Red and Black

THEIR first sight of each other—Red and Black—was across the space which stretches between pulpit and pew. It’s sometimes a wide space, and impassable; again, it’s not far, and the lines of communication are always open. In this case, neither of them knew, as yet, just what the distance was.

Black—Robert McPherson Black—if you want his full name, had been a bit nervous in the vestry where he put on his gown. He had been preaching only five years, and that in a Southern country parish, when a visiting committee of impressive looking men had come to listen to him—had come again—and once more—and then had startled him with a call to the big suburban town and the fine old, ivy-grown church generally known as the “Stone Church.”

“But, gentlemen,” he had said, swinging about quickly in his study chair when Mr. Lockhart, the chairman of the committee, had asked him if he would consider a call—“I’m—I’m—why, I’m not good enough for you!”

The committee had smiled—it was quite a remarkable committee, and had a sense of humour. At least Samuel Lockhart had, and one other of the five who were waiting upon Mr. Black in his study after the evening service.

“Meaning virtue—or ability?” inquired the chairman, with his friendly smile.

“Both. You see—well, to put it honestly—I’m just a country boy as yet, born in Scotland and brought up in your South. I haven’t had the training——”

“Very good things have come out of the country—and Scotland—and the South,” Mr. John Radway had suggested. “And I believe you are a graduate of—a perfectly satisfactory college and seminary, and have built this church up from desertion to popularity——”

Well, they had had it out on those lines, and others, in the next hour, the committee falling more and more in love with its candidate—if so emotional a phrase may be used of the feelings stirred in the breasts of five middle-aged, steady-going, sensible men—as they watched the young man’s face go from pale to red and back again, and heard him tell them not only what he thought he was not, but what he thought they might not be either—in so frank and winning a way that the more he wasn’t sure he’d better come the surer they were he must!

In the end he came—called and accepted, after the modern methods, wholly on the judgment of the committee, for he had refused absolutely and finally to come and preach a candidating sermon. So when he emerged from the vestry door, on that first May Sunday, he faced for the first time his newly acquired congregation, and the church faced for the first time its minister-elect. Which was wholly as it should be, and the result was a tremendously large audience, on tiptoe with interest and curiosity.

Red was not in the congregation when Black first came in through the vestry door. Instead, as usual, he was racing along the road in a very muddy car, trying to make four calls in the time in which he should really have made two, because his wife had insisted very strenuously that he should do his best to get to church on that particular morning. It seemed that she had learned that the new minister was from the South, and she, being a Southerner, naturally felt an instant sense of loyalty. It was mighty seldom that Red could ever be got to church, not so much because he didn’t want to go—though he didn’t, really, unless the man he was to hear was exceptionally good—as because he couldn’t get around to it, not once in a blue moon—or a Sunday morning sun. And if, by strenuous exertion, he did arrive at church, there was one thing which almost invariably happened—so what was the use? The young usher for Doctor Burns’ aisle always grinned when he saw him come in, because he knew perfectly that within a very short time, he, the usher, would be tiptoeing down the aisle and whispering in the ear below the heavy thatch of close-cropped, fire-red hair. And then Doctor Burns’ attending church for that day would be over.