University of Virginia Library

17. CHAPTER XVII.
SAINT AND SINNER.

IT happened a little after this time that the minister's
invalid wife improved somewhat inexpectedly in health,
and, as Bathsheba was beginning to suffer from imprisonment
in her sick-chamber, the physician advised very
strongly that she should vary the monotony of her life
by going out of the house daily for fresh air and cheerful
companionship. She was therefore frequently at the house
of Olive Eveleth; and as Myrtle wanted to see young people,
and had her own way now as never before, the three
girls often met at the parsonage. Thus they became more
and more intimate, and grew more and more into each other's
affections.

These girls presented three types of spiritual character
which are to be found in all our towns and villages. Olive
had been carefully trained, and at the proper age confirmed.
Bathsheba had been prayed for, and in due time startled
and converted. Myrtle was a simple daughter of Eve,
with many impulses like those of the other two girls, and
some that required more watching. She was not so safe,
perhaps, as either of the other girls, for this world or the
next; but she was on some accounts more interesting, as
being a more genuine representative of that inexperienced
and too easily deluded, yet always cherished, mother of our
race, whom we must after all accept as embodying the creative
idea of woman, and who might have been alive and
happy now (though at a great age) but for a single fatal
error.

The Rev. Ambrose Eveleth, Rector of Saint Bartholomew's,
Olive's father, was one of a class numerous in the
Anglican Church, a cultivated man, with pure tastes, with
simple habits, a good reader, a neat writer, a safe thinker,
with a snug and well-fenced mental pasturage, which his
sermons kept cropped moderately close without any exhausting
demand upon the soil. Olive had grown insensibly
into her religious maturity, as into her bodily and intellectual
developments, which one might suppose was the natural
order of things in a well-regulated Christian household,
where the children are brought up in the nurture and admonition
of the Lord.

Bathsheba had been worried over and perplexed and
depressed with vague apprehensions about her condition,
conveyed in mysterious phrases and graveyard expressions
of countenance, until about the age of fourteen years, when
she had one of those emotional paroxysms very commonly
considered in some Protestant sects as essential to the
formation of religious character. It began with a shivering
sense of enormous guilt, inherited and practised
from her earliest infancy. Just as every breath she ever
drew had been malignantly poisoning the air with carbonic
acid, so her every thought and feeling had been tainting
the universe with sin. This spiritual chill or rigor had in
due order been followed by the fever-flush of hope, and
that in its turn had ushered in the last stage, — the free
opening of all the spiritual pores in the peaceful relaxation
of self-surrender.

Good Christians are made by many very different processes.
Bathsheba had taken her religion after the fashion
of her sect; but it was genuine, in spite of the cavils
of the formalists, who could not understand that the spirit

which kept her at her mother's bedside was the same
as that which poured the tears of Mary of Magdala on
the feet of her Lord, and led her forth at early dawn
with the other Mary to visit his sepulchre.

Myrtle was a child of nature, and of course, according
to the out-worn formulæ which still shame the distorted
religion of humanity, hateful to the Father in Heaven
who made her. She had grown up in antagonism with all
that surrounded her. She had been talked to about her
corrupt nature and her sinful heart, until the words had
become an offence and an insult. Bathsheba knew her
father's fondness for young company too well to suppose
that his intercourse with Myrtle had gone beyond the
sentimental and poetical stage, and was not displeased
when she found that there was some breach between
them. Myrtle herself did not profess to have passed
through the technical stages of the customary spiritual
paroxysm. Still, the gentle daughter of the terrible
preacher loved her and judged her kindly. She was
modest enough to think that perhaps the natural state of
some girls might be at least as good as her own after the
spiritual change of which she had been the subject. A
manifest heresy, but not new, nor unamiable, nor inexplicable.

The excellent Bishop Joseph Hall, a painful preacher
and solid divine of Puritan tendencies, declares that he
prefers good-nature before grace in the election of a wife;
because, saith he, “it will be a hard Task, where the Nature
is peevish and froward, for Grace to make an entire
Conquest whilst Life lasteth.” An opinion apparently
entertained by many modern ecclesiastics, and one which
may be considered very encouraging to those young ladies

of the politer circles who have a fancy for marrying bishops
and other fashionable clergymen. Not of course that
“grace” is so rare a gift among the young ladies of the
upper social sphere; but they are in the habit of using
the word with a somewhat different meaning from that
which the good Bishop attached to it.