Hawaii - James Michener [79]
As for the money, gaunt Gideon explained: "We are practicing Christians adhering to the word of Calvin as preached by Theodore Beza in Geneva and by Jonathan Edwards in Boston. We do not believe in painting our barns in worldly displays of wealth, nor in painting our daughters to parade their concupiscence. We save our money and apply it to the betterment of our minds and the salvation of our souls. When my son Abner graduates a minister from Yale, he will glorify God by preaching the same message and exhibiting the same example. How did he get from this farm to divinity school? Because this family practices frugality and avoids worldly exhibit."
In his senior year at Yale, emaciated Abner Hale whose parents did not allow him enough money to live on, experienced a spiritual enlightenment which changed his life, impelling him to unanticipated deeds and imperishable commitments. It was not what the early nineteenth century called "conversion," for Abner had undergone this phenomenon at eleven, while walking at dusk from the far fields to the milking shed. It was a wintry Marlboro night, and as he walked through the crackling stubble, frost on his breath, he heard a voice cry distinctly, "Abner Hale, are you saved?" He knew he was not, but when he replied, "No," the voice kept repeating the inquiry, and finally a light filled the meadow and a great shaking possessed him, and he stood in the fields transfixed, so that when his father came for him he burst into wild tears and begged: "Father, what must I do to be saved?" In Marlboro his conversion was held to be a minor miracle, and from that eleventh year his pious father had scrimped and borrowed and saved to send the predestined boy to divinity school.
What thin-faced Abner experienced at Yale was far different from conversion; it was spiritual illumination on a specific point and it arrived through a most unlikely person. A group of his worldly classmates, including his roommate, the young medical student John Whipple, who had once smoked and drunk, came by his room as he was writing a long report on "Church Discipline in the City of Geneva as Practiced by Theodore Beza."
"Come along to hear Keoki Kanakoa!" his rowdy classmates shouted.
"I'm working," Abner replied, and closed his door more tightly against temptation. He had come to the part of his paper in which Beza had begun to apply the teachings of Calvin to the general civil life of Geneva, and the manner in which this was done fascinated the young divinity student, for he wrote with some fervor: "Beza constantly faced the problem which all who govern must face: 'Do I govern for the welfare of man or for the glory of God?' Beza found it easy to give his answer, and although certain harshnesses which the world condemned did unavoidably occur in Geneva, so did the Kingdom of God on earth, and for once in the long history of civilization, an entire city lived according to the precepts of our Divine Father."
There was a rattling at his door and wiry John Whipple stuck his head in and called, "We're saving a seat for you, Abner. Seems everyone wants to hear Keoki Kanakoa."
"I am working," Abner replied the second time, and carefully he closed his door and returned to his lamp, by whose amber light he wrote painstakingly: "The Kingdom of God on earth is not easy to attain, for mere study of the Bible will not illuminate the way by which a government can acquire sanctity, for obviously if this were the case, thousands of governments that have now perished and which in their day attended to the Bible would have discovered the godly way. We know they have failed, and they have failed because they lacked a man of wisdom to show them. . . ." He bit his pen and thought of his father's long and gloomy battle with the town fathers of Marlboro. His father knew what the rule of God was, but the fathers were obstinate