THE next morning the parson was standing before his scant congregation of Episcopalians.
It was the first body of these worshippers gathered together in the wilderness mainly from the seaboard aristocracy of the Church of England.Asmall frame building on the northern slope of the wide valley served them for a meeting-house.No mystical half-lights there but the mystical half-lights of Faith; no windows but the many-hued windows of Hope; no arches but the vault of Love.What more did those men and women need in that land, over-shadowed always by the horror of quick or waiting death?
In addition to his meagre flock many an unclaimed goat of the world fell into that meek valley-path of Sunday mornings and came to hear, if not to heed, the voice of this quiet shepherd; so that now, as be stood delivering his final exhortation, his eyes ranged over wild, lawless, desperate countenances, rimming him darkly around.They glowered in at him through the door, where some sat upon the steps; others leaned in at the windows on each side of the room.Over the closely packed rough heads of these he could see others lounging further away on the grass beside their rifles, listening, laughing and talking.Beyond these stretched near fields green with maize, and cabins embosomed in orchards and gardens.Once a far-off band of children rushed across his field of vision, playing at Indian warfare and leaving in the bright air a cloud of dust from an old Indian war trail.
As he observed it all--this singularly mixed concourse of God-fearing men and women and of men and women who feared neither God nor man nor devil--as he beheld the young fields and the young children and the sweet transition of the whole land from bloodshed to innocence, the recollection of his mission in it and of the message of his Master brough out upon his cold, bleak, beautiful face the light of the Divine: so from a dark valley one may sometime have seen a snow-clad peak of the Alps lit up with the rays of the hidden sun.
He had chosen for his text the words "My peace I give unto you," and long before the closing sentences were reached, his voice was floating out with silvery, flute-like clearness on the still air of the summer morning, holding every soul, however unreclaimed, to intense and reverential silence:
"It is now twenty years since you scaled the mountains and hewed your path into this wilderness, never again to leave it.Since then you have known but war.As I look into your faces, I see the scar of many a wound; but more than the wounds I see are the wounds I do not see: of the body as well as of the spirit--the lacerations of sorrow, the strokes of bereavement.So that perhaps not one of you here but bears some brave visible or invisible sin of this awful past and of his share in the common strife.Twenty years are a long time to fight enemies of any kind, a long time to bold out against such as you have faced; and had you not been a mighty people sprung from the loins of a mighty race, no one of you would be here this day to worship the God of your fathers in the faith of your fathers.The victory upon which you are entering at last is never the reward of the feeble, the cowardly, the faint-hearted.Out of your strength alone you have won your peace.
"But, O my brethren, while your land is now at peace, are you at peace? In the name of my Master, look each of you into his heart and answer: Is it not still a wilderness? full of the wild beasts of the appetites? the favourite hunting-ground of the passions? And is each of you, tried and faithful and fearless soldier that he may be on every other field, is each of you doing anything to conquer this?""My cry to-day then is the war-cry of the spirit.Subdue the wilderness within you! Step by step, little by little, as you have fought your way across this land from the Eastern mountains to the Western river, driven out every enemy and now hold it as your own, begin likewise to take possession of the other until in the end you may rule it also.If you are feeble; if fainthearted; if you do not bring into your lonely, silent, unwitnessed battles every virtue that you have relied on in this outward warfare of twenty years, you may never hope to come forth conquerors.By your strength, your courage, patience, watchfulness, constancy,--by the in-most will and beholden face of victory you are to overmaster the evil within yourselves as you have overmastered the peril in Kentucky.""Then in truth you may dwell in green and tranquil pastures, where the will of God broods like summer light.Then you may come to realize the meaning of this promise of our Lord, 'My peace I give unto you': it is the gift of His peace to those alone who have learned to hold in quietness their land of the spirit."White, cold, aflame with holiness, he stood before them; and every beholder, awe-stricken by the vision of that face, of a surety was thinking that this man's life was behind his speech: whether in ease or agony, he had found for his nature that victory of rest that was never to be taken from him.
