To
marry her, become the proprietor of her snug home and ravishing person,
and send her off to pray with the sick and sup with the older women of
the flock, seemed to him such a comfortable consummation as to have
Heaven's especial approval. Thus do we deceive ourselves when the spirit
of God has departed from us, even in youth, and construe our dreams of
selfishness to be glimmerings of a purer life.
Calvin was precocious in assurance, because, in addition to being
unprincipled, he was in a manner ordained by election and birthright to
rule over Kensington. His father had been one of those strong-willed,
clear-visioned, intelligent young Eastern divinity students who brought
to a place of more voluptuous and easy burgher society the secular vigor
of New England pastors. Being always superior and always sincere, his
rule had been ungrumblingly accepted. Another generation, at middle age,
found him over them as he had been over their parents--a righteous,
intrepid Protestant priest, good at denunciation, counsel, humor, or
sympathy. The elders and deacons never thought of objecting to anything
after he had insisted upon it, and in this spirit the whole church had
heard submissively that Calvin Van de Lear was to be their next pastor.
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