University of Virginia Library

XXI
Genus Clericum

I was a ministerial child rather by birth than by conviction. To one born on the march there may come to be in the end a mystic home-sense in the loneliness of tents, but in the beginning the army child may perhaps have his own opinion of the rigors of camp life and prefer his morning snooze to the summons of the bivouac. Analogously, the children of the clerical class may come into existence with a leaning toward the world, the flesh, and the devil, and may long conceal, beneath an outward conformity and a due filial reticence, an infant resentment against the preoccupation of their parents with the salvation of souls.

I think I speak for many ministerial children when I say that the attitude of my infancy toward its environment was mainly one of protest, broken by passionate upheavals of partisanship. Sometimes I sympathized with little neighbors who limped shamelessly through the catechism or went out of church before the sermon, but as often I longed to

shake them and thrust them, well-prodded, upon their duties.

The mere external discipline of the church militant came easily to me because I was so early inured to it. It is back of my memory, but I have ascertained that it was at the age of two and under that I learned rigidity of muscle in the sanctuary, where I sat holding immobile on the pew cushion legs too short to crook, while my fingers, in white cotton gloves, were extended in stiff separation each from each. The hat upon my head was in itself an early example of ministerial adjustment to parochial issues. Two ladies who were rivals in missionary zeal had each been moved to present me with a hat. That neither hat suited either my face or my mother's taste was, of course, mere incident. The claims both of courtesy and of equity necessitated my wearing the hats in impartial regularity, on alternate Sundays. Thus before the beginnings of memory, and through the medium of a baby's hat, did I become acquainted with the potency, in our domestic concerns, of that great public called Parish.

It must have been at about this period that I experienced one of my intermittent attacks of partisanship, desiring with my clear infant voice to rebuke the lukewarm re

sponses of the congregation, and remodeling the unintelligible stretches of the Litany by the stentorian variation, "Lord have mercy upon us, miserable scissors!" The words of liturgy and hymn did not, however, long confound me. I had the concentration of many a sanctuary hour to devote to their meaning, so that by six years old even the Trinity had become a term of crystalline comprehension. By this time, also, other ministerial babykins had come toddling into the march in my rear, to share with me the soberness and separation of our calling. It was, on the whole, well disciplined, our little army corps, although we recognized the latent twinkle in the eyes of the mother who generaled us with a clever balancing of motive between our well-being and that of the Parish. Both she and we were occasionally flabbergasted, sometimes by our public performance of private virtues, sometimes by our private performance of public ones. For example, at the home table we were always exhorted to conscientious chewing; it did not, therefore, occur to us to accelerate the process at a Sunday-School picnic. The sylvan board had long been deserted by others, but we, the Rector's children, a faithful little line, longing to be on the merry-go-round, in the swings, on the boats, still sat and dutifully chewed and chewed and chewed. I vividly recall the bewildering onslaught of our mother leading a bevy of church ladies in search of the missing. Ignominiously were we whirled off to join the sports of less seeming-famished companions.

On the other hand, in public, in the Sunday School, were we early made to understand that all the law and the prophets hung upon the catechism; a pink-paper catechism, frank in its woodcuts and facile in its explanation of the mysteries of the sacraments. Since this pink catechism was a lamp unto our feet, we suggested, during a thrilling burglar epidemic, that copies be left on the thresholds of rectory bedchambers. The burglar would pause to read, and there would ensue his immediate conversion and our resultant security. The parental laughter at our expense shook the foundations of our faith.

Such a severe consistency of behavior in regard to the lessons taught in the rectory and those taught in the sanctuary is a state of mind early outgrown by any intelligent ministerial child. Such crudity of conduct was a stage in the march that we had all passed by the age of ten. By that time we had an unerring sense of what was due to the Parish and what was due to ourselves, with the result

that our outward conformity was about balanced by our inward misanthropy at having to conform. We attended, muttering imprecations up to the very door, the infant missionary society that filched our Saturday afternoons, we tore up futile scraps of calico to jab them together again with accursed "over-and-over" stitches, we gazed at pictures in which splendid blanketed braves, or splendid unclothed Samoans, were seen to exchange romance for religion in the shape of conversion and white cottas. Our souls loathed patchwork and missions, but, on the other hand, how we thrilled to the righteousness of reward when the visiting missionary, male or female, became our own particular guest! The ecstasy as one flirted one's Sunday flounces before the eyes of less favored neighbors because one was walking to church, holding the hand of a genuine Arctic archdeacon! And then the Bishop's visits, when we were whisked into cubbyhole and closet out of our crowded nursery that it might be converted into a prophet's chamber! Which one of my schoolmates had ever passed the right reverend plate at supper? And the honor of the Bishop's petting afterwards! The episcopal lap, the high general's knee, is the prerogative of the captain's children only, the same that never miss church and know all their collects.

Slowly we grew accustomed to the pressure of the knapsack upon our shoulders, that weight of clerical example which did not burden our irresponsible playmates. We knew that the Minister's children were different. We did not want it to be so, but we began to see why it was so. True, we protested when our father would not pause to tell us stories or our mother stay at home from calls to play with dolls, yet in the silent thinking-places of our little hearts we began to divine the beauty of the midnight sick-watches, of the valiancy of Sunday-School labors, of the brave weariness of sewing societies, of the heaven-born patience with Parish bores. As we watched the sleeker parents of our schoolmates, there dawned in us realization of what our parents had given up, and silent shame for our jealousy of their devotion. Few children are hurt by being shoved aside a little because of an ideal. The hours when our parents played with us are still passing precious, but it is because of the other hours that there was born in us a shamefaced sense of the meaning of the banner under which we trudged.

Isolation is the chief inconvenience of hav

ing an ideal in the family. We were apart from other youngsters, partly because we knew it incumbent upon us to set them an example, since, early enough and sadly enough, we had acquired self-consciousness from the frank criticism of all our conduct made by any parishioner so minded, and partly were we cut off by the vow of poverty taken by our parents. Other families may look forward to easier times; no ministerial household has any such illusions. The tiniest child of the ministry knows that after forty the father will not receive a call; the veriest baby of us knows what happens to old ministers, because so many pitiful, decrepit old soldiers have from time to time found shelter in our tent.

Yet the ministry is the best place in the world to learn that poverty is a nut that yields good meat if you crack it boldly. Well I remember an icy rectory which had but one register in the Arctic regions of the second story. At bedtime we would gather about this register to warm our toes. Each blanketed to the ears like a little Indian, we would discourse as serenely and acutely as any schoolmen, of the nature of angels, for was not the whole realm of heaven and earth ours for the mere talking? Pinched and patched we might

be, but bold to meet penury with a consciousness of princely possessions. I did not so much think well of myself for this superiority to worldly comforts as I thought scorn of those who did not have it. Very early I had a contempt for a child who could not evolve a game from a clothespin or set a pageant moving forth from a box of buttons. I had a veritable snobbishness of disdain for a youngster who had to be amused.

Necessarily one requires respect for inward resources when the only things one has ever had enough of are bread and butter and books. Every ministerial child breathes book-madness and burns for an education. When at the age of five you have known your father to go without boots for a book, and then to caper like a weanling lamb on the volume's arrival, you have acquired something more potent than a mere conscientious respect for literature; rather you have learned to regard the book-world as a place of bacchanal liberty and delight forever open to you. I do not know whether it tended toward my humanizing or against it that the dominant beings of my young imagination were Books, while those of my girl friends were Boys.

There is nothing more effective than clerical penury to teach one the cheapness of

dreams. The door of fantasy stands always open for the rectory household to enter, singly or together. I think every ministerial family cherishes that one dear dream of all unwilling gypsies. They always hope somehow, somewhere, sometime, to find a house that shall be a home. Do what you may, a rectory is always house, not home. It may always belong to some one else next month. If only it were worth while to plant perennials in our flower-beds! If only it were worth while to plant friendships to bear fruit in after years! Yet this last we can never help doing as we pass from parish to parish, being at heart most human of wanderers. It must be very beautiful to belong somewhere, to have, for instance, cousinships in the neighborhood. There are never any family parties in the ministry. There are never any gentle grandsires to come forth from their kindly crypts and give guarantee of our characters to the community. On each new camping-ground we stand, a huddled family group, completely dependent on our own efforts for introduction.

These new-parish sensations tempt to generalizations, for they are so alike, in town after town. The zest of a new call wears away even in one's infancy. Perhaps the captain

still expects to find his tents pitched in Arcady, but not so his family; we meet the Parish's reception acutely on our good behavior, exquisitely affable to all, but our inner motto is, "Watch out!" It is usually those parishioners who give us most effusive welcome who will be readiest to desire our godspeed. It is those who stand back and look us over who will be our firmest friends. We cannot resent their attitude because it is exactly our own. We, too, are looking them over. When we go into a new parish the first person we meet is some one who is n't there, namely, our predecessor, that thorn in the flesh of the most righteous saint and soldier. There is always a predecessor, and however dead or distant, he is always there, in the hearts of the Parish, and quite frequently he is in their homes as well. However callous, however courteous one may endeavor to be, one cannot escape a slight sensation of stiffening when parishioners want The Other One to marry or bury them. Think of the well-bred wrangle that sometimes occurs in settling the clerical rights to a corpse! In all my ministerial experience I never knew a predecessor and a successor who loved each other. Yet I speak without bitterness, for one of the proudest and pleasantest sensations of our ministry has been that of being a predecessor ourself.

To an unwilling nomad there is nothing so monotonous as change, yet the very constancy of our march engenders an amazing ease of adjustment to each new environment. In our relations to people, we clericals learn an adaptability almost pathetically perfect. We succeed in being all things to all men by never being all ourselves to any man. Our affability is the armor that protects the inner sensitive personality. Perhaps we are naturally expansive, but we early learn the perils of frankness, so that it comes about that along our pilgrimage we are friendly, but have few friends, those few, however, the tenderest, trustiest friends in the world, those few, rare spirits of a keenness and a kindness to penetrate the steel-strong armor of ministerial reserve. Very young, we clerical sons and daughters learn to pass from millionaire to laundress with no change of manner. The reason is not far to seek; we own senior warden and washerwoman as our parishioners, equally, because warden and washerwoman, equally, feel that they own us. With equal freedom the two censure or serve, love or hate, us. Recognizing the proprietory rights of each, we realize that each may be equally

our bane or our blessing. Yet our democracy goes deeper than all this. Half-hearted soldiers we may often be, but we never doubt the sincerity of our flag. We had the luck to be born into the household of the consecrated, whether we wanted to be or not; we are genuinely democratic for the same reason that the apostles were.

Perhaps there is another reason, and a wickeder one, why all men stand in our sight naked of all accidental social trappings; and that is that we know them all so well! I cannot determine how clearly the world may see into rectory windows, but certainly one sees pretty clearly from rectory windows. It is a heart-searching and heart-revealing relation, that of a parish to its parson. The completely voluntary nature of all church effort and church organization affords an exhibition of idiosyncrasies not to be found in any other association. When I think of the crimes and the crankiness sometimes committed in the name of religion, I thank Heaven that the effect of these in a ministerial household is more often amusement than cynicism. I was grown up before I realized that the ostensible purpose of a choir is to praise the Lord: in my youth I always thought of a choir solely as a means of perfecting a rector in patience.

But always there exists the other side in the parochial relation, the side not of badness, but of beauty. Personally I perceive no stronger argument against the charge of present-day irreligion than the tribute of trust paid to any sincere minister. From my childhood on I have seen it everywhere, the respect for consecration. Everywhere I have heard it, the belief in the man who believes, ring confident as the cry of the roadside beggar upon the Nazarene.

Few people think it worth while to put on pretense with a clergyman; they rarely try to make him think them better than they are; yet he generally does think so. It is frequently the alertness to protect the captain against his own unworldliness that teaches his family their sanity and sureness of insight. This very insight may, however, make them poorer-spirited than their superior officer, craven and fain to capitulate. In a parish skirmish they are likely to be divided between hot loyalty to his cause and a vain hope that he won't think it necessary to fight. I can picture the probable domestic anxiety in the house of Calchas when in pursuit of his calling he found it necessary to stand up to the king of men, Agamemnon!

Long campaigning is likely to make minis

terial offspring lovers of peace, yet I believe I am not really unwilling to fight the Devil. The trouble is that we of the ministry so often fight him when he is n't there. I wish our young theologues could be taught the sound and shape of Satan. Frankly I arraign the theological seminary as a very poor military school. It sends forth a soldier who does not know so much as how to set up a tent, whose idea of the Enemy is a mediaeval bugaboo in a book, I would establish two new chairs in our seminaries, a chair of agriculture, rudimentary, perhaps, but sufficient to teach the difference between tares and wheat, which Nature, uninstructed in any isms, still ordains shall grow together unto the harvest; and a second chair, in common sense, to dispense instruction in human nature. The average theologue is deep-read in Hebrew Scripture, but ignorant of the A B C of the tongue in which is written the Bible of man's soul. Doctors may dispute the divine inspiration of the former, but who of us is infidel enough to dispute the divine inspiration of the latter? Perhaps the more reprehensible fault of the seminary is not so much deficiency in the matter of its teaching as deficiency in its maturity. No thinking person wishes to receive his spiritual guidance from an unthinking boy. I am constantly puzzled by the ill-logic of our ministerial preparation when I reflect that the foundation of its teaching is the fact that God Himself thought it necessary to be thirty years a man with men before He was ready to teach or to preach.

Considering his inadequate equipment, so inferior in the relation of means to end to that of the social worker, the average minister of to-day does better than his preparation deserves. If he has devotion, devotion will, in the long run, counteract his blunders. People will put up with almost anything from a man so long as he's a man. There never was a time when respect for a clerical coat, as a coat, was less; there never was a time when reverence for the man within the coat, as a man, was greater. Because of this fact, we of the ministry who best know the seamy side of an ideal know also best its beauty.

I was born beneath a banner I did not choose, but like many another ministerial child, I have grown from a mere external allegiance to a real one. I think the angels of birth were a little distraught when they dropped me in the tents of the righteous, but on the whole I am reconciled. I have traveled to and fro and far, but only the rectory tent is home, there alone exists the nomad's intense

family friendship which is a home's sole enduring furniture. I have wandered so far among other men and other manners and morals that sometimes our little band has seemed but a faint dot on the spaces of a universe undreamed of within the limitations of rectory walls. Wandering thus, I have questioned many things unquestioned in my childhood. Only ministerial children themselves can estimate how open they are to doubt's attacks. The very intensity of partisanship and narrowness of creed and practice in which they have been brought up are sources of danger, while, having always been nourished on the glory of the mind, they will always in their traveling gravitate to the places of intellect, only to find their little faith regarded there as one more soap-bubble to be tossed about. Accustomed at home to the old-fashioned unquestioning distinctions, the minister's son or daughter will discover that there no longer exists the old sharp fight between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, because each side recognizes far too well a kinship in weakness and wistfulness. There was a time when to take a man's faith from him was a fair game, for it was his own affair to guard a castle aggressively inviting attack. Now even infidels are too pitiful to steal another man's God.

It is not so simple an adjustment as perhaps it externally appears, the return to the tiny clerical camp whence once we issued forth to our education. Perhaps I have thrilled to the trumpets of larger armies, perhaps our little troop of skirmishers seems to me a sorry one now, and perhaps, darker treachery still, the hosts of Midian do not loom so big and black to me as of old, perhaps I have even made some charming friends among the Hittites and the Jebusites, but it is astonishing how, when I am back in the old conditions, the enemy's ranks resume their old color and proportion.

When I am abroad I am no stickler for church attendance, yielding myself sometimes to the call of a "heaven-kissing hill" or to the spell of woods sacredly serene; but at home I am accustomed by contagion to look darkly askance at Sunday picknickers or lazy stay-at-homes. They should come and hear my father preach! Yet I myself feel God nearer on a hilltop than at the altar, and I own, as closest comrades and most inspiring, men and women whose souls never bow in worship anywhere. They belong to another army, that army of social betterment which is so curiously blind to its own pillar of fire. My creed is to their minds a child's

lisping, they ask neither a God nor an immortality, they ask only that they may lift the burdened man upright. If we cannot worship, let us work, people say to-day, and do not dream that never before in history was there enough religion in the world to make theirs a plausible deduction.

These my friends belong to the army of non-church-goers arraigned in the little village church where I kneel to say my prayers. It is very strange, they say to me,—these soldiers of an army grown far larger now than our thinning ranks,—very strange to me that you should need a religion; and I answer it is very strange to me that you cannot hear above the blackness of your hosting, your own prophet voices choiring a midnight mass to Heaven.

There are divers ways of worship and I acknowledge that my own way, minister's daughter though I am, exemplary in externals, is not always that which would appear best in accord with my bowed head and practiced knees. There is much in your full-sized Anglican that is bigger than his Prayer Book, although I loyally hold that an inspired document of Christian common sense. Many a windy, rolling thought comes to me when I am kneeling in secret rebellion at the abase

ment of the Litany, irreverent, meseemeth, to the souls cast in God's image, but who am I that I should think scorn of any words by which people climb to Heaven? Suppose I should compose prayers for my father's congregation, think how bewildered the good people in our pews would become if they should find, writ out for their repeating, the calls of birds and the voices of winds, which I know would sing themselves into any prayer of my making.

No, in its prayers and in its practice, I find myself ever turning quietly back to the faith of my fathers, that banner of my clan. Perhaps I may think its gold tarnished with mediaevalism, its silk worn very thin, but are not all banners merely the work of men's hands? And what matter of the ensign so long as it holds skyward? I, within the ministry, may sometimes question our methods of warfare, thinking them valiant against obsolete bugaboos and oblivious of a more subtle Satan, but, doubtful how better to direct the age-old campaign, uncertain what newer weapons to endue, I would rather still be on the side of a blind and passionate ideal, for energies may sometimes be wasted, but ideals are never wasted.

Perhaps I have sometimes thought to

join that other army, of man's social progress, a noble army the thunder of whose modern warfare rolls ever louder and louder through the land. But I a deserter from the thin, faint brigade that belongs to an older fashion? A deserter now, when, in our little rectory corps, I see the hands that grasp the sword growing weaker, and the hands that uphold the sword-bearer's growing frailer, and when, in eyes keen to pierce the Enemy's darkness, I read the growing peace prophetic of the battle over? Back to my place in the ranks, back beneath our tattered pennon! What better service have I craved? What braver banner? For on the ensigns of many creeds I have searched, after all, only for that one sure device which shines upon my fathers' faith. That device is a Face, even the face of the leader of all the host, and as on and on I follow the march of our ministry,—