A Forest Meeting

Copyright © 2007¹

Chapter 13 of the book
Boyhood Memories & Lessons
by
Isaiah Reid

This article is also available in the complete paperback version.

BUT FEW NOW KNOW about log meeting houses in all this central west, yet they were common in the opening of the country. Won­derful meetings have been held in them. Heaven will be richer for the work wrought in these rude places of worship. Grand characters were forged there. There were sound conversions. There were vigorous gospel sermons. The stal­warts of the last generation were spiritually born there, where “the old-time religion” we now sing about was in the full bloom of its glory. What if they had no gothic architecture, chancel win­dows, or carpeted aisles? They had what is infinitely better, actual sal­vation that saved. What if they had no fine turnouts and cushioned pews? They had the fine array of the saints, which was so well pleasing to God. Ah! good old days of simplicity and faith that took hold of God!

The plat of ground on which the church stood was not large. The build­ing was in one corner. The north end of this plat was reserved for the church and the use of the churchgoers. The south half of the plat was the burying ground. Once it had been nicely cleared off, but when I first came to know it, a few evergreens had been planted, and in places there was a young growth of the forest reasserting its dominion. It had been sown to bluegrass, but here and there the broom grass claimed a place for itself. The grasshoppers liked this undisturbed bit of ground and it seemed to be a kind of grasshopper heav­en, judging by the way they worshiped and rejoiced as I used to hear them in the quiet of the early Sabbath morning, as I walked with Mother to church. I fancy I can now shut my eyes and hear their shrill, incisive, strident, short-meter songs. On the west and north of this plat of ground the old native forest crowded close up to the fence line, a wall of living green anywhere from sixty to one hundred feet high. The east side was pasture land sloping rapidly down the hillside to a narrow little valley, in which was a stream of water with low, rippling melody of song in it. On the south lay a fine field with Uncle Lusk’s²  house just beyond it. On every side there was interest for me, but especially the sides on which were these fine old trees crowded close to each other, as yet almost untouched with the axe.

I was only ten years of age then.³ There is much thinking now that was not pos­sible then, and yet it must have been that I was then a real child of nature. I did not then know, if I do now, how it was that the unuttered voice about me was really the great universal life which I was breathing and whose spirit I was feeling. I then seemed more affected by my nature environment than I was by the devised worship of man. I may not have understood what the trees said, or the flowers whispered, or the brooks and birds sang, but certainly I did not understand what the preacher preached, or the meaning of the Psalms the people sang. That which was natural was first.⁴ So when the hot weather came, and on fine mornings the men would carry out the seats from the church and place them in front of a permanent stand they had built for that purpose, I was happy. The old, gloomy, dusty, half-light­ed church was never more than a kind of coop for me. Out under the trees I was another being. Squirrels, and birds, and trees I knew something about, and they seemed more real to me than Noah and the ark, and Jonah and the whale, or Elisha and the bears.

And yet I am of the impression that the church service aided largely in helping me to connect up the God of nature with the God of revelation; that this God who made the world was the God who managed and controlled it. The sense of the Infinite which pervaded the natural world had certain direction and shaping by the human explanation in preaching, pray­er, and song. It is Hamilton Mabie⁵ who says, “One needs pre­par­a­tion for the sanctities and solemnities of the woods.” I was then realizing this which I was unable for years to define.

I do not think I have ever gotten over those first meetings in the woods. They made me in one sense a lover of camp meetings. Out under the trees I felt as if made new. The old Psalms never sounded so sweet as when they rang out under the leafy architraves of the trees. This was “God’s first temple,” as Bryant sang.⁶ The old church was man’s. This was grand. That was meager and mean.

This contact with uni­versal life should be no barrier to real spiritual worship. In fact it is not. God is as much God in the things He has made as in the things He has said. The work proclaims the Worker as much as the written explanation. The Bible is an explanation of God concerning the things He has made and their relations, and our relations to them and Him, which we could not spell out so well without the printed page. I did not know this then, and yet somehow I unconsciously felt its power which I neither understood nor tried to explain.

I no more remember today the looks of the preacher and people than I do the trees, the birds, the busy squirrels, or the checkered spots of sun­light. I remember nothing that was said, and yet I remember this forest temple. The grasshoppers over in the bluegrass, the broom grass, and indeed all over the churchyard lot trilled an incessant song of praise in their own unchanged and original worship. They never had a Babel confusion in their history,⁷ and we hear them in the language God gave them when Adam named them.⁸ The harvest flies—“the tall cicada people of the pine”⁹—from the tops of the great yellow poplars piped their high-keyed song from a point nearer heaven than either preacher or any of his congregation.

The red-headed woodpecker, less religi­ous than the rest—per­haps he was a seventh-day keeper¹⁰—scolded continually as he flew from the dead limb where his nest was, away off to the open fields. A yellowhammer, as if afraid to disturb us, glided almost noiselessly from his home in a high tree, while his children called loudly after him. Sunday as it was, they must be fed, but in no way did he trouble the service. Away off in the deeps of the forest, from the top of some dead, dry limb of a tree which would ring when struck with his bill, that king of the woodpecker family—the woodcock—rang a merry love call which echoed for a quarter of a mile in the leafy retreats of the woods. Over in the field an occasional bobwhite sent a cheery note, as if to say, “All’s well over here.”

In this deep heart of the woods we scarce knew a wind, but in the quieter moments we heard the harps of the trees sweep subdued harmonies as a kind of deep sub-bass to all else we heard. Later, a lower current of air would drop down on us, and in falling sink down the long, lithe branches of the beeches, and then as noiselessly lift them up again. At the same time perhaps far away, through a transient opening in the dome of our temple, the branches would part for an instant and a fragment of the great overarch­ing sky in deep blue looked down on us as if assuring us of heaven’s bless­ing.

The field immediately north of the Covenanter cemetery, as it appeared in 2006. The log church would have been in the immediate foreground, surrounded by a thick phalanx of trees.¹¹

We ought not to omit mentioning the structure of this temple. The church was narrow; this was wide. The church had doors; this had none. The church had a low ceiling; the temple had a lofty dome raised on numerous lofty Corinthian pillars. These were beech, ash, poplar, hickory, and red oak, with an occasional sugar tree or rock maple. The beech columns were smooth and ashen gray, the ash rougher, but true to line, in darker gray. The poplar was king of the forest, and the massive line of the very dark gray pillar he lifted was often lost in the foliage of the other trees before a limb was discoverable. The trees carpeted our aisles for us, freshly in the early fall, and holding for a year, when nature had a house-cleaning and gave us a new outfit.

The squirrels had their homes in these trees. During our worship they often came down to see how we intruders were conducting ourselves. They would sit on a limb and raise their umbrella—sun or no sun—listen attentively for a time, and then retire as noiselessly as they came. They were better behaved than cross babies and unruly children. They listened better than some people. I wonder if God did not send them there to teach some people who ought to have known much better than they.

The only folks of nature’s congregation who behaved really badly were the flies, gnats, and mosquitoes. They seemed utterly irreverent, and were persistent Sabbath-breakers. They had no respect for service, preach­er, or people. The yellow-jackets were about as disregardful of law, but mostly attended to their own business, which was to feast on the half-eaten apples, pears, and peaches we threw down. Once in a while an angry hornet rushed in to get a fly, but as suddenly sang his peculiar song as he hastened away. Whether he went away swearing or praising, one could hardly tell. There was this dif­ference, however: he ended his incoming song—for he sang as he came—with a sudden “hit,” as if he had struck something; but his postlude died away more gradually and gently than the execution of any choir. Perhaps, after all, it was his way of return­ing thanks for securing one of our flies. So he may have acted better than some people who come to church without any song, and who go away with­out any praise.

Those are faraway days now. I do not know why I remember them more readily than the services in the old church. I remember nothing that was said by the preacher in those days. He spoke in an unknown language. I am not over a love for that kind of outdoor worship yet. On the prairie, as I now am, I miss very much the worship in the forest. There I seem to get natural again. There I touch the universal life about me and drink from foun­tains unmuddied by the ways and manners of fallen men. There I touch the life of youth again. There I must interpret for myself, and am freed from the opinions and theories of men. There the language is to be personally interpreted, for “their voice is not heard.”¹²

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