University of Virginia Library

45. CHAPTER XLV.
IN CHURCH.

They turned into Chambers Street, in which was the little
church where Dr. Channing was to preach. Lawrence Newt
led the way up the aisle to his pew. The congregation, which
was usually rather small, to-day quite filled the church. There
was a general air of intelligence and shrewdness in the faces,
which were chiefly of the New England type. Amy Waring

saw no one she had ever seen before. In fact, there were but
few present in whose veins New England blood did not run,
except some curious hearers who had come from a natural desire
to see and hear a celebrated man.

When our friends entered the church a slow, solemn voluntary
was playing upon the organ. The congregation sat
quietly in the pews. Chairs and benches were brought to accommodate
the increasing throng. Presently the house was
full. The bustle and distraction of entering were over—there
was nothing heard but the organ.

In a few moments a slight man, wrapped in a black silk
gown, slowly ascended the pulpit stairs, and, before seating
himself, stood for a moment looking down at the congregation.
His face was small, and thin, and pale; but there was
a pure light, an earnest, spiritual sweetness in the eyes—the
irradiation of an anxious soul—as they surveyed the people.
After a few moments the music stopped. There was perfect
silence in the crowded church. Then, moving like a shadow
to the desk, the preacher, in a voice that was in singular harmony
with the expression of his face, began to read a hymn.
His voice had a remarkable cadence, rising and falling with
yearning tenderness and sober pathos. It seemed to impart
every feeling, every thought, every aspiration of the hymn.
It was full of reverence, gratitude, longing, and resignation:

When he had read it and sat down again, Hope Wayne felt
as if a religious service had already been performed.

The simplicity, and fervor, and long-drawn melody with
which he had read the hymn apparently inspired the choir
with sympathy, and after a few notes from the organ they
began to sing an old familiar tune. It was taken up by the
congregation until the church trembled with the sound, and
the saunterers in the street outside involuntarily ceased laughing

and talking, and, touched by some indefinable association,
raised their hats and stood bareheaded in the sunlight, while
the solemn music filled the air.

The hymn was sung, the prayer was offered, the chapter
was read; then, after a little silence, that calm, refined, anxious,
pale, yearning face appeared again at the desk. The
preacher balanced himself for a few moments alternately upon
each foot—moved his tongue, as if tasting the words he was
about to utter—and announced his text: “Peace I leave with
you: my peace I give unto you.”

He began in the same calm, simple way. A natural, manly
candor certified the truth of every word he spoke. The voice
—at first high in tone, and swinging, as it were, in long,
wave-like inflections—grew gradually deeper, and more equally
sustained. There was very little movement of the hands
or arms; only now and then the finger was raised, or the
hand gently spread and waved. As he warmed in his discourse
a kind of celestial grace glimmered about his person,
and his pale, thoughtful face kindled and beamed with holy
light. His sentences were entirely simple. There was no
rhetoric, no declamation or display. Yet the soul of the hearer
seemed to be fused in a spiritual eloquence which, like a
white flame, burned all the personality of the speaker away.
The people sat as if they were listening to a disembodied soul.

But the appeal and the argument were never to passion,
or prejudice, or mere sensibility. Fear and horror, and every
kind of physical emotion, so to say, were impossible in the
calmness and sweetness of the assurance of the Divine presence.
It was a Father whose message the preacher brought.
Like as a father so the Lord pitieth His children, said he, in
tones that trickled like tears over the hearts of his hearers, although
his voice was equable and unbroken. He went on to
show what the children of such a Father must needs be—to
show that, however sinful, and erring, and lost, yet the Father
had sent to tell them that the doctrine of wrath was of old
time; that the eye for the eye, and the tooth for the tooth, was

the teaching of an imperfect knowledge; that a faith which
was truly childlike knew the Creator only as a parent; and
that out of such faith alone arose the life that was worthy of
him.

Wandering princes are we! cried the preacher, with a profound
ecstasy and exultation in his tone, while the very light
of heaven shone in his aspect—wandering princes are we, sons
of the Great King. In foreign lands outcast and forlorn,
groveling with the very swine in the mire, and pining for the
husks that the swine do eat; envying, defying, hating, forgetting—but
never hated nor forgot; in the depths of our rage,
and impotence, and sin—in the darkest moment of our moral
death, when we would crucify the very image of that Parent
who pities us—there is one voice deeper and sweeter than all
music, the voice of our elder brother pleading with that common
Father—“Forgive them, forgive them, for they know not
what they do!”

He sat down, but the congregation did not move. Leaning
forward, with upraised eyes glistening with tears and beaming
with sympathy, with hope, with quickened affection, they
sat motionless, seemingly unwilling to destroy the holy calm
in which, with him, they had communed with their Father.
There were those in the further part of the church who did
not hear; but their mouths were open with earnest attention,
their eyes glittered with moisture; for they saw afar off that
slight, rapt figure; and so strong was the common sympathy
of the audience that they seemed to feel what they could not
hear.

Lawrence Newt did not look round for Aunt Martha. But
he thought of her listening to the discourse, as one thinks of
dry fields in a saturating summer rain. She sat through the
whole—black, immovable, silent. The people near her looked
at her compassionately. They thought she was an inconsolable
widow, or a Rachel refusing comfort. Nor, had they
watched her, could they have told if she had heard any thing
to comfort or relieve her sorrow. From the first word to the

last she gazed fixedly at the speaker. With the rest she rose
and went out. But as she passed by the pulpit stairs she
looked up for a moment at that pallid face, and a finer eye
than any human saw that she longed, like another woman of
old looking at another teacher, to kiss the hem of his garment.
Oh! not by earthquake nor by lightning, but by the soft touch
of angels at midnight, is the stone rolled away from the door
of the sepulchre.