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"Plenty of room over there if you want it." "Who's over there?" inquired Zene. "Oh, it's a big camp-meeting," replied the man. "There's twenty or thirty families, and lots of fun." "Do you mean," inquired Grandma Padgett, "a camp-meeting for religious purposes?" "You can have that if you want it," responded the man, "and have your exhorters along. It's a family camp.
Three exhorters, their eyes ablaze with fanaticism, began to thunder forth dire warnings of the wrath to come and gained a hearing. Men rushed to and fro aimlessly. The gentleman with the side-whiskers, who looked like the caricatures of the trusts, having at last succeeded in making his imperial wishes known, clambered into a taxicab, and sat back, apparently unimpressed.
These then became exhorters, and moved among their friends in the congregation, begging them to yield their "proud and haughty spirits" ere it should be too late.
In 1803 John Leland, representing forty-two Baptist clergymen, twenty licensed exhorters, four thousand communicants, and twenty thousand attendants, sent out another plea for disestablishment in his "Van Tromp lowering his Peak with a Broadside, containing a Plea for the Baptists of Connecticut."
It would be a very different Church, and a very different world, if Christians, who were not conscious of possessing gifts which made them fit to be either prophets, or teachers, or exhorters, and were scarcely endowed even for any special form of ministry, felt that a gift from their hands, or a wave of pity from their hearts, was a true token of the movement of God's Spirit on their spirits.
They tell us that they have been "called;" that they do not go at their profession as other people do, but they are "called;" that God, looking over the world, carefully selects His priests, His ministers, and His exhorters. I don't know. They say their calling is sacred.
One old negro woman, fat, powerful, and gloomy, suddenly arose and uttered a scream that had the dignity and savagery of a mountain lion's cry. It rang far out into the night. The exhorter continued his mad, furious, thumping, barbaric walk. Behind him a row of other exhorters sat, a relay ready to leap to his aid. They urged on the tumult with wild cries. "A-men, brother."
She wanted to savour to the full its wrath and danger, to surrender herself to be played upon by these sallow, stubby-bearded exhorters, whose menacing tones and passionate gestures made a grateful appeal, whose wild, musical words, just because they were uncomprehended, aroused in her dim suggestions of a race-experience not her own, but in which she was now somehow summoned to share.
The two exhorters were told to take their choice between silence and the station-house. There is usually a good deal of selfish method in such leaders' madness, and they sullenly retired. Poor, demented Hannah was bundled away, and comparative quiet restored through the square. The weary hours dragged on; the uneasy earth caused no further alarms that night.
Excepting possibly the last-mentioned group, the priests of all these cults, the singers, shouters, prayers and exhorters of Bootstrap-lifting have as their distinguishing characteristic that they do very little lifting at their own bootstraps, and less at any other man's.
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