Part 8

It was about this time, also, that I began to investigate the glories of Bishop Asbury, and to make such inquiries as I could into his saintly virtues. We had in our library the Bishop’s Journals in three volumes, and we had also two or three volumes of biography, all of which I read. In later years I have read many others. Probably twenty or thirty books, in one form or another, have been written about Bishop Asbury, and I think that I have gone pretty thoroughly into most of them. But most of them are senseless if not downright idiotic; they were written by preachers and published by the Methodist Church, and the whole slant is religious. They are based on the assumption that a Preacher and a Bishop must of necessity be a holy man, and that all the little idiosyncrasies and faults that give a clue to the real character of the man, are but manifestations of the fight between God and Satan.

From an ecclesiastical point of view there can be no question of Bishop Asbury’s greatness, for there have been few men who have left a more definite imprint on American religious culture. There were fewer than 500 Methodists in America when he came here in 1771; when he died there were 214,000, with good churches and great influence. He had completed the church organization according to his own ideas, ignoring to a large extent the plans of John Wesley as set forth by Thomas Rankin and Thomas Coke, and he had assumed as much power as a Pope of Rome. As a religious organizer he has had few equals, and it is a great pity that he did so much unnecessary organizing, and that his amazing genius should have flowered in such a futile and preposterous creation as the present-day Methodist Church; a great pity that he could not have developed a more flexible creed, one that would have grown as the world grew, instead of standing stock-still and viewing the universe with intolerant suspicion, with constant bickerings about the wishes of God and yelping appeals to the Almighty to damn somebody.

But statistically Bishop Asbury is even greater. He preached his first sermon in America at Philadelphia on the day he set foot on this continent, in October, 1771, and delivered his final pronouncement against sin on his deathbed, when, propped upon his pillows, he expounded the twenty-first chapter of Revelation. In these forty-five years he preached some 17,000 sermons, and probably 20,000 in his whole life, for he began preaching when he was about fifteen or sixteen, some three years after his conversion. The number of words that he uttered for the Lord is simply incalculable; there is no telling how far they would reach if they could be laid end to end.

In their methods of preaching and in their intolerance the preachers of my boyhood, of other sects as well as Methodists, were devout and faithful followers of Bishop Asbury. The bellowing evangelist of the Billy Sunday and Lincoln McConnell type is his lineal ecclesiastical descendant. He preached always at the top of his voice, for he had great faith in exhortation, and to him the good sermon was the noisy sermon; even to-day the Preacher who rants and raves is the one who is regarded by his flock as nearest to God. When Bishop Asbury was not preaching he was praying; he rose every morning at four o’clock and prayed and read the Bible until six, when he breakfasted and set forth on his travels. He would not sleep more than six hours a night because Wesley had decided that six hours was enough. One day a week he fasted, and part of another day, punishing his flesh for the greater glory of the Lord.

This love of self-inflicted punishment affected his whole life. As a boy he was moody and sensitive; he appears to have been of the type that complains constantly that he is being “picked on.” He was introspective, finding his greatest joy in self-pity, and he was never happy, as we used to say in Missouri, unless he was miserable. His playmates in the little English school near Birmingham called him “parson” because of his pious lugubriousness, and when the teacher beat him or something happened to cross him he sought solace in prayer.

References to his numerous physical ailments begin to appear in Bishop Asbury’s Journals about 1772, when he was in his late twenties. He had never been strong physically, and never after he came to America was he in good health. He was apparently a hypochondriac, with all the hypochondriac’s morbid delight in recounting his symptoms; many pages of his Journals are filled with them. He took enormous doses of medicine, performed slight surgical operations upon himself, and raised great blisters on the slightest provocation, frequently blistering his whole body from throat to abdomen. Once he preached a whole afternoon with so many blisters that he was not able either to stand or sit, for he had blistered not only the soles of his feet but less refined portions of his anatomy also; he had to be propped up in the pulpit, where he raved and ranted for hour after hour, saving many sinners. He took no care of himself whatever, riding horseback through snowstorms and rainstorms with biting pains in his chest, and with his stomach and throat filled with ulcers, feverish from pain and religion.

All of these things he notes in his Journals with great gusto, and gives long lists of the medicines he took and the measures he employed to combat his sickness. Tartar emetic was his favorite remedy, and of this he swallowed enormous quantities. For an ulcerated throat he used a gargle of “sage tea, honey, vinegar and mustard, and after that another gargle of sage, tea, alum, rose leaves and loaf sugar to strengthen the parts.” Another favorite remedy was a diet, as he called it, made from this remarkable formula: “one quart of hard cider, one hundred nails, a handful of snake root, a handful of pennell seed, a handful of wormwood.” He boiled this concoction from a quart to a pint, and drank a wineglass of it each morning before breakfast for ten days, meanwhile using no butter, milk or meat. He notes in his Journal that “it will make the stomach very sick.” It will. I brewed the drink once, and I had as soon drink dynamite; bootleg gin is nectar by comparison.

There can be little doubt that Bishop Asbury’s physical condition had a great deal to do with his extraordinary piety, for it is true that most of the religious leaders have had many things wrong with their bodies, and that the sicker a man is, the more religious he is likely to be. A man who is healthy and normal mentally and physically seldom becomes fanatically religious. True, healthy men sometimes become monks and preachers, but except in rare instances such men are comparatively moderate in their views. And generally they do themselves very well in a material way, especially if they become monks.

It was once my journalistic duty to make a daily visit to a Franciscan monastery in Quincy, Illinois, and the good brothers remain a high light in a somewhat drab period. Jovial and pot-bellied, they were veritable Friar Tucks in brown bathrobes, extraordinarily hearty eaters and drinkers, and not even at pre-Volstead banquets have I ever received as much free food and drink as from the good Franciscans. It was easy to see why such men as these went in for religion, but it is not so easy to understand the motive of the Protestant minister. The earthly rewards are nothing to speak of, and what with evolution and one thing and another, he can no longer be certain that there is a Heaven to go to.

The Franciscans were fascinating spectacles as they padded on their sandaled feet through the gardens of the monastery and along the graveled paths that led to the church next door. I became particularly fond of Brother John--I think they called him Brother John, anyhow I did--who might have stepped from the pages of Boccaccio. He was the press representative of the monastery; he always answered my ring, and through the bars of the door I could see him, waddling genially down the corridor, puffing and rattling his keys. It always seemed to me that Brother John was miscast; doubtless he lived a happy and carefree life, though perhaps overly cluttered with prayer, but I thought it a great pity that he could not have been an alderman. And what a bartender he would have made! His paunch would have elected him a City Father, and his fund of stories would have got him a job in any first-class barroom. But possibly he has reformed and is now leading some such useful life.

Brother John made but one effort to convert me and induce me to join the Catholic Church, and when I said “Bunk!” he stopped immediately and said that inasmuch as I would undoubtedly go to Hell he would still take advantage of my reportorial capacity to get a little publicity for the Church before that unfortunate event occurred. But there was no tolerance in the attitude of my reverend relative, the Bishop. His outstanding characteristic was intolerance; it shows in a hundred different acts of his career; he was arbitrary and domineering. Anyone who was well dressed or who bore any outward signs of prosperity was offensive in his sight; he preached the gospel of poverty and self-denial, and believed that all pleasure was wicked and that self-inflicted suffering was heavenly bliss. He was imperious and scornful of restraint and opposition; what he said was true he thought was true, and that was all there was to it. When men differed with him they were wrong, and he had no disposition to reopen any question which he had once settled in his mind. He believed that he was appointed by God to rule the Methodists in America, and that he was a legitimate successor of the Apostles. In 1801 he wrote:

“I will tell the world what I rest my authority on; first, divine authority; second, seniority in America; third, the election of the General Conference; fourth, my ordination by Thomas Coke, Philip William Otterbein, Richard Whatcoat and Thomas Vasey; fifth, because the signs of an Apostle have been seen in me.”

Divine authority and the signs of an Apostle!

Yet his steadfast belief that he was so appointed was one of the secrets of his power and influence, which were greater than that of any other churchman of his time. We are even yet feeling their effects, and we shall continue to feel them. There seems to be no hope, what with Boards of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals and similar intolerant activities, that the Methodist Church will ever become more worthy of respect than it was in his day. Indeed, it grows worse and worse.

Another prime factor in Bishop Asbury’s extraordinary piety, as can be seen by the entries in his Journals and by a study of the biographies written by other clergymen, was his terrific mental turmoil. Throughout his whole life his mind whirled like a pinwheel; he was constantly in what, back in Missouri, we used to call a “terrible state.” About the time he began to be ill he started referring to himself as “Poor Francis,” and thereafter that was the dominant note of his life. He pitied himself because of his physical ills, and then dosed himself with horrid medicines, and with bleedings and blisterings, making his ailments more painful and himself an object of greater pity. He tortured himself thus physically, and flogged his mind with constant thoughts of his unworthiness; he was continually groveling before God, beseeching the Almighty to put temptation in his path. These extracts taken at random from his Journals show the trend of his thought:

“I do not sufficiently love God nor live by faith.

“I must lament that I am not perfectly crucified with God.

“I feel some conviction for sleeping too long.

“My heart is grieved and groaneth for want of more holiness.

“Unguarded and trivial conversation has brought a degree of spiritual deadness.

“My conscience reproves me for the appearance of levity.

“A cloud rested on my mind, which was occasioned by talking and jesting. I also feel at times tempted to impatience and pride of heart.

“My heart is still depressed for want of more religion.

“Were I to stand on my own merit, where should I go but to hell?

“Here I received a bitter pill from one of my greatest friends [referring to his last letter from John Wesley]. Praise the Lord for my trials also! May they be sanctified.”

Bishop Asbury preached the same doctrine of personal conversion and sanctification that is preached by present-day Methodist ministers, and he sought this blissful state for himself with frenzied zealousness. At times he thought he had entered into what he called the full fruition of a life with God; at other times he fancied himself given up to Satan. The older he grew, the gloomier and more introspective he became, and like most of the other great religionists he had a pronounced streak of melancholia. He had alternating periods of exaltation and depression; he was either soaring the heights of religious ecstasy or floundering in the depths of sin and despair. He did not seem able to find any middle ground in which he could obtain a measure of peace and contentment; occasionally in his Journals he noted that he was happy in God and at peace, but the next entry showed him groaning in great vexation of spirit, crying out a doubt of the value of his religious life. He yearned for a constant religious thrill, and mourned because he could not satisfy his yearning.

DIVERSIONS OF AN ABANDONED SINNER

1

Almost immediately after my conversion, or at least as soon as it had become noised about that I had consigned my holy relative to what some of our more finicky Sisters, unable to bring themselves to say “Hell,” referred to coyly as “the bad place,” I abandoned myself to a life of sin and became a total spiritual loss in the eyes of all Farmington except members of my immediate family and certain of my intimate friends who collaborated with me in various wicked but pleasant enterprises. That is to say, I cast aside the taboos and the inhibitions that religion had thrown about me, and became for the first time in my life a normal boy. I existed simply to play and raise hell generally, and for some curious reason the activity which gave me the most pleasure was throwing rocks at the church or in some manner interrupting the service.

It was not long before even the most hopeful had ceased their talk of sending me to a theological school and fitting me to carry on the family labors, for I began to smoke cigarettes, play cards, swear, drink when I could find a bartender willing to ignore the law forbidding the sale of liquor to a minor, and to cock an appreciative and appraising eye at the girls. It was then agreed that it was too late to do anything with me or for me, and on the Sunday morning that I mounted my new bicycle and rode brazenly past the Southern Methodist church as the Brothers and Sisters filed with bowed heads into the edifice for worship, I was consigned body and soul to the sizzling pits of Hell.

I suffered a great deal of physical agony before I learned to smoke cigarettes, and it was some time before I learned to blow smoke through my nose with the nonchalant ease affected by the group of older boys and young men who loafed in Doss’s barber shop and around the Post Office Building and McKinney’s peanut and popcorn machine. My older brother had learned a year or so before, and he frequently made himself very offensive to me by boasting that he could smoke a whole package of Sweet Caporals or Drums without becoming ill. I yearned to try, but he would not give me a cigarette, and neither would any of the other boys, and my finances were in such shape that I could not purchase any. And, of course, such wicked things could not be purchased and charged to my father; I could have charged a plug of chewing tobacco to him, but not cigarettes.

But one day I was loafing hopefully in McKinney’s when my brother came in and produced a dime that he had amassed by laborious work chopping wood at home, and bought a package of Sweet Caporal Little Cigars. These were really nothing but cigarettes wrapped with tobacco instead of paper, but they resembled a cigar and were thought to be infinitely more stylish and manly than the ordinary cigarette. I asked him for one, and he said he would not give one to John the Baptist himself. But I persisted, and followed him home, aghast at his determination to hide behind the barn and smoke the whole package one after the other.

“I’ll light one from the end of the other,” he boasted.

Finally as we came opposite Brother Nixon’s house just south of Elmwood Seminary, he relented and very carefully opened the box and handed me a Little Cigar. It was a great moment. The yard of Elmwood Seminary fairly swarmed with girl students, including the young lady who at the time represented everything that was desirable in the female sex, and I visioned their cries of startled admiration as I passed, puffing nonchalantly, blowing smoke from my nose and perhaps from my ears.

I had no doubt of my ability to handle the innocent-looking Little Cigar; indeed, at that time I considered no problem insurmountable. My brother instructed me to fill my mouth with smoke and then take a long, deep breath, and after that blow the smoke out gently and slowly, holding the Little Cigar between the first and second finger and crooking the little finger as we did when we drank tea or coffee, that being a mark of gentility and refinement. As we came in front of the old Clardy homestead less than half a block from the Seminary I struck a match and applied it to the end of the Little Cigar, while my brother watched anxiously and from time to time gave me advice. I puffed as he directed.

“Got a mouthful?” he asked.

Unable to speak, my cheeks bulging, I nodded.

“Now take a long breath.”

But, alas, I did not breathe; I swallowed, and while the smoke penetrated me and spread throughout my interior, it did not take the correct route. I began to strangle, and my brother got excited.

“Blow it out, you damn fool!” he cried. “You’ll choke!”

I did choke. I did even worse; I became very ill, and the spectacle which so intrigued the young ladies of the Seminary that day was not that of a young gentleman going nonchalantly to Hell by the cigarette route. Instead, they saw a very sick boy rolling on the sidewalk trying desperately to stem a distressing internal upheaval.

It was several days later before I had enough courage to try again, and I debated within myself whether or not God had caused me to be so ill in order to show me that smoking was a sin. But I had definitely committed myself to the Devil, so a few days later I begged a dime from my father and bought a package of Drums and another of Sweet Caporals, the two most popular brands of cigarettes. With these, and a supply of matches, I went behind the barn. I made a neat pile of sawdust to lie upon, and there I remained the whole afternoon, smoking one cigarette after another. I was terribly ill at first, but gradually improved until the last three or four gave me no trouble. I did not have much appetite for dinner that night, but I had conquered the cigarette and I felt a glow of pride at the fact that I had got a very good start in the direction of the bad place.

The basis of my overwhelming desire to smoke cigarettes was the fact that cigarette-smoking when I was a boy in Farmington was one of the major sins. It ranked with adultery and just a little ahead of murder and theft. The Preachers called them coffin nails and delivered violent sermons against them, and every once in a while an evangelist would come to town with medical charts showing the effect of tobacco upon the interior human organs. But the fact that it was bad physically for growing boys was seldom stressed at all; we were impressed instead with the fact that God thought it a sin to smoke cigarettes, although it did not appear that it was a sin for the tobacconist to sell them. That was business.

Many efforts were made to reform me after I had begun to smoke. My mother said she had hoped I wouldn’t, but that was all she said, and my father said he did not give a hoot whether I smoked or not, but that he hoped I would not be a fool and overdo it. He himself had learned the art of chewing tobacco when he was a boy of seven in Mississippi, and so far as I have ever been able to learn, God had never called him to account. He died at the age of seventy-nine, suddenly, and a slab of plug-cut was in his pocket. It is impossible for me to believe that God refused him entrance into whatever Heaven there may be on account of his habit, which he thoroughly enjoyed.

But the Preachers and the Brothers and Sisters did not agree with my parents, nor would they admit that it was none of their business. On the contrary, they said that it was the Lord’s business, and since they were the duly accredited agents of the Lord, appointed by Him to lead Farmington into the paths of righteousness, it was their business also. When Brother Fontaine was our Methodist pastor he did not look with disfavor upon chewing, because he himself was seldom without a chew and presumably had an indulgence from God, but he looked upon the cigarette as an invention of the Devil. In this view he was upheld by the Ladies’ Aid Society and the Farmington branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. And the W. C. T. U., with the possible exception of the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals, was and is the world’s best example of an organization maintained for the sole purpose of minding other people’s business.