Voices; Birth-Marks; The Man and the Elephant Part 28

He walked home with Mrs. Fairfax and Dorothy. It was one of the most attractive places in Danville. Practically all of its furnis.h.i.+ng had been imported from England to Virginia by Lord Fairfax and brought by his nephew's family to Kentucky.

In the drawing room were magnificent mirrors, fine tapestries, a virginal and hand lyre; the floor was covered with heavy velvet carpets and the window curtains were of the finest linen lace; in an alcove was a large and well-selected library. On the hall walls hung portraits of preceding generations, some by great masters; and in the beamed dining room a ma.s.sive sideboard was covered with silver plate which bore the heraldic symbol of one of the first families of Old England.

After her mother left them, Dorothy, the aristocrat, talked with John, the newly-ordained circuit rider preacher about their marriage. John said: "I wish to impress upon you that I am a tramp preacher, a calling which in this new country, forces me to tramp long distances by forest trails from one settlement to another and to be from home weeks at a time." Nor did Dorothy count such marriage a sacrifice, as after he left, with eyes overflowing with tears of happiness, she thanked G.o.d that He had given her John.

They agreed that they would marry as soon as his territory had been a.s.signed by the Presbytery; in the meanwhile he was to go home and help with the harvest.

Mid-afternoon of the tenth of June, John, laying aside his cradle, sickle in hand was gleaning the last of the wheat about the fence corners and stumps of the two-acre field. It is the first they have grown since leaving Virginia. He planted it the October before, thinking of his wife to be and his mother.

Corn pone bread, baked in the Dutch oven, heated by being buried in the red hot coals of the great fireplace was all right for the Colonel and himself, in fact, they preferred it; but Dorothy and his mother should have wheaten bread, which could now be ground and bolted at the water mill at c.u.mberland Falls.

As almost in tenderness he bound and knotted the last bundle, some one near called.

"John! John!"

Thrilled, he turned, Dorothy stood before him-and he caught her and held her in his arms.

"Father Rice and mother are at the house. You have been a.s.signed to this district, in which you are to live and establish new churches. It is nearly a hundred miles square; there is only one church and you are the only preacher. You are to begin work on the first of July; and so to be with you the longer before you leave, I have come to you, John. Father Rice and mother thought I should do this. We shall live here as it is near the center of your district. He has all the papers ready and must go on at once to Powell's Valley, where he preaches tonight. Kiss me as much as you wish, but hurry, John. He is waiting to marry us; if you are not ready, he can do it when he returns in about a week-I thought that would hurry you a bit."

John, absent-minded in his happiness, picked up the sickle, and carrying it in his left hand, with his right arm around Dorothy's waist, hastened towards the house. There, after greetings, and without further preparation on John's part, other than removing his hat, they were married.

At the close of the service, Father Rice, in his prayer, called attention to the sickle, which unconsciously John still held, and when he released Dorothy's hand, had transferred from his left to his right hand. "* * * Oh, Lord! We know that you will bless this union of faithful hearts; and the work which thy harvester will soon a.s.sume. As he now stands ready, make him fit and ready for thy harvest in this his field, where the grain is ripe and waiting; and may he never leave it except to gladden a heart as he has done today, standing as now prepared to return. * * *"

Only those who love as did these two, can understand the happiness of that Valley honeymoon, which lasted until John was forced to go to work.

Though their journey was but to the Pinnacle and home again and the bride's trousseau in the main of homespun and buckskin, they knew of nothing more and wished for no greater blessings than were theirs.

One late afternoon, when the breeze blew cool, and the shadow of the western mountains covered half the valley, they left home; John carrying a hamper of good things and a blanket for Dorothy; and climbed to the Pinnacle, just as the sun sank behind the distant western hills. They watched the red and the gold of the sunset s.h.i.+ft and fade to purple and then to a night gray; and while the stars were struggling to show themselves in the light, half day, half night, the golden red harvest moon came up over the eastern mountains and greeted them with his full ruddy face and broad smile-and Dorothy smiled back, saying: "The man up there is an awful flirt. No wonder a woman grows less coy under first the golden, now the silver mantle of his smile."

When the night grew old and was gray from the morning light they walked home again; knowing yet more intimately and loving the more, their mountains, the valley and the trackless wilderness beyond.

John brought the wealth of a princely intellect, an educated and quietly happy mind and tireless energy as his offering to the church. Character takes color from its surroundings and he seemed to possess the impenetrable calmness of the mountains.

His work called him from one distant settlement to another. It was his practice to travel from twenty to forty miles a day and preach at night.

Occasionally his work required him to stop for several days in a place to organize a church or to hold a protracted meeting or to build a church. He was called upon to marry couples, to organize schools, to visit the sick, to bury the dead and to arbitrate neighborhood controversies.

Wherever he went, he carried a holy influence which in a year or two spread over his district and an improved social and spiritual influence seemed to follow his preaching as a benediction.

He broke no appointments because of swollen streams, deep snows or other physical causes. If the horse gave out or the stream was too turbid to swim horseback, he dismounted and picketing him, swam across, his Bible within his c.o.o.n skin cap and the cap tied tight beneath his chin.

He rode along the trails carrying his Bible and a reference book or two in his saddle bags. When the trail was one the horse knew and would follow, he gave him the rein and studied as he rode along.

Wherever he stopped at night, after family prayers, which he asked the privilege of conducting if not asked; he sat until very late before the open light-wood fire and prepared the outline for his next day's sermon.

Frequently he was forced to camp in the forest; then he built a great fire and by its light worked long and zealously upon another sermon. He knew the solitudes; and having lived the life of those to whom he preached, he knew his hearers and from homely incidents in their lives or from the parables ill.u.s.trated his sermons, talking to half a dozen primitive settlers with the same conscientious fervor as when his audience was of considerable proportions because of some social or political gathering in the neighborhood.

After the first few months he was treated with respect by all the residents of his district. Occasionally visitors were not so respectful.

Once at a distant county seat, he put up for the night at a tavern where several lawyers, attending court, were quartered. Seeing him reading his Bible before the fire, and rather to test his mettle than in an irreverent spirit, they began discussing the subject of religion; but he seemed not to hear. When the time came to retire the landlord, as was the custom of the country, invited him to lead the evening's devotions.

He read a chapter, then all knelt in prayer. In his deep, kindly voice he prayed: "* * * O Lord! Thou hast heard the conversation tonight, pardon its folly * * *" and the lawyers, impressed by his earnestness and repentant of their folly, asked his pardon also.

It was at no small cost of danger and privation that he preached the gospel to these distant settlements. He never carried a rifle and had never felt that his life was in danger. Several times when he sat alone at night by his wilderness camp fire he would hear a stealthy tread behind him, but knew better than to turn or even move in a startled way.

Sometimes he would hear the steps approach very near and after several minutes silently steal away again. He knew his girdle had again protected him.

Once or twice several Indians came out of the night and sat beside his camp fire talking with him in the Mingo tongue; and once several of his Mingo friends spent the night at his camp fire. They were in the country for the purpose of attacking some isolated settlement; and when he asked them to leave the "Long Knives" of his district alone, they reluctantly consented.

When it was rumored Indians were about, the settlers offered to act as guard to his next appointment; but he a.s.sured them he was in no danger when unarmed and unaccompanied. This they came to believe.

Slowly his reputation as an exemplary citizen and a preacher of power and conviction was made, and his influence as an earnest advocate and defender of the new Union made his district the strongest Federalist section of Kentucky. Yet more slowly there spread about a belief that he was gifted with the miraculous power of curing by laying his hands upon the head of the sick. It was told that several times after he did this and kneeling prayed beside his bed, the raving of delirium ceased and after a long sleep the patient speedily recovered.

As head of the Presbytery Father Rice began to get letters and to be importuned: "Send us Reverend Calvin Campbell; our district is much more populous than the one to which he has been a.s.signed and needs just such a preacher. * * *" Special messengers were sent to him from the Can Run and Forks of d.i.c.k's River churches requesting that he help in their protracted meetings. These invitations were declined, because his large district which was growing rapidly provided more labor than he could perform.

Thus it came about that Dorothy saw less and less of her husband. She too was busy, else she might have rebelled at the loneliness or by importunities have hindered her husband's work. Mrs. Campbell had grown feeble; there were baby clothes to make; and many people visited them, coming to Kentucky or returning to Virginia; these must be cooked for and entertained. Every hunter or trader of the district thought it a duty to call at the preacher's house and stopped overnight or remained for a meal. They left a ham of venison or a brace of turkeys or a deer skin for Mrs. Campbell; and always wanted to know how soon their preacher was coming to their station. At the end of the first year Dorothy, because of these inquiries and John's mail, realized that her husband, locally at least, was becoming a famous man and paying the price of greatness.

Father Rice in the spring of 1791 rode up to the house one afternoon and said to Dorothy: "I have come to help Calvin out for a couple of weeks; but he must pay me back by attending the Presbytery and filling my appointments at Danville, Lexington and Little Mountain."

John came home that night; the next day they preached to a big gathering at Powell's River Meeting House. After the meeting, which beginning in the afternoon lasted until eleven o'clock, he rode home alone, leaving Father Rice to follow in the morning. It was nearly two o'clock when the long ride was ended; but it gave him a few hours more with his wife.

While Father Rice remained they held meetings at each of the five churches of his district, four of which had been organized by him. It was true they were little more than large pens of logs, covered by a clapboard roof and warmed by a great fireplace built of mud and sticks; but they were crowded at every service and many stood outside looking in and listening at the doors and windows. They were as sheep seeking a fold and came great distances to find one.

When the meetings closed they left to attend Transylvania Presbytery at Danville. There he met again an old acquaintance, Robert Marshall, who when a boy of sixteen had been wounded in the battle of Monmouth and had come home with Colonel Campbell to rest and grow strong again. Several months before he had moved from Virginia to Kentucky.

After the Presbytery adjourned the three went to Lexington and John filled Father Rice's pulpit.

The Lexington Gazette made favorable mention of his sermon:

"Calvin Campbell, the young mountain preacher, who lives at Campbell Station and is a descendant of the Campbells of Scotland, filled Father Rice's pulpit last Sunday and preached one of the greatest sermons ever heard in Lexington.

"In a voice of great compa.s.s and power, without strain or apparent mental effort, and in a deft, finished and homiletic style, plain to all in its perfectness, he made plain the most difficult of truths; dwelling upon scriptural interpretation rather than doctrinal theme. All who heard him were captivated by his magnetism and convinced by his earnest spirituality. We have never before heard a preacher who could picture the life and mission of the Saviour so effectively, or who by apt lessons from the parables makes the truths they teach so personal to each hearer."

The following Sunday John preached in Danville, where he had many friends and acquaintances. A great crowd came to hear him. It was here he had gone to the seminary, had married Dorothy Fairfax and at the political club had answered most convincingly, considering his age, General Wilkinson's then popular argument. His sermon which follows indicates his liberal, and as Father Rice felt tempted to say, his almost unorthodox views.

Making the World Christian.

"Christianity is the development of a great universal partners.h.i.+p, organized for the redemption of man, between G.o.d in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and man; in which man before Abraham, and Abraham, Moses, Paul, Augustine, Savonarola and Luther have partic.i.p.ated and men yet unborn will partic.i.p.ate.

"Though light was the first thing G.o.d made, man to shut out light draws closely about his eyes the curtains of conceit and prejudice. The white man, defining his G.o.d as a spirit, in his conceit says, he has a material white body and I am made in his image; while the red man gives to his G.o.d, a spirit, at times a material red body. This is logical in that if G.o.d, a spirit, sees fit to appear to man, or if man appears to see G.o.d, it will be in the highest comprehensive form known to man.

"Again, though Christianity is one of the three religions that teaches universality and though G.o.d knows no race and no people, extending to all a universal promise, man in combined conceit and prejudice declares I am of G.o.d's chosen people. The reason is obvious; take Judaism; it has never countenanced universality; to the Jew, G.o.d was the G.o.d of the Jews-and surrounded by idolatrous nations-to their inspired prophets they were the chosen people of G.o.d, having been taught by precept and by experience that G.o.d discriminates in his temporal blessings between an idolater and a follower. It took a vision to remove this prejudice from the mind of Peter; and today there are those in Christian churches who could not learn the lesson of universality by many visions, and like Jonah sit by the roadside hoping and waiting for Nineveh's destruction.

"G.o.d, infinite-that is, great past being measured-is not alone the G.o.d of the Presbyterians, of any nation, of the men of today, of this little world, but all the worlds that have been and that make and are to make the universe. What right have we to think that the universe was made simply for the man we know? Is it an unreasonable flight of fancy to a.s.sume that G.o.d has spoken through his prophets and given his Son for the redemption of the men of other worlds than our own? The Bible literally says, the universe was made for man, because, though inspired, it is man-worded and G.o.d spoke to man through his prophets in a comprehensive language. He told what was fit in language not to be restricted to the letter, which is not the custom of the East, but to be interpreted as man grew in comprehension. Nor is it necessary to a true faith in G.o.d and Christianity to believe that G.o.d's prophets never spoke to humanity or wrote down his messages on tablet or cylinder seal before those messages were given by the Bible to the Jewish nation.

"Those who question the Bible as an inspired book, say the account of the creation follows too closely the Babylonian and Chaldean records.

Prophets even figuratively recounting a fact or interpreting a message, would give it in such form that to the mind of man, the account would be similar in essentials; and such similarity but tends to prove the truth of the fact and the same general source of information. A brief portion of the Chaldean account reads:

"'When the upper region was not yet called heaven, When the lower region was not yet called earth, And the abyss of Hades had not yet opened its arms, Then the chaos of waters gave birth to all of them And the waters were gathered into one place * *