CRUSADE OF THE CHILDREN
Some years ago, while the pastoral charge of the little Saxon village of Grönstetten, from some neglect in the proper authorities, remained vacant, that neighborhood was visited by a strange religious epidemic. It had formerly, indeed, been one of the most cheerful places; standing together, house by house, in the midst of a large, well cultivated plain, on which the fields, scarcely marked out from one another save by neighbourly tokens, stretched with their green level to the side, of the woods, only varied by the different colours of the several crops. The little old church, surrounded by a few spreading trees, stood at the end of the village on some higher ground, raising its gilded steeple into the blue air, so that it always seemed to be touched by an evening sun. Neither wall nor fence was to be seen, and the surrounding level looked like the single farm of a brotherhood; the peasants, noticing of a fine Sunday afternoon how the season had advanced their wheat or flax, appeared to a stranger almost as much interested in one patch as in another. Various games and exercises went on amongst the young men and boys after work and school hours, on the piece of common near the churchyard, while the young maidens and the old people with their children stood by. Nowhere were holidays, occasions of marriage, and old festival traditions more fondly kept; in every house at Christmas, while snow was on the ground and on the bare woods, the window shone so brightly against the icicles hanging from the roof, as the Christmas-tree, with its prettily-adorned branches, was lighted-up; and the whole united family surprised each other with carefully prepared gifts. Then at Easter time, when spring was bursting out of trees and earth, and the birds beginning to sing again, you might have seen with what joy the children rolled their coloured paschal eggs along the grass, parents entering into their feelings with smiles. It was a serious business for them to dress and water the graves under the church wall, wreathing the small head-stones with garlands of fresh wild-flowers, gathered about the ruins of the old castle, which rose on a neighbouring height. Nor did many evenings ever pass that there was not some meeting of the young people in one of the village houses, where the girls brought their spindles, or pieces of cloth to make a bedcover for the dame; while the youths stood by to seize the opportunity for sundry advances of rustic courtship. All this gaiety was by no means inconsistent with the industry in which this resembled other villages of the district; and as little did it result from any want of earnestness and serious thought in matters of religion, or in the attendance upon those services to which the church in due season called every one. For it was while the venerable old pastor lived, that this state of things lasted at Grönstetten. The good man himself diffused by his presence among them, as well as by his precepts, a spirit not only of devotion, but of cheerfulness; nor would he have failed, in case of any causeless absence from church, or on occasion of a breach of morality, to visit, and faithfully reprove the offender. Even after his death, when the services were only occasionally performed by strangers, the change of feeling in the village would not have occurred, but for some other circumstances; doubtless the people themselves possessed sufficient independence and ground of faith to pursue their lives according, to the true temper of rational men, had none interfered with them.
But, about this time, there came frequently to Grönstetten several preachers of a new and almost unknown sect, and of a cast altogether different from what the people had been accustomed to. These persons considered that in time past at Grönstetten all had been in a manner spiritually dead; that men there, indeed, were as good as asleep to all eternal realities, or were at best dreamers of false peace. Not only did they, in their fervid addresses, exaggerate the vileness of human nature, and set it against itself, but the idea of goodness placed by them before the mind, seemed one wholly different from its own direction of progress, if not altogether unattainable. Many simple natural affections were by them almost represented as sinful, while they looked upon the customary diversions in the light of unholy levities, and upon the old holiday practices as traditions quite heathenish. In short, the heaven to which they pointed so mystically, appeared to consist in an utter contrast to all conceptions which were ever formed on earth, to every joy which had been felt by men, even in their moments of purest contact with each other and nature; the reward of some great sacrifice and toil, which were to be undergone. There was much talk of strange, unutterable changes to take place on the earth, for which preparation was to be made; and the new preachers exulted in the interpretation of prophecies, which they fancied could be understood beforehand, in making men uneasy at thought of all outward coming of the Lord, of wars, and destruction, which would make the world worse than ever it had been. Their meeting-house, opened in an old barn, was at first frequented chiefly by women, since the men and older people had a natural dislike to innovation; but eventually the very newness of the doctrine began to gain ground for it, and the fact of its being so distinct from that of the late pastor, only tended to reflect upon his memory. There is, certainly, something in our nature, by which those things most opposed to it, as in a kind of fascination at times lay hold of it; so in hateful dreams or ghost-fears. Especially if the soul be not regularly furnished with supplies of healthy and cheerful enlightenment; and thus it was that this kind of unearth-like religion, imported by men of zeal for the most part sincere and also assisted by sympathy with other places in the neighbourhood, exerted so much influence at the village of Grönstetten. The first symptom of this was exhibited in a certain secret discomfort at home, a sense of division between persons of the same household, which made them look strangely and wonderingly on each other. It seemed, indeed, to be a principal and favourite object of the new-comers to gain over the female members; they aimed their chief blow at the family sacredness, alleging the words, "I am come to set the husband against the wife, the son against the father, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law." People came to feel nature also as discordant with themselves; the very grass and trees, and the quietness of the air, seemed to many not so good as before; the mute, inanimate things appeared almost as so many tempting wiles of a hidden power which was below, working through all, and meaning man evil. One would have thought, as they stood listlessly at their doors of an evening, looking beyond into the distance, that they would have taken up staff or scrip and set out on pilgrimage, had they but known where to go, or what to do. After all, however, this state of matters wore itself out, and gradually returned to something like the former; nor would any one have been the worse, rather, in truth, a little wiser, upon the eventual settlement of a new pastor at Grönstetten. Only, indeed, that a few who had not joined in the late feeling, and who had previously been united to their neighbours by intercourse, had for the time seemed to be excluded from their better sympathies, became more worldly, and were inclined to scoff at holy things. As in all cases of extremes, the bad had grown more addicted to vice, none stretching out to them a better hand; and it was long ere a reviving sense of brotherhood did much to raise them higher.
Still the most peculiar feature of this excitement was, that, as if its impulse must extend through every class, the younger people latterly showed signs of a religious emotion, yet stronger and more remarkable than in those less subject to impressions from their years. What they saw and heard in others had sunk into the children's minds, which brooded upon it as if upon the sense of some dispeace, and contradiction at the heart of domestic forms; as if to their clearer instinct various inconsistencies in the practice of life, nay in the parental relations, had been revealed; yet for which the true remedy had been by them misconceived. This appeared with many of them partly in the shape of impatience to go forth into the world, a weariness when the sun light, shining into the cottage, stole from chair to chair, and the clock ticked monotonously against the wall. Something that was to be done and suffered seemed to lie far without; the object of their lives and souls, from which friends, parents, with their daily earth-customs, were tyrannically withholding them. But chiefly, perhaps, from ill-judged, dealing with this vague desire, was it frequently betrayed in enthusiastic words, in a sort of unaccountable, ecstasy in trances, which some reckoned prophetic. Instead of the life-like, careless, childish games, and little quaint devices, which formerly enlivened the house or open air, they gathered together praying, as if for the fulfilment of an unspeakable distantlonging; they went up the street, or across the fields, singing devout hymns. One or another at home would stand up by the table, unabashed by the presence of elder people, and speak from the seeming influence of some internal communication, mystical, half-articulate words, and piously-sounding reproofs or exhortations. It was in vain to chide or chastise them; trustful obedience, humility, content with home, simple duties, cheerful playfulness, were during this interval
