Held to Answer/Chapter 38
Elder Burbeck did not make good his threat. Hampstead stood again in the pulpit of All People's on Sunday, as his heart had so passionately desired.
But the reality disappointed. The contrast between this day and last Lord's day was pitiful. To be sure, the church was packed; but not to worship. The people—curious and wooden-hearted—had come to be witnesses to a spectacle, to see a man go through the business of a rôle which his character no longer fitted him to enact. The service and the sermon were one long agony. John spoke upon the duty of being true. His words came back upon him like an echo.
As for Elder Burbeck, he had only halted. The minister, from considerations of delicacy which were promptly misconstrued, having remained away from the called meeting of the Official Board on Saturday night, all things in that session had gone to Burbeck's satisfaction. He held in his pocket the resolution of the Board, recommending that the congregation request the resignation of the pastor of All People's. He might have introduced this at the close of the sermon, thus turning the ordinary congregational meeting into a business session; but the Elder was an expert tactician. He decided to devote the entire day to a final estimate of just what inroads the week had made upon the ascendancy of the minister with his people.
However, the manner in which the sermon was received encouraged him to go forward immediately with his plans. As the congregation was upon the last verse of the last hymn, the Elder ascended to the pulpit beside the minister. He did not look at the minister. He did not whisper that he had an announcement to make, and Hampstead did not say at the end of the hymn: "Elder Burbeck has an announcement to make." This was the usual form. But it was not followed. Instead, Burbeck, unannounced, with coarse self-assertion, made the announcement:
"There will be a business meeting of the church on Monday night to consider matters of grave import to the congregation. Every member is urged to be present."
There was a grave doubt if the Elder had a right of himself to call a meeting of the church. Yet the only man with force enough to voice that doubt was the minister, and he did not voice it. Instead, he stood quietly until the announcement was concluded and then invoked the benediction of God upon all the service, which, of course, included the announcement.
When at the close of the service Doctor Hampstead undertook to mingle among his people, according to custom, he found a minority hysterically hearty in their assurances of confidence, sympathy, and support; but the majority avoided him. Instead of enduring this and withering under it, the minister was roused into something like aggression. By confronting and accosting them, he forced aloof individuals to address him. He made his way into groups that did not open readily to receive him. In all conversations he frankly recognized his position, made it the uppermost topic, and solicited opinion and advice. He even eavesdropped a little. Once people opened their mouths upon the subject, he was astonished at their frankness. When the sum total of the impressions thus gathered was organized and deductions made, he was stunned almost to cynicism by their results. Of course, no one indicated that they believed him guilty of theft, and in the main all accepted his defense as the true defense. But they found him guilty of folly—a folly with a woman. Whether it was merely a folly and not a sin, it appeared was not to greatly alter penalties.
Yet justice must be done these people. They felt sorry for their minister and showed it; and they only shrank from him to avoid showing something else that would hurt him. They still acknowledged their debts of personal gratitude to him, but now they experienced a feeling of superiority. Their weaknesses had overtaken them in private; his had caught up with him under the spotlight's glare. They looked upon him with commiseration, pityingly, but from a lofty height. Besides which, they accused him of an overt offense. He had brought shame on All People's. He had preached to them this morning upon the duty of being true; but he had himself not been true—to the proud self-interest of All People's.
This indignant concern for the reputation of All People's was rather a surprising revelation to Hampstead. He had fallen into the way of thinking that he had made All People's; that he and All People's were one. That the congregation could have any purpose that did not include his purpose was not thinkable. He had never conceived of it as a social organism, with self-consciousness, with pride, with a head to be held up and a reputation to be sustained. To him All People's was not a society of persons with a pose. It was an association of individuals, each more or less weak, more or less dependent in their spiritual nature upon each other and upon him; the whole banded together to help each other and to help others like themselves. He had thought of himself as the instrument of All People's in its work of human salvage. But he now discovered that in these four years All People's had suffered from an over extension of the ego. It had been spoiled by prosperity and public approbation, just as other congregations, or individuals, might be or have been. The admiration of the members for him as their pastor, their humble obedience to his will, was in part due, not to his spiritual ascendancy, not to his conspicuously successful labors as a helper of humankind in so many different ways, but to the fact that these activities of the minister won him that public admiration and approval which shed a glamour also upon the congregation and upon the individual members of the congregation. Because of this, they worshipped him, honored him, and palavered over him to a point where Hampstead, no doubt as unconsciously as the congregation and as dangerously, had suffered an over-extension of his own ego.
But deflation of spirit had come to him swiftly. Now his own pride and his own self-sufficiency had all been shot away. If any remained, the effect of this Sunday morning service was quite sufficient to perform the final operation of removal.
He was to preach that night from the text: "If God is for us, who is against us." He gave up the idea. It sounded egotistical. He preached instead his farewell sermon, though without a word of farewell in it, from the text:
"Brethren, even if a man be overtaken in any trespass, ye who are spiritual restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; looking to thyself lest thou also be tempted."
That was what the pastor of All People's was trying to do,—to restore a man. In preaching this sermon, he forgot that this was his valedictory, forgot himself, forgot everything but the great mission of spiritual reconstruction upon which he had labored and proposed to labor as long as life was in him, no matter what yokes and scars were put upon him. In it he reached the oratorical height of his career, which was not necessarily lofty.
But people listened—and with understanding. Some of them cried a little. It made them reminiscent. The man himself, now slipping, had once restored them with great gentleness. All said, "What a pity!"
But Hampstead, while he spoke, was steeling himself against the probable desertion of his congregation. He had a feeling that he could win them back if he tried hard enough, but he began to doubt that they were worth winning back. He had really never sought to win them to himself personally; he would not begin now.
Instead, he saw himself cast out. The verdict of the church on Monday night would also be "Held to Answer."
He saw it coming almost gloatingly, and with a fierce up-flaming of that fanatic ardor which was always in him. The desire came to him to seize upon the position in which he stood as a pulpit from which to deliver a message to the world that greatly needed to be delivered, to say something that his fate and his life thereafter might illustrate, and thus make his public shame a greater witness to the truth than ever his popularity had been. In one of the loftiest of his moods of exaltation, he strode homeward from the church.
At ten o'clock, he telephoned the morning papers that at midnight he would have a statement to give out. It contained some rather extravagant expressions, was couched throughout in an exalted strain, and ran as follows:
AN ADDRESS TO THE PEOPLE
"They tell me that I have stood for the last time in the pulpit of All People's; that on Monday night I shall be unfrocked by the hands that ordained me; for my ministerial standing was created by this church which now proposes to take it away. This act, more than a court conviction, will seem my ruin. I write to say I cannot call that ruin to which a man goes willingly.
"It is not my soul that hangs in the balance, but another's. While this man struggles, I declare again that I will not break in upon him. I can reach out and touch him; but I will not. He will read this. I say to him: 'Brother, wait! Do not hurry. I can hold your load a while until you get the grapple on your spirit.'
"But for saying this, I am cast out.
"Men observe to me: 'What a pity!' I say to you: 'No pity at all!'
"Is a minister who would not thus suffer worthy to be a minister? The conception can be broadened. Is any man? Is an editor worthy to be an editor, a merchant, a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, standing as each must at sometime where the issue is sharply drawn between loyalty and disloyalty to truth or trust,—is any of them truly worthy or truly true, who would not willingly suffer all that is demanded of me?
"It does not require a great man to be true to the clasp of his hand: nor a minister. I know policemen and motormen who are that. To be that, upon the human side, has been almost the sum of my religious practice—not my profession, but my practice. By that habit I have gained what I have gained—and lost what I have lost. Humbled to the dust, I dare yet to make one boast: I have not failed in these small human loyalties, except as my capacities have failed.
"This last act of mine, which will be regarded as the consummation of failure, is the greatest opportunity to be true that I have ever had.
"To go forth on foot before this community, held to answer for my convictions, fills me with a sense of abandon to immolation upon high altars that is almost intoxicating.
"I can almost wish it might never be known whether I spoke the truth or not about the Dounay diamonds; that in my death, unvindicated, I might lie yonder on the hills of Piedmont; that on a simple slab just large enough to bear it, might be written no name but only this:
{{" '}}He believed something hard enough to live for it.'
"I wish even that you might crucify me, take me out on Broadway here and nail me to a trolley pole. But you will not do this. I am not so worthy. You are not so brave. Those men had the courage of their convictions who nailed up the Galilean and hurled down with stones the first martyr. You have not. Courage to-day survives; but it is reserved for ignoble struggles. Men are more ready to die for their appetites than to live for their convictions. Men fear to be uncomfortable, to be sneered at, to be defeated. Paugh! Defeat is not a thing to fear. To be untrue is the blackest terror! To become involved for the sake of one's convictions should not be regarded as calamity. Yet it is,—in these soft days.
"The hope that the fall, even of one so humble and unimportant as I, may be some slight protest against this spirit of weakness, takes out the sting and gives me a delirious kind of joy.
"I would like to have been a great preacher. I am not. I would I had a tongue of eloquence to fire men to this passion of mine. I have not. That is the pity! I was proud and jealous of my position. I have lost it.
"Yet I do not doubt that I shall find a field of usefulness. Deep as you hurl me down, I do not doubt but that there are some to whom even if condemned, spurned, unfrocked—oh, the eternal silliness of that! as if any decrees of men could affect the standing or potentiality of a soul—I can come as a welcome messenger of helpfulness. To them I shall go! They may be found here. If so, I shall remain here—go in and out—pointed at as the man who failed.
"Perhaps I can even make failure popular. It ought to be. There is a great need of failures just now, for men who will fail for their true success's sake.
"The world needs a new standard of appraisal. It honors the man whose success bulks to the eye. It needs to be a little more discriminating; to find out why some men failed, and to honor them because they are failures. Some of the greatest men in America and in history were failures. Socrates with his cup was a failure. Jesus was a failure. It was written on his back in lines of blistering welts. It was nailed into his palms, stabbed into his brow, hissed into his ear as he died.
"Re-reading at this midnight hour what I have written, I perceive that it sounds slightly frenzied. But my soul just now is slightly frenzied. If I wrote calmly, unegoistically, it would be a lie. What is written is what I feel.
"Here and there some will approve this document. More will sneer at it. But it is mine. It is I. I sign it. It is my last will and testament in this community where once—daring to boast again—I have been a power.
"Friends—and enemies alike!—this final word.
"I have not grasped much, but this: To be true. When somebody trusts you worthily, make good. Be true, children, to the plans and to the hopes of parents. Be true, lad, to the impetuous girl who has trusted you with more than she should have trusted you. Be true, women, to your lovers and your husbands; men to your wives, your partners, your fellow men, your patrons; to your talents, your opportunities, your country, your age, your world! Be true to God! If you have no God, be true to your highest conception of what God ought to be.
"It sounds like a homily. It is a principle. You can multiply it indefinitely. It runs like a scarlet thread through religion, and it will go all around the borders of life.
"Eternal Loyalty is the Price of true Success.
"To this conviction I subscribe my name, myself and everything that still remains to me.
John felt that he wrote this and that he signed it in the presence of the Presence. The address and not the sermon was his valedictory.