that I need to preach to Rachel Jessup, otherwise she may wander into false creeds.”
They had been walking as they talked, but now Minta objected. “I need to sit for a moment, if you don’t mind.”
Rachel was immediately solicitous. “Of course, I’m sorry. Here’s a vacant piece of log in the shade.” She helped her down, and fussed about her for a moment.
Lewis was about to go on his way and leave the two women, when Minta said, “I’m fine, really. There’s no reason for you to sit around. Go on with Mr. Lewis and see what there is to see.”
Rachel hesitated for a moment. “All right, but I won’t be long, and then I’ll come back and keep you company.”
“Minta’s expecting her first child,” she confided when they were out of earshot. “She’s sick most of the time, but tries to keep going. That’s why Seth asked me to come and live with them, to give her a hand.”
“This child-bearing business is hard on some women,” Lewis said. “It wears them out, even the strong ones, and I don’t think your Minta was too robust to begin with.” So Betsy was right, he thought. He might have known.
“Do you have children, sir?”
“Yes, three boys. I had girls, but I’ve lost them all.”
His grief must have shown in his face. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Rachel said. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”
“It’s all right. It’s just that one of the losses is recent. I can’t help but believe that they’ve all gone to a better place, but I admit that I miss them sorely.”
Whatever she might have said in return was lost in the hubbub of the start of the meeting. William Case mounted the platform and gazed out over the crowd theatrically before he uttered his first words.
“Brothers and Sisters …” he began.
Lewis rather disliked William Case. He found him pompous and intolerant, failings that he knew are often ascribed to men of God, but in Case they were refined to an unbearable degree. He also had a reputation as a ladies’ man of sorts, but his specialty seemed to be marrying up lady preachers so as to shut them up. At least that was Lewis’s theory.
His first wife had been Hetty Hubbard, a local preacher who had had some success. But after Case married her, she mounted the pulpit no more. When she died a short time later, he took as his second wife the well-known preacher Eliza Barnes. She had been a popular speaker who had laboured hard among the Indian Missions. Case had professed on more than one occasion to detest her, and during her preaching days he even refused to sit on the same platform with her if she were scheduled to speak. Now that he’d married her, of course, he refused to allow her to say anything, much less profess the Word of God.
Lewis had heard Barnes preach on several occasions, and had admired her eloquence and the force of her voice, which carried easily to the farthest-flung of the congregation.
In the new order of Methodism, however, women were no longer encouraged to profess their faith in public, instead being relegated to the home on account of their “fragility.” Lewis knew this was nonsense, given the lives they led. Take Betsy, for example. For most of her life she had been about as frail as a draught horse, had given birth to ten children and raised them virtually alone, had suffered fevers and accidents and sorrows by the score, and yet was still able, on the days when her ague didn’t plague her, to work the average man into the ground. If Betsy had ever been inclined to take up the travelling connection and give public vent to her faith, Lewis would have encouraged and applauded her.
She had laughed when he said this to her at one time. “I declare, Thaddeus, that’s the last thing I would want to do. One of us on the road is enough.”
“But if you wanted to, I’d do my best to help you, you know.”
“No, Thaddeus. The only thing I ever wanted was you and the babies.”
And then her voice had softened. “I do thank you for saying it, though.”
Not so Case. And not so with most of the other Methodists, in spite of the fact that they had for years relied on women to supervise class meetings, to carry the gospel to the Indian Missions, and yes, even to preach wherever there was someone to listen. His church was falling into line with the Wesleyans, who had gone so far as to pass a resolution forbidding women from taking the pulpit, and men like William Case had agreed to it.
Lewis had seen how effective women could be, how they could move a crowd and stir its conscience. Why not let them, in a country that spread its people across countless miles and scattered them thinly across its face? It wasn’t as if there was a surfeit of male ministers.
By the time he realized that his reflections had caused him to lose track of what Case was saying, Lewis had missed the entire first part of the sermon. He chided himself for letting his mind wander.
Case was met with polite attention, but as the first speaker of the day, he failed to engender the wild enthusiasm that was the hallmark of the camp meeting. As the day wore on, however, each sermon would spur the frenzy of the crowd until, at the very end of the meeting, Case would speak again and claim the conversion of many.
But now it was the turn of the exhorter. James Simpson mounted the platform. It was the exhorter’s job to encourage the crowd to shout and proclaim their faith, to “do what was right.” He began with “Hallelujah!”
“Hallelujah,” the crowd shouted in return.
“I should go back and make sure Minta is all right,” Rachel said and she darted away before he could say goodbye.
Most of the crowd was sitting well back, but there were a number, mostly young folks, who crowded in a ring around the platform.
“Hallelujah, brothers and sisters,” the exhorter called.
“Hallelujah,” came the reply of many voices, although there were a few catcalls from the back. These meetings attracted mostly the sincere, but there were always a few who came along just to see what trouble they could cause.
“Haven’t you heard the news?” A voice came floating up to the platform.
Simpson ignored it.
“Hey, Preacher, haven’t you heard the news?” the voice persisted, “The devil is dead!”
Although he had barely seemed to acknowledge the heckling, Simpson now seized on this statement. “If the devil is dead,” he shouted to the crowd, “then I see he’s left a dreadful number of fatherless children!”
The crowd roared its approval, and he continued. “We are all fatherless children unless we acknowledge the true benevolence of the Lord Our God, who is truly our father. Like a father, he will forgive us. Like a father he will admit us to his House. Like a father he will love us, but only if we surrender ourselves to the Mercy of his Grace and give up our whole hearts to the joy of his Word.”
“Hallelujah!” the crowd shouted, and the heckler gave up. If there was anything a Methodist crowd admired, it was a ready wit, and Simpson had shown that he had it in abundance.
As the exhortation went on, Lewis realized that Rachel had worked her way through the throng of people and had rejoined him.
