The Damnation of Theron Ware | Page 5

the sessions of the
Conference had given some of the more guileless of visiting brethren a
high notion of Tecumseh's piety; and perhaps even the most
sophisticated stranger never quite realized how strictly it was to be

explained by the anxiety to pick out a suitable champion for the fierce
Presbyterian competition. Big gatherings assembled evening after
evening to hear the sermons of those selected to preach, and the church
had been almost impossibly crowded at each of the three Sunday
services. Opinions had naturally differed a good deal during the earlier
stages of this scrutiny, but after last night's sermon there could be but
one feeling. The man for Tecumseh was the Reverend Theron Ware.
The choice was an admirable one, from points of view much more
exalted than those of the local congregation.
You could see Mr. Ware sitting there at the end of the row inside the
altar-rail--the tall, slender young man with the broad white brow,
thoughtful eyes, and features moulded into that regularity of strength
which used to characterize the American Senatorial type in those
far-away days of clean-shaven faces and moderate incomes before the
War. The bright-faced, comely, and vivacious young woman in the
second side pew was his wife--and Tecumseh noted with approbation
that she knew how to dress. There were really no two better or worthier
people in the building than this young couple, who sat waiting along
with the rest to hear their fate. But unhappily they had come to know of
the effort being made to bring them to Tecumseh; and their simple
pride in the triumph of the husband's fine sermon had become
swallowed up in a terribly anxious conflict of hope and fear. Neither of
them could maintain a satisfactory show of composure as the decisive
moment approached. The vision of translation from poverty and
obscurity to such a splendid post as this--truly it was too dazzling for
tranquil nerves.
The tedious Bishop had at last begun to call his roll of names, and the
good people of Tecumseh mentally ticked them off, one by one, as the
list expanded. They felt that it was like this Bishop--an unimportant and
commonplace figure in Methodism, not to be mentioned in the same
breath with Simpson and Janes and Kingsley-- that he should begin
with the backwoods counties, and thrust all these remote and pitifully
rustic stations ahead of their own metropolitan charge. To these they
listened but listlessly--indifferent alike to the joy and to the dismay

which he was scattering among the divines before him.
The announcements were being doled out with stumbling hesitation.
After each one a little half-rustling movement through the crowded
rows of clergymen passed mute judgment upon the cruel blow this
brother had received, the reward justly given to this other, the
favoritism by which a third had profited. The Presiding Elders, whose
work all this was, stared with gloomy and impersonal abstraction down
upon the rows of blackcoated humanity spread before them. The
ministers returned this fixed and perfunctory gaze with pale, set faces,
only feebly masking the emotions which each new name stirred
somewhere among them. The Bishop droned on laboriously,
mispronouncing words and repeating himself as if he were reading a
catalogue of unfamiliar seeds.
"First church of Tecumseh--Brother Abram G. Tisdale!"
There was no doubt about it! These were actually the words that had
been uttered. After all this outlay, all this lavish hospitality, all this
sacrifice of time and patience in sitting through those sermons, to draw
from the grab-bag nothing better than--a Tisdale!
A hum of outraged astonishment--half groan, half wrathful snort
bounded along from pew to pew throughout the body of the church. An
echo of it reached the Bishop, and so confused him that he haltingly
repeated the obnoxious line. Every local eye turned as by intuition to
where the calamitous Tisdale sat, and fastened malignantly upon him.
Could anything be worse? This Brother Tisdale was past fifty-- a
spindling, rickety, gaunt old man, with a long horse-like head and
vacantly solemn face, who kept one or the other of his hands
continually fumbling his bony jaw. He had been withdrawn from
routine service for a number of years, doing a little insurance
canvassing on his own account, and also travelling for the Book
Concern. Now that he wished to return to parochial work, the richest
prize in the whole list, Tecumseh, was given to him-- to him who had
never been asked to preach at a Conference, and whose archaic nasal
singing of "Greenland's Icy Mountains " had made even the Licensed

Exhorters grin! It was too intolerably dreadful to think of!
An embittered whisper to the effect that Tisdale was the Bishop's
cousin ran round from pew to pew. This did not happen to be true, but
indignant