Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17.djvu/338

330 we continner to give as much as five hundred dollars to the old Doctor, and make the best dicker we can with the new minister; and I'll clap ten dollars on to my pew-rent; and the Deacon there, if he's anything of a man, 'll do as much agin. I know he's able to."

Let no one smile. The halting prudence, the inevitable calculating process through which the small country New-Englander arrives at his charities, is but the growth of his associations. He gets hardly; and what he gets hardly he must bestow with self-questionings. If he lives "in the small," he cannot give "in the large." His pennies, by the necessities of his toil, are each as big as pounds; yet his charities, in nine cases out of ten, bear as large a proportion to his revenue as the charities of those who count gains by tens of thousands. Liberality is, after all, comparative, and is exceptionally great only when its sources are exceptionally small. That "widow's mite"—the only charity ever specially commended by the great Master of charities—will tinkle pleasantly on the ear of humanity ages hence, when the clinking millions of cities are forgotten.

The new arrangement all comes to the ear of Reuben, who writes back in a very brusque way to the Doctor: "Why on earth, father, don't you cut all connection with the parish? You've surely done your part in that service. Don't let the 'minister's pay' be any hindrance to you, for I am getting on swimmingly in my business ventures,—thanks to Mr. Brindlock. I enclose a check for two hundred dollars, and can send you one of equal amount every quarter, without feeling it. Why shouldn't a man of your years have rest?"

And the Doctor, in his reply, says: "My rest, Reuben, is God's work. I am deeply grateful to you, and only wish that your generosity were hallowed by a deeper trust in His providence and mercy. O Reuben! Reuben! a night cometh, when no man can work! You seem to imagine, my son, that some slight has been put upon me by recent arrangements in the parish. It is not so; and I am sure that none has been intended. A servant of Christ can receive no reproach at the hands of his people, save this,—that he has failed to warn them of the judgment to come, and to point out to them, the ark of safety."

Correspondence between the father and son is not infrequent in these days; for, since Reuben has slipped away from home control utterly,—being now well past one and twenty,—the Doctor has forborne that magisterial tone which, in his old-fashioned way, it was his wont to employ, while yet the son was subject to his legal authority. Under these conditions, Reuben is won into more communicativeness,—even upon those religious topics which are always prominent in the Doctor's letters; indeed, it would seem that the son rather enjoyed a little logical fence with the old gentleman, and a passing lunge, now and then, at his severities; still weltering in his unbelief, but wearing it more lightly (as the father saw with pain) by reason of the great crowd of sympathizers at his back.

"It is so rare," he writes, "to fall in with one who earnestly and heartily seems to believe what he says he believes. And if you meet him in a preacher at a street-corner, declaiming with a mad fervor, people cry out, 'A fanatic!' Why shouldn't he be? I can't, for my life, see. Why shouldn't every fervent believer of the truths he teaches rush through the streets to divert the great crowd, with voice and hand, from the inevitable doom? I see the honesty of your faith, father, though there seems a strained harshness in it when I think of the complacency with which you must needs contemplate the irremediable perdition of such hosts of outcasts. In Adèle, too, there seems a beautiful singleness of trust; but I suppose God made the birds to live in the sky.

"You need not fear my falling into what you call the Pantheism of the moralists; it is every way too cold for my hot blood. It seems to me that the moral icicles with which their doctrine