Where politics did not cleave, other issues did. The Episcopal Church was cleft into a reform movement (and one unreformable). In his own denomination internal discord raged over such questions as diabolic pleasures and Apostolic music. He saw young people haled before the pulpit as before a tribunal of exact statutes and expelled for moving their feet in certain ways. If in dancing they whirled like a top instead of being shot straight back and forth like a bobbin in a weaver's shuttle, their moral conduct was aggravated. A church organ was ridiculed as a sort of musical Behemoth—as a dark chamber of howling, roaring Belial.
These controversies overflowed from the congregation to the Bible College. The lad in his room at the dormitory one Sunday afternoon heard a debate on whether a tuning fork is a violation of the word of God. The debaters turned to him excited and angry:—
"What do you think?" they asked.
"I don't think it is worth talking about," he replied quietly.
They soon became reconciled to each other; they never forgave him.
Meantime as for his Biblical studies, they enlarged enormously his knowledge of the Bible; but they added enormously to the questions that may be asked about the Bible—questions he had never thought of before. And in adding to the questions that may be asked, they multiplied those that cannot be answered. The lad began to ask these questions, began to get no answers. The ground of his interest in the great Book shifted. Out on the farm alone with it for two years, reading it never with a critical but always with a worshipping mind, it had been to him simply the summons to a great and good life, earthly and immortal. As he sat in the lecture rooms, studying it book by book, paragraph by paragraph, writing chalk notes about it on the blackboard, hearing the students recite it as they recited arithmetic or rhetoric, a little homesickness overcame him for the hours when he had read it at the end of a furrow in the fields, or by his candle the last thing at night before he kneeled to say his prayers, or of Sunday afternoons off by himself in the sacred leafy woods. The mysterious untouched Christ-feeling was in him so strong, that he shrank from these critical analyses as he would from dissecting the body of the crucified Redeemer.
A significant occurrence took place one afternoon some seven months after he had entered the University.
On that day, recitations over, the lad left the college alone and with a most thoughtful air crossed the campus and took his course into the city. Reaching a great central street, he turned to the left and proceeded until he stood opposite a large brick church. Passing along the outside of this, he descended a few steps, traversed an alley, knocked timidly at a door, and by a voice within was bidden to enter. He did so, and stood in his pastor's study. He had told his pastor that he would like to have a little talk with him, and the pastor was there to have the little talk.
During those seven months the lad had been attracting notice more and more. The Bible students had cast up his reckoning unfavorably: he was not of their kind—they moved through their studies as one flock of sheep through a valley, drinking the same water, nipping the same grass, and finding it what they wanted. His professors had singled him out as a case needing peculiar guidance. Not in his decorum as a student: he was the very soul of discipline. Not in slackness of study: his mind consumed knowledge as a flame tinder. Not in any irregularities of private life: his morals were as snow for whiteness. Yet none other caused such concern.
All this the pastor knew; he had himself long had his eye on this lad. During his sermons, among the rows of heads and brows and eyes upturned to him, oftenest he felt himself looking at that big shock-head, at those grave brows, into those eager, troubled eyes. His persistent demonstrations that he and his brethren alone were right and all other churches Scripturally wrong—they always seemed to take the light out of that countenance. There was silence in the study now as the lad modestly seated himself in a chair which the pastor had pointed out.
After fidgeting a few moments, he addressed the logician with a stupefying premise:—
"My great-grandfather," he said, "once built a church simply to God, not to any man's opinions of Him."
He broke off abruptly.
"So did Voltaire," remarked the pastor dryly, coming to the rescue. "Voltaire built a church to God: 'Erexit deo Voltaire' Your great-grandfather and Voltaire must have been kin to each other."
The lad had never heard of Voltaire. The information was rather prepossessing.
"I think I should admire Voltaire," he observed reflectively.
"So did the Devil," remarked the pastor. Then he added pleasantly, for he had a Scotch relish for a theological jest:—
"You may meet Voltaire some day."
"I should like to. Is he coming here?" asked the lad.
"Not immediately. He is in hell—or will be after the Resurrection of the Dead."
The silence in the study grew intense.
"I understand you now," said the lad, speaking composedly all at once. "You think that perhaps I will go to the Devil also."
"Oh, no!" exclaimed the pastor, hiding his smile and stroking his beard with syllogistic self-respect. "My dear young brother, did you want to see me on any—BUSINESS?"
"I did. I was trying to tell you. My great-grandfather—"
"Couldn't you begin with more modern times?"
"The story begins back there," insisted the lad, firmly. "The part of it, at least, that affects me. My great-grandfather founded a church free to all Christian believers. It stands in our neighborhood. I have always gone there. I joined the church there. All the different denominations in our part of the country have held services there. Sometimes they have all had services together. I grew up to think they were all equally good Christians in their different ways."
"Did you?" inquired the pastor. "You and your grandfather and Voltaire must ALL be kin to each other."
His visage was not pleasant.
"My trouble since coming to College," said the lad, pressing across the interruption, "has been to know which IS the right church—"
"Are you a member of THIS church?" inquired the pastor sharply, calling a halt to this folly.
"I am."
"Then don't you know that it is the only right one?"
"I do not. All the others declare it a wrong one. They stand ready to prove this by the Scriptures and do prove it to their satisfaction. They declare that if I become a preacher of what my church believes, I shall become a false teacher of men and be responsible to God for the souls I may lead astray. They honestly believe this."
"Don't you know that when Satan has entered into a man, he can make him honestly believe anything?"
"And you think it is Satan that keeps the other churches from seeing this is the only right one?"
"I do! And beware, young man, that Satan does not get into YOU!"
"He must be in me already." There was silence again, then the lad continued.
"All this is becoming a great trouble to me. It interferes with my studies—takes my interest out of my future. I come to you then. You are my pastor. Where is the truth—the reason—the proof—the authority? Where is the guiding LAW in all this? I must find THE LAW and that quickly."