An Auld Licht Minister

by J. M. Barrie

 

AN AULD LICHT MINISTER.

BY J. M. BARRIE

NEVER was there a man more uncomfortably loved than our Auld Licht minister. Easie Haggart, his maid-servant, reproved him at the breakfast table. Old wives and grey-beards grumbled by their hearths when he did not look in to despair of their salvation. The maidens of his congregation he told to beware lest they made an idol of him. His two leading elders saw him in conversation with a strange woman, and asked him, in an anonymous letter, if he remembered that he had a wife. Twenty were his years when be came among us, and he knocked a board out of the pulpit the first Sabbath. Before beginning his trial sermon he handed the big Bible down to the precentor to give his arms freer swing. The congregation, in a tremble of excitement, probed his meaning. Not a square inch of paper could be concealed there. Mr. Dishart had hardly any hope for the Auld Lichts. He had none for any other body. Davit Lunan got behind his handkerchief to take a pinch of snuff, and he was on him like a tiger. The call was unanimous. Lunan proposed him.

Every few years the Auld Licht a Scottish church gave way, so to speak, and buried the minister. The congregation turned its empty pockets inside out, and the pastor departed in a farmer's cart. To the Auld Lichts was there the humiliation of seeing their pulpit supplied on alternate Sabbaths by itinerant probationers and stickit ministers. But when they were not starving themselves to support a pastor, they were saving up for a stipend. They retired with compressed lips to their looms and weaved till they weaved another minister. Without the grief of parting with one pastor, there could not be the excitement of choosing another. To have had a minister with them always would have puffed them up.

The Auld Lichts were seldom more than twelve months in making a selection, and in their haste they would have passed our Mr. Dishart and mated with a monster. So many years have elapsed since a providential hand tore the mask from Mr. Watts's face, that no near relative can survive to be pained by a recital of the circumstances. Mr. Watts was a probationer who had occasionally supplied the pulpit, and though not so young as might have been wished (for he had now reached four-and-twenty years), he was seemly in Auld Licht eyes. It was a bumpy parish, and the dominie called approving attention to the way he lifted his legs. He came to Croup with a great reputation, having once on the fast-day refused a token to his wife; and there seemed to be good stuff in a preacher who stopped his sermon to thunder forth, "Sluggard in the laft, awake!" But a breeze from heaven exposed him on Communion Sabbath.

On the evening of this most solemn day the door of the Auld Licht kirk was closed, and the congregation, instead of hobbling to their worn, shining seats, trooped, with their Bibles in their hands, down the Tanage brae. They had a prescriptive right to the public common, or commonty, on Communion Sabbath, and they were not given to miss their chances. It was the Covenanters come back to life. To the summit of the slope a wooden box was slowly hauled by the Auld Licht Session, and round this reverent Auld Lichts and interested outsiders quietly grouped. The sun, drawing itself together in the heavens, no longer intruded on the commonty, and all the braes and houses echoed the cracked and agitated Auld Licht bell.

With slow, majestic tread, the Session advanced up the sloping award, with the boyish minister in its midst, and more cherubic he could scarce have looked though they had been about to offer him up for sacrifice. Communion Sabbath was his grandest opportunity for a sustained effort. Then he held his congregation in the palm of his hand, and the more he squeezed them, the better they were pleased. The box consisted of two compartments—one for the minister, and the other, the lower, for the precentor. He would have been a poor creature who thought this pulpit resembled a puppet-show. The enthusiasm of the boy in the pulpit, who was really wonderful for his size, killed criticism, and Lang Tammas lingered over the psalm-lines with unctuous effect. This was the "tent-preaching."

Mr. Watts was conducting the services on the commonty. It was a fine, still night, and but for the whining of an occasional dog, the clerical drone alone broke the silence. The minister passed from "lastly and briefly" to "I cannot allow this opportunity to pass," and the Auld Lichts bowed their beads in emphatic approval. He seemed in a fair way to beat all past record, when a rush of wind tore up the common and ran straight at the pulpit. It formed in a sieve and passed over the heads of the multitude, who looked up in awe. Lang Tammas in his box below distinctly heard the leaves of the pulpit Bible shiver. Mr. Watts's hands, outstretched to prevent a dire catastrophe, were blown against his side, and twenty sheets of closely written paper floated into the air. The minister (if such he can be called) shrunk back in the box appalled, and the horrified congregation slowly realized that Mr. Watts, the man whom they bad been on the point of calling, "read" from a "paper" concealed in the pulpit. Ten minutes afterwards the Session alone were on the commonty. They looked a little curious, jumping, like trout at flies, at the damning evidence of the minister's guilt fluttering in the air. To sit under a pastor who "read" was to the Auld Lichts like claiming heaven on false pretences.

Mr. Dishart's manner in the pulpit was a remarkable instance of what early application can accomplish. At the age of ten he had entered the University, and from far and near strangers went to his father's kirk to see the inspired boy practising the art of gesticulation in a front gallery pew. The seed sown in those days of his comparative youth bore rich fruit in our Auld Licht Kirk. So long as the pulpit cushions lasted, we only saw him dimly in a cloud of dust, and perhaps it was too much as if he were burning incense. He introduced headaches. Once in a superb transport of enthusiasm he flung his arms over the pulpit and struck Lang Tammas on the head. He would balance himself on his chest on the pulpit boards and pommel the Evil One with both hands, then he would whirl round to the left and clench his fist at Mag Tamson's bonnet. With a marvellous jump be would be on Sam'l Todd's laddie, profanely catching flies. Stiff and erect, he would leap three times in the air. He would gather himself together in a corner for a terrific spring. When you wanted to slip a peppermint lozenge into your mouth, you never knew when you had him. When he wept he seemed to be laughing, and he laughed in a paroxysm of tears. He battled the pulpit door and punched the pulpit trappings with a vindictiveness that was hardly Christian. When he ceased to whirl like a windmill, he assumed the appearance of a pump. The pump pose was the more terrible, for then he glared motionless at Tibbie Mealmaker, as if the upraised arm, or handle, had stuck. It was the calm that presages the storm. Tibbie bore up bravely under the windmill, but the pump affected her to tears. She was stone deaf.

For the first year of his ministry an Auld Licht pastor was a mouse in a circle of cats. The community watched intently for unsound doctrine, both in the kirk and out of it, and when the minister diverged from the narrow path they had him in an instant by the neck. Mr. Dishart, however, who was one of the finest men I ever knew, had been brought up in the true way, and the congregation grew in time despondent. They sat back in their pews with all suspicion of lurking heresy allayed; and only when Mr. Dishart and another minister exchanged pulpits did they lean forward to snap the preacher up. Mr. Dishart was not without his trials. Lang Tammas objected to his unseemly running between stricken houses to save time. It was much questioned whether he did right in insisting that the "ladle" should be handed up to the pulpit for his donation. Those who should have known said that he felt deeply the shortsightedness of the old parish church minister. When Mr. Volume first met him he made a mistake, and clapping him on the head told him he would be a man yet. Then there was the memorable split in the congregation, which comes once in a lifetime to every Auld Licht minister.

The congregation were thinking of approaching him through the medium of Easie Haggart, on the subject of matrimony, for he was turned twenty and had seventy pounds a year, when one day he disappeared in the Edinburgh coach, and when he returned his bride accompanied him. The Auld Lichts nodded their sapient heads into each others faces, but said nothing to the minister. If he did not choose to take them into his confidence, it was no business of theirs. When Sandy Whamond lost his eldership, his wife, Bell Dundas, said that Mrs. Dishart, before her marriage, had been a U.P. But though there was something mysterious about her, the minister would hardly have gone that length.

Easie Haggart was among the thorns in Mr. Dishart's flesh. When he had company, she stood at the door and joined in the congregation. If another minister was present she took a chair and discussed Mr. Dishart's infirmities. The Auld Lichts loved their pastor with a fervour passing the love of women, but they saw even more clearly than himself the necessity for his humiliation. He made his children's boots and taught them, but his Session once complained that his wife looked too like their sister. The latter years of his life was weighed down by a debt of four pounds that his creditor had forgotten all about. He paid it in sixpences and pennies, and died happy.