Johnston Annie Fellows
In League with Israel: A Tale of the Chattanooga Conference

There came again the fulfillment of the deathless words, "And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me!" O, how the lowly Nazarene was lifted up that morning in that great gathering of his people! How his name was exalted! All up and down old Lookout Mountain, and even across the wide valley of the Tennessee, it was echoed in every song and prayer.

When the testimony service began, David turned from one speaker to another. What had they come so far to tell? From every State in the Union, from Canada, and from foreign shores, they brought only one story – "Behold the Lamb of God!" In spite of himself, the young Jew's heart was strangely drawn to this uplifted Christ. Suddenly he was startled by a ringing voice that cried: "I am a converted Jew. I was brought to Christ by a little girl – a member of the Junior League. I have given up wife, mother, father, sisters, brothers, and fortune, but I have gained so much that I can say from the depths of my soul, 'Take all the world, but give me Jesus.' I have consecrated my life to his service."

David changed his position in order to get a better view of the speaker. He scrutinized him closely. He studied his face, his dress, even his attitude, to determine, if possible, the character of this new witness. He saw a man of medium height, broad forehead, and firm mouth over which drooped a heavy, dark mustache. There was nothing fanatical in the calm face or dignified bearing. His eyes, which were large, dark, and magnetic, met David's with a steady gaze, and seemed to hold them for a moment.

With a lawyer-like instinct, David longed to probe this man with questions. As he went back to the inn, he resolved to hunt up his history, and find what had induced him to turn away from the faith.

CHAPTER IV.
AN EPWORTH JEW

NEARLY every northern-bound mail-train, since Bethany's arrival in Chattanooga, had carried something home to Jack – a paper, a postal, souvenirs from the battle-fields, or views of the mountain. Knowing how eagerly he watched for the postman's visits, she never let a day pass without a letter. Saturday morning she even missed part of the services at the tent in order to write to him.

"I have just come back from Grant University," she wrote. "Cousin Frank was so interested in the Jew who spoke at the sunrise meeting yesterday, because he said a little Junior League girl had been the means of his conversion, that he arranged for an interview with him. His name is Lessing. Cousin Frank asked me to go with him to take the conversation down in shorthand for the League. I haven't time now to give all the details, but will tell them to you when I come home."

Bethany had been intensely interested in the man's story. They sat out on one of the great porches of the university, with the mountains in sight. They had drawn their chairs aside to a cool, shady corner, where they would not be interrupted by the stream of people constantly passing in and out.

"It is for the children you want my story," he said; "so they must know of my childhood. It was passed in Baltimore. My father was the strictest of orthodox Jews, and I was very faithfully trained in the observances of the law. He taught me Hebrew, and required a rigid adherence to all the customs of the synagogue."

Bethany rapidly transcribed his words, as he told many interesting incidents of his early home life. He had come to Chattanooga for business reasons, married, and opened a store in St. Elmo, at the foot of Mount Lookout. He was very fond of children, and made friends with all who came into the store. There was one little girl, a fair, curly-haired child, who used to come oftener than the others. She grew to love him dearly, and, in her baby fashion, often talked to him of the Junior League, in which she was deeply interested.

Her distress when she discovered that he did not love Christ was pitiful. She insisted so on his going to Church, that one morning he finally consented, just to please her. The sermon worried him all day. It had been announced that the evening service would be a continuation of the same subject. He went at night, and was so impressed with the truth of what he heard, that when the child came for him to go to prayer-meeting with her the next week, he did not refuse.

Towards the close of the service the minister asked if any one present wished to pray for friends. The child knelt down beside Mr. Lessing, and to his great embarrassment began to pray for him. "O Lord, save Brother Lessing!" was all she said, but she repeated it over and over with such anxious earnestness, that it went straight to his heart.

He dropped on his knees beside her, and began praying for himself. It was not long until he was on his feet again, joyfully confessing the Christ he had been taught to despise. In the enthusiasm of this new-found happiness he went home and tried to tell his wife of the Messiah he had accepted, but she indignantly refused to listen. For months she berated and ridiculed him. When she found that not only were tears and arguments of no avail, but that he felt he must consecrate his life to the ministry, she declared she would leave him. He sold the store, and gave her all it brought; and she went back to her family in Florida.

In order to prepare for the ministry he entered the university, working outside of study hours at anything he could find to do. In the meantime he had written to his parents, knowing how greatly they would be distressed, yet hoping their great love would condone the offense.

His father's answer was cold and businesslike. He said that no disgrace could have come to him that could have hurt him so deeply as the infidelity of his trusted son. If he would renounce this false faith for the true faith of his fathers, he would give him forty thousand dollars outright, and also leave him a legacy of the same amount. But should he refuse the offer, he should be to him as a stranger – the doors of both his heart and his house should be forever barred against him.

His mother, with a woman's tact, sent the pictures of all the family, whom he had not seen for several years. Their faces called up so many happy memories of the past that they pleaded more eloquently than words. It was a sweet, loving letter she wrote to her boy, reminding him of all they had been to each other, and begging him for her sake to come back to the old faith. But right at the last she wrote: "If you insist on clinging to this false Christ, whom we have taught you to despise, the heart of your father and of your mother must be closed against you, and you must be thrust out from us forever with our curse upon you."

He knew it was the custom. He had been present once when the awful anathema was hurled at a traitor to the faith, withdrawing every right from the outlaw, living or dead. He knew that his grave would be dug in the Jewish cemetery in Baltimore; that the rabbi would read the rites of burial over his empty coffin, and that henceforth his only part in the family life would be the blot of his disgraceful memory.

He spread the pictures and the letters on the desk before him. A cold perspiration broke out on his forehead, as he realized the hopelessness of the alternative offered him. One by one he took up the photographs of his brothers and sisters, looked at them long and fondly, and laid them aside; then his father's, with its strong, proud face. He put that away, too.

At last he picked up his mother's picture. She looked straight out at him, with such a world of loving tenderness in the smiling eyes, with such trustful devotion, as if she knew he could not resist the appeal, that he turned away his head. The trial seemed greater than he could bear. He was trembling with the force of it. Then he looked again into the dear, patient face, till his eyes grew too dim to see. It was the same old mother who had nursed him, who had loved him, who had borne with his waywardness and forgiven him always. He seemed to feel the soft touch of her lips on his forehead as she bent over to give him a goodnight kiss. All that she had ever done for him came rushing through his memory so overwhelmingly that he broke down utterly, and began to sob like a child. "O, I can't give her up," he groaned. "My dear old mother! I can't grieve her so!"

All that morning he clung to her picture, sometimes walking the floor in his agony, sometimes falling on his knees to pray. "God in heaven have pity," he cried. "That a man should have to choose between his mother and his Christ!" At last he rose, and, with one more long look at the picture, laid it reverently away with shaking hands. He had surrendered everything.

He did not tell all this to his sympathizing listeners. They could read part of the pathos of that struggle in his face, part in the voice that trembled occasionally, despite his strong effort to control it.

Frank Marion's thoughts went back to his own gentle mother in the old homestead among the green hills of Kentucky. As he thought of the great pillar of strength her unfaltering faith had been to him, of how from boyhood it had upheld and comforted and encouraged him, of how much he had always depended upon her love and her prayers, his sympathies were stirred to their depths. He reached out and took Lessing's hand in his strong grasp.

"God help you, brother!" he said, fervently.

Bethany turned her head aside, and looked away into the hazy distances. She knew what it meant to feel the breaking of every tie that bound her best beloved to her. She knew what it was to have only pictured faces to look into, and lay away with the pain of passionate longing. The question flashed into her mind, could she have made the voluntary surrender that he had made? She put it from her with a throb of shame that she was glad that she had not been so tested.

Some acquaintance of Mr. Marion, passing down the steps, recognized him, and called back:

"What time does your speech come on the program, Frank? I understand you are to hold forth to-day."

Mr. Marion hastily excused himself for a moment, to speak to his friend.

Bethany sat silent, thinking intently, while she drew unmeaning dots and dashes over the cover of her note-book.

Mr. Lessing turned to her abruptly. "Did you ever speak to a Jew about your Savior?" he asked, with such startling directness, that Bethany was confused.

"No," she said, hesitatingly.

"Why?" he asked.

He was looking at her with a penetrating gaze that seemed to read her thoughts.

"Really," she answered, "I have never considered the question. I am not very well acquainted with any, for one reason; besides, I would have felt that I was treading on forbidden grounds to speak to a Jew about religion. They have always seemed to me to be so intrenched in their beliefs, so proof against argument, that it would be both a useless and thankless undertaking."

"They may seem invulnerable to arguments," he answered, "but nobody is proof against a warm, personal interest. Ah, Miss Hallam, it seems a terrible thing to me. The Church will make sacrifices, will cross the seas, will overcome almost any obstacle to send the gospel to China or to Africa, anywhere but to the Jews at their elbows. O, of course, I know there are a few Hebrew missions, scattered here and there through the large cities, and a few earnest souls are devoting their entire energy to the work. But suppose every Christian in the country became an evangel to the little community of Jews within the radius of his influence. Suppose a practical, prayerful, individual effort were made to show them Christ, with the same zeal you expend in sending 'the old story' to the Hottentots. What would be the result? O, if I had waited for a grown person to speak to me about it, I might have waited until the day of my death. I was restless. I was dissatisfied. I felt that I needed something more than my creed could give me. For what is Judaism now? I read an answer not long ago: 'A religion of sacrifice, to which, for eighteen centuries, no sacrifice has been possible; a religion of the Passover and the Day of Atonement, on which, for well-nigh two millenniums, no lamb has been slain and no atonement offered; a sacerdotal religion, with only the shadow of a priesthood; a religion of a temple which has no temple more; its altar is quenched, its ashes scattered, no longer kindling any enthusiasm, nor kindled by any hope.'¹ No man ever took me by the hand and told me about the peace I have now. No man ever shared with me his hope, or pointed out the way for me to find it. If it had not been for the blessed guiding influence of a little child, my hungry heart might still be crying out unsatisfied."

He went on to repeat several conversations he had had with men of his own race, to show her how this indifference of Christians was reckoned against them as a glaring inconsistency by the Jews. Almost as if some one had spoken the words to her, she seemed to hear the condemnation, "I was a hungered, and ye gave me no meat. I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink. I was a stranger, and ye took me not in. Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these my brethren, ye did it not to me."

Strange as it may seem, Bethany's interpretation of that Scripture had always been in a temporal sense. More than once, when a child, she had watched her mother feed some poor beggar, with the virtuous feeling that that condemnation could not apply to the Hallam family. But now Lessing's impassioned appeal had awakened a different thought. Who so hungered as those who, reaching out for bread, grasped either the stones of a formal ritualism or the abandoned hope of prophecy unfulfilled? Who such "strangers within the gates" of the nations as this race without a country? From the brick-kilns of Pharaoh to the willows of Babylon, from the Ghetto of Rome to the fagot-fires along the Rhine, from Spanish cruelties to English extortions, they had been driven – exiles and aliens. The New World had welcomed them. The New World had opened all its avenues to them. Only from the door of Christian society had they turned away, saying, "I was a stranger, and ye took me not in."

In the pause that followed, Bethany's heart went out in an earnest prayer: "O God, in the great day of thy judgment, let not that condemnation be mine. Only send me some opportunity, show me some way whereby I may lead even one of the least among them to the world's Redeemer!"

Mr. Marion came back from his interview, looking at his watch as he did so. It was so near time for services to begin at the tent, that he did not resume his seat.

"We may never meet again, Mr. Lessing," said Bethany, holding out her hand as she bade him good-bye. "So I want to tell you before I go, what an impression this conversation has made upon me. It has aroused an earnest desire to be the means of carrying the hope that comforts me, to some one among your people."

"You will succeed," he said, looking into her earnest upturned face. Then he added softly, in Hebrew, the old benediction of an olden day – "Peace be unto you."

All that day, after the sunrise meeting, David Herschel had been with Major Herrick, going over the battle-fields, and listening to personal reminiscences of desperate engagements. A monument was to be erected on the spot where nearly all the major's men had fallen in one of the most hotly-contested battles of the war. He had come down to help locate the place.

"It's a very different reception they are giving us now," remarked the major, as they drove through the city.

Epworth League colors were flying in all directions. Every street gleamed with the white and red banners of the North, crossed with the white and gold of the South.

"Chattanooga is entertaining her guests royally; people of every denomination, and of no faith at all, are vying with each other to show the kindliest hospitality. We are missing it by being at the hotel. I told Mrs. Herrick and the girls I would meet them at the tent this evening. Will you come, too?"

"No, thank you," replied David, "my curiosity was satisfied this morning. I'll go on up to the inn. I have a letter to write."

The major laughed.

"It's a letter that has to be written every day, isn't it?" he said, banteringly. "Well, I can sympathize with you, my boy. I was young myself once. Conferences aren't to be taken into account at all when a billet-doux needs answering."

The next day David kept Marta with him as much as possible. He could see that she was becoming greatly interested, and catching much of Albert Herrick's enthusiasm. The boy was a great League worker, and attended every meeting.

David took Marta a long walk over the mountain paths. They sat on the wide, vine-hung veranda of the inn, and read together. Then, as it was their Sabbath, he took her up to his room, and read some of the ritual of the day, trying to arouse in her some interest for the old customs of their childhood.

To his great dismay, he found that she had drifted away from him. She was not the yielding child she had been, whom he had been able to influence with a word.

She showed a disposition to question and contend, that annoyed him. The rabbi was right. She had been left too long among contaminating influences.

It was with a feeling of relief that he woke Sunday morning to hear the rain beating violently against the windows. He was glad on her account that the storm would prevent them going down into the city. But toward evening the sun came out, and Frances Herrick began to insist on going down to the night service in the tent.

"It is the last one there will be!" she exclaimed. "I wouldn't miss it for anything."

"Neither would I," responded Marta. "There is something so inspiring in all that great chorus of voices."

When David found that his sister really intended to go, notwithstanding his remonstrances, and that the family were waiting for her in the hall below, he made no further protest, but surprised her by taking his hat, and tucking her hand in his arm.

"Then I will go with you, little sister," he said. "I want to have as much of your company as possible during my short visit."

Albert Herrick, who was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs, divined David's purpose in keeping his sister so close. He lifted his eyebrows slightly as he turned to take his mother's wraps, leaving Frances to follow with the major.

The tent was crowded when they reached it. They succeeded with great difficulty in obtaining several chairs in one of the aisles.

"Herschel and I will go back to the side," said Albert. "The audience near the entrance is constantly shifting, and we can slip into the first vacant seat; some will be sure to get tired and go out before long. They always do."

It was the first time David had been in the tent, and he was amazed at the enormous audience. He leaned against one of the side supports, watching the people, still intent on crowding forward. Suddenly his look of idle curiosity changed to one of lively interest. He recognized the face of the Jew who had attracted him in the mountain meeting. Isaac Lessing was in the stream of people pressing slowly towards him.

Nearer and nearer he came. The crowd at the door pushed harder. The fresh impetus jostled them almost off their feet, and in the crush Lessing was caught and held directly in front of David. Some magnetic force in the eyes of each held the gaze of the other for a moment. Then Lessing, recognizing the common bond of blood, smiled.

That ringing cry, "I am a converted Jew," had sounded in David's ears ever since it first startled him. He felt confident that the man was laboring under some strong delusion, and he wished that he might have an opportunity to dispel it by skillful arguments, and win him back to the old faith.

Seized by an impulse as sudden as it was irresistible, he laid his hand on the stranger's arm.

"I want to speak with you," he said, hurriedly, and in a low tone. "Come this way. I will not detain you long."

He drew him out of the press into one of the side aisles, and thence towards the exit.

"Will you walk a few steps with me?" he asked; "I want to ask you several questions."

Lessing complied quietly.

The sound of a cornet followed them with the pleading notes of an old hymn. It was like the mighty voice of some archangel sounding a call to prayer. Then the singing began. Song after song rolled out on the night air across the common to a street where two men paced back and forth in the darkness. They were arm in arm. David was listening to the same story that Bethany and Frank Marion had heard the day before. He could not help but be stirred by it. Lessing's voice was so earnest, his faith was so sure. When he was through, David was utterly silenced. The questions with which he had intended to probe this man's claims were already answered.

"We might as well go back," he said at last. As they walked slowly towards the tent, he said: "I can't understand you. I feel all the time that you have been duped in some way; that you are under the spell of some mysterious power that deludes you."

Just as they passed within the tent, the cornet sounded again, the great congregation rose, and ten thousand voices went up as one:

"All hail the power of Jesus' name,

Let angels prostrate fall!"

The sight was a magnificent one; the sound like an ocean-beat of praise. Lessing seized David's arm.

"That is the power!" he exclaimed. "Not only does it uplift all these thousands you see here, but millions more, all over this globe. It is nearly two thousand years since this Jesus was known among men. Could he transform lives to-night, as mine has been transformed, if his power were a delusion? What has brought them all these miles, if not this same power? Look at the class of people who have been duped, as you call it." He pointed to the platform. "Bishops, college presidents, editors, men of marked ability and with world-wide reputation for worth and scholarship."

At the close of the hymn some one moved over, and made room for David on one of the benches. Lessing pushed farther to the front. David listened to all that was said with a sort of pitying tolerance, until the sermon began. The bishop's opening words caught his attention, and echoed in his memory for months afterward.

"Paul knew Christ as he had studied him, and as he appeared to him when he did not believe in him – when he despised him. Then he also knew Christ after his surrender to him; after Christ had entered into his life, and changed the character of his being; after new meanings of life and destiny filled his horizon, after the Divine tenderness filled to completeness his nature; then was he in possession of a knowledge of Christ, of an experience of his presence and of his love that was a benediction to him, and has through the centuries since that hour been a blessing to men wherever the gospel has been preached.

"It is such a man speaking in this text. A man with a singularly strong mind, well disciplined, with great will-power; a man with a great ancestry; a man with as mighty a soul as ever tabernacled in flesh and blood. He proclaimed everywhere that, if need be, he was ready to die for the principles out of which had come to him a new life, and which had brought to his heart experiences so rich and so overwhelming in happiness, that he was led to do and undertake what he knew would lead at the last to a martyr's death and crown. Why? Hear him: 'For the love of Christ constraineth us.'"

There was a testimony service following the sermon. As David watched the hundreds rising to declare their faith, he wondered why they should thus voluntarily come forward as witnesses. Then the text seemed to repeat itself in answer, "For the love of Christ constraineth us!"

He dreamed of Lessing and Paul all night. He was glad when the conference was at an end; when the decorations were taken down from the streets, and the last car-load of irrepressible enthusiasts went singing out of the city.

Albert Herrick went to the seashore that week. David proposed taking Marta home with him; but her objections were so heartily re-enforced by the whole family that he quietly dropped the subject, and went back to Rabbi Barthold alone.