Zaccheus and other liberal people, and
how the congregation sang
“He dies, the Friend of Sinners dies,”
more lustily than ever, after having performed this Christian
act—how all this happened I can not take up the reader's time
to tell. But I can assure him that the nearly blind English
woman did not room with blasphemous old Mowley any more,
and that the blue-drilling pauper frock gave way to something
better, and that grave little Shocky even danced with delight,
and declared that God hadn't forgot, though he'd thought that
He had. And Mrs. Matilda White remarked that it was a
shame that the collection for the poor at a Methodist sacramental
service should be given to a woman who was a member
of the Church of England, and like as not never soundly
converted!
And Shocky slept in his mother's arms and prayed God not
to forget Hannah, while Shocky's mother knit stockings for the
store day and night, and day and night she prayed and hoped.
