--- title: Improvement Era description: Monthly periodical of the Mormon church, 1897 onward. This library holds the issues of November 1897 to December 1930. authors: - Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations collections: - periodicals tags: - magazine - improvement-era periodical: Improvement Era volume: 24 number: 2 published: 1920-12 publisher: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations publisher_place: Salt Lake City language: en type: magazine reference: 'Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations, "Finding God in Millersville," *Improvement Era* 24, no. 2 (December 1920): 110–118.' source: url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera2402unse transcription: Transcribed from the Internet Archive scan of each issue (the item for each issue is named in the issue's own source); unnumbered advertising leaves are omitted, printed page numbers are kept as page markers. identifier: improvementera2402unse start_page: 110 end_page: 118 rights: status: public-domain basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1920-12) source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera2402unse publication_year: 1920 note: The Internet Archive item metadata carries a blanket "© Copyright by Intellectual Reserve, Inc." notice. The library owner judged it inapplicable because this issue was published in 1920, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright. --- # Finding God in Millersville Finding God in Millersville A Personal Experience A Plain Mans Story of How He Found More Than He Had Lost "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my breth- ren, ye have done it unto me>." ^/^OLONEL," I said to him, "do you believe that we will ever live again after we are done living here?" I shot the question right out of a clear sky, as we were sit- ting one day in his office, in Chicago. He is the largest jobber in our trade, and is under no particular obligation to be nice to me. On the contrary, I am under obligations to him; he handles more than one hundred thousand dollars of our product an- nually. He looked at me for a moment as though to be sure he had heard correctly; then he nodded to his secretary to leave the room. And that man, who is considered the hardest proposition in our business, and. who probably has not put his foot inside a church since his wedding day, sat and talked with me for an hour and a quarter about religion. After twenty-four years of pretty strenuous business life I have come to the conclusion that there are two subjects on which the average man will always talk — his own family and religion. Preachers who complain that men are not interested in religion either don't know how to talk to them, or they haven't ridden much in the smoking compartments of Pullmans. I have heard, in those little smoke-filled dungeons, discussion that would do credit to a theological seminary. And so we talked, there in that quiet office, in the way that men do who have thought things out for themselves; but I found, before many minutes had passed, that while I had asked the original question, soon it was he who queried and I who answered. Indeed, in some strange way I found myself telling him of the doubts and struggles I had fought through in reach- ing firm ground for my convictions. I could see he was deeply interested, which may have been the reason for my speaking more freely than I had intended when I asked that simple ques- tion. At the close of our talk the colonel said, "Thornton, you ought to write that experience of yours just the way you've talked it." ♦Copyright. 1917, by The Reilly & Britton Co. Published in the Im- provement Era by permission. FINDING GOD IN MILLERSVILLE 111 "Bosh!" I said; "I'm not a writer." "That's just why you ought to do it," he insisted; "a writer would spoil it — he'd do it too well. You'll just talk it right out; and there are a million men like me that'll read it. There are millions of us in this country who have discarded the ready- made religion that our mothers fitted us out with, and who have been hewing away blindly, trying to make a religion for our- selves. Go home and get your stenographer and write it." On the way back, on the train, I made up my mind that he was right. I know I run the risk of being called a crank; but any man who has gone through the sort of a mill I have in the past four- teen years will acquit me of that charge. Fourteen years ago, when I took over our business, it had been wrecked and piled up in the ditch. Last year its net profits were forty-two thou- sand dollars; three-fifths of it mine. Cranks are not born; one must have much time to become a crank — time to devote to re- flection and indignation. For fourteen years my barber has come to my office every morning, I did not have time enough even to go out for a shave. f HAPPENED to be born in Syracuse, New York, forty-nine years ago. My mother died at my birth; my father was one of those men cursed with an unhappy color blindness, to whom all near fields appear parched, all distant fields green. Had I been left in his care I should probably have been weakened by pneumonia in the Yukon, as he was, and died of typhoid on my way to the Mexican silver mines, as he did. Fortunately, he could not be bothered with me; the chase was too swift. I was early sent to my grandmother, who lived alone on a farm near Hobbs Corners, this state. Under her direction I grew up in hard labor and the literal fear of God. The Corners was the center of a considerable farming sec- tion, a couple of hundred families living about it within a ra- dious of five miles. They were pure-blooded American stock, hard-working, unimaginative, intolerant people who had "got right with God." No care-free laughter was heard in Hobbs Corners on the Sabbath nor, indeed, on any other day, except around the livery stable and poolroom — corridors of hell. The deep religious spirit of the community protected it from card playing, dancing, and most forms of wholesome amusement, but not against a bitter, malicious gossip. We kept every jot and tittle of the law but we never learned to love our enemies, the Baptists. Life in Hobbs Corners was a bitter trial, imposed upon us by a just God, who might, perhaps, at its close, admit us grudgingly into heaven. L12 IMPROVEMENT EB \ My grandmother strove earnestly to instil in me a fear of i hi- God: she succeeded in making me hate him. At fifteen I left Hobbs Corners and went to the county seal and got a job. I shall call the town Millersville for the pur- poses of this story, and myself Thornton, and our business the Millersville Cutlery Company. Gordon Miller, president of the company, was a business man of fine type. He had some pri- vate faults, but he had also the essential man's virtue — honesty. He taught me that my word must be as good as my bond. He could tolerate any mistake in judgment, any lapse in duty, any- thing except a lie. And being honest, with himself as well as the world, he could be neither a hypocrite nor a liar nor a snob. •yHE record of my first ten years in his employ might be writ- ten by any other business man who started young with no favoring influence except a determination to succeed. I worked long, hard hours: and gradually my pay and my responsibilities were increased. For a few months after my arrival in Millers- ville, I went regularly to church, in obedience to a promise exacted by my grandmother. But, strange as it may seem, my very association with a good man, Mr. Miller, influenced me greatly against religion. I worshiped Gordon Miller, who kept his promises. I had no use for God, who did not. All around me I saw hard-working, honest men and women building their lives on those promises, and meeting one disaster after another. "Trust in the Lord and do good," said the Bible, "so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed." In all Millersville there was no man who lived more sin- cerely in the spirit of that injunction than John Hamblin. His life was a daily record of unselfish service for the poor and af- flicted of the town. Did he dwell in the land? He did. Was he fed? He was not. Four years in succession the Providence which he served so faithfully sent blighting winds across his fields at the very moment when they would do the most harm. They could not have been timed more accurately by the devil himself. Four years, when John needed a bit of help from Providence, destruction was dealt to him instead. Did John curse God? Not much. Every Sunday he was found in his place in the family pew, kneeling humbly before heaven and confessing his utter unworthiness to be allowed to live. "A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand," said the Bible to the faithful, "but it shall not come nigh thee. Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked." That is a clear-cut promise. Yet when the diphtheria stalked our streets no child of the FINDING GOD IN MILLERSVILLE 113 local saloon-keeper, Tom Higgins, was struck down; only the three children of Joe Mason, the squarest, most loved man in town. If Joe Mason and John Hamlin did not protest in their hearts against this perfidy of Providence, I protested for them. I made no public declaration; but I was through with religion, none the less. I ceased going to church. For the rest of the years until my marriage, I led the care-free life of the majority of unattached young men. A DAY came when Gordon Miller died. I do not like to re- member that day, nor the chaotic years that followed. Suffice it to say that the business, in the hands of his son, passed from profit to the verge of bankruptcy in a very few years. Almost all businesses, I have since discovered, are merely the extension of a big permeating personality; no matter what their resources, nor how great their lead over their competitors, they fall rapidly into ruin without a head. Any man who tells me that there is no personality within and behind the universe, that it merely happened and runs itself, will have to begin by explaining to me the bankruptcy of the Millersville Cutlery Company after the death of Mr. Miller. The creditors looked the situation over, they decided to continue the business, and offered me the chance to acquire a three-fifths control, provided I could discharge the company's obligations and put it on its feet again. In that task I buried the next few years of my life. One afternoon late, as I was preparing to leave the office, my secretary spoke to me: "Jimmy is dying, Mr. Thornton," she said. "Jimmy? Jimmy?" I repeated vaguely. "Who's Jimmy?" "Your office boy," she said; "the little freckle-faced boy who came here a year ago." I remembered him then — a bright little chap, one of a dozen in the outer office who ran our errands. I don't think I had ever known his last name. I felt a quick tinge of pity. "Send some flowers," I said, "and have Doctor Fowler go over there and — " "I've done that," she answered; "but, Mr. Thornton — " "Yes?" I was in a hurry. "He wants to see you." "Me? Why, Miss Stone, you know that's impossible." "But he's asked for you all day. He's dying, Mr. Thorn- ton. Couldn't you — " "Give me his address," I said. "I'll go over." My car was at the door, and fifteen minutes later we drew Ill IMPROVEMENT ERA up in front of the poor little two-family house where Jimmy lived. His mother and father, a day laborer, and four unkempt children were gathered in a smelly, sobbing group about the bed. Jimmy cried out to me feebly as I stepped in. "Mr. Thornton — I wanted to see you. I wanted to tell you, I done the best I could, Mr. Thornton — " I sat down beside the tumbled bed and took his little fe- vered hand in mine. His mother threw herself distractedly upon the floor beside me. Doctor Fowler came in, touched the boy's head professionally and drew away again. And so — and so — with his hand in his boss's — Jimmy Egan died. I left some money with the father and promised to come back the next day. Fowler and I went out together. "Sad case," I said. I was vaguely disturbed, and it seemed that I must say something. I wanted Fowler to break into the sort of talk I was accustomed to — to say it was decent of me to come down to give the money. To my surprise he turned on me almost savagely — old Fowler, whom I had known for years, to whom I had paid fees of hundreds of dollars. "How much fresh air is there in that abominable hole of yours, Thornton?" he demanded. I was thunderstruck. "What do you mean?" "Just what I say. How much fresh air do the people get that make your profits for you? How much sunshine? Do you know what killed the kid? No air; no sunshine; long hours in a dirty hole of a factory. How many days did your peo- ple lose last year on account of bad health?" "Why, darn your impudence, Fowler — why, I don't know — " "Well, if you want my advice, you better find out. Here's my corner. Tell your man to stop. Fve got another of your crowd to dose up before I go home. Good night." XJE was gone before I could say a word to him. Instead of driving home, I sent word to Mrs. Thornton not to expect me for dinner. I dined at the Miller House alone. And after din- ner I walked out through the district where the employees of the Millersville Cutlery Company lived, out beyond the town, under the stars. And all the time it seemed to me that Jim- my's voice pursued me, and Jimmy's eyes shone through the darkness into mine. What happened in the next year or more I shall have to sketch very briefly: Jimmy's people had no notion of laying Jimmy's death at my door; on the contrary, they were profuse in their gratitude to me for the help I had given. They sent me a little snapshot of Jimmy in an ugly gilt frame. That FINDING GOD IN MILLERSVILLE 115 snapshot, in all its pristine ugliness, stands on my desk beside the picture of my wife and boys. As fast as I could, I remodeled our plant so as to let in both light and sunshine. The money that I had planned to put into redecorating our own home went into some shower baths for the men. On my own initiative, I closed the plant on Satur- day afternoons except in the busy season, and shortened the other days an hour. I became interested in what other fellows in our line had done to make their factories attractive, and formed a secret resolve to have ours the show place of the cutlery business. It became a matter of pride with me: I looked forward to the day when the trade paper would send men to write me up. It was pride — but there was something else that at first I hardly understood. Gradually, as I got nearer to my people, they began to move in closer to me. Sanderson, the foreman of the shipping-room came in one day, hat in hand, and said he wanted to talk to me about sending his boy to a technical school. Old Molly, one of our packers, knocked timidly one afternoon just at closing time, and, blushing and stammering, wanted to know whether I thought any doctor could cure her varicose veins. "I have to stand on my feet so much, Mr. Thorton, and you understand, I don't want to bother you nor nothing, but you've been so good to the men, I thought perhaps — " I was becoming a sort of father to the whole three hundred of them. I called myself a fool, but I liked it none the less. Something had waked up in me that I did not suspect was there. If any man had accused me of being philanthropic, of letting miy "better nature assert itself," I would have denied the charge indignantly. "It's just good business," I would have said. "I help to keep 'em efficient, and they work harder." Nevertheless, I knew it was more than that — much more. WITHOUT realizing it until long afterward I had made my first great religious discovery. I had discovered my fellow man — my brother. It was about this time that I became more or less inter- ested in reading the Bible. My youngsters in Sunday school were studying the New Testament, and their questions were embarrassing. I had a vague remtembrance of some parts of the New Testament from my own Sunday school days, and my im- pressions of Jesus of Nazareth, joined together, would probably have read something like this: Jesus of Nazareth was a rather weak-faced young man who 116 IMPROVEMENT ERA claimed to be (rod. He spent three years preaching in Pales- tine surrounded by a group of emotional women. He was once taken onto a high tower by the devil, who jeered at him and .land him t<» throw himself down. Jesus, although he claimed to have miraculous power, neither accepted the challenge nor threw the devil down. When tried before the Roman governor, he said: "If I wanted to, I could call ten legions of angels to destroy you and rescue me." But he did not make good. He left many sayings, among them, "If a man smite you on one cheek, turn the other also." This wasn't an attractive picture; I hated to pass it on to my boys — at least until I had verified it. So I set to reading some of the books that professed to interpret him to us, amlong them Thomas Hughes' Manliness of Christ. I didn't expect to be interested; to my surprise, I was. Gradually, an entirely new picture of Jesus of Nazareth took shape in my mind. I came to picture him first of all as physically strong. His first thirty years were spent in swinging an ax and pushing a plane; his last three years were occupied almost continuously in tramping from one village to another and sleeping out of doors. He had. "no place to lay his head." On his first trip down to Jerusalem his ears were full of the complaints of the simple peasants against the graft and oppression of the priestly gang at the Temple. He was young and unknown, a poor peasant. Yet he strode in among that gang of robbers, and with a rude little whip drove them in terror before him out of the Temple. You can't make me believe that he could have done that unless there was iron muscle behind that little whip, ready to back it up. As I got to know him better I conceived a real admiration for Jesus of Nazareth, coupled with an intense surprise that in all the twenty centuries that have elapsed since he lived, his Church has never shown him to the world as he really was. My admiration at first was merely the sort that Napoleon felt for him. Without armies or influence, as Napoleon pointed out, he had conquered the world and erected an empire that has outlasted all others. Mine was merely that sort of admiration to start with; but it deepened as my study went on. I came to marvel at the perfection of his life — his magnificent self- possession, that was not lost even when they awakened him in the midst of a storm that threatened the ship: his mental su- premacy over the keenest minds of his time, and his spiritual grandeur. So, gradually, I made my second religious discovery; I dis- covered Jesus of Nazareth. FINDING GOD IN MILLERSVILLE 117 A PSYCHOLOGIST, I suppose, would be able to trace, step by step, the process that was going on inside rne, and set it down with scientific precision. I can't. I only know that I went on with my reading and thinking. I took a good many long walks alone. It has been said that no astronomer can be an atheist. However that may be, I know, at least, that nothing seems to lift me out of myself like an hour or two alone under the stars. To think that each one of those tiny points of light is a sun as big as or bigger than our sun and that round it circle whole systems of worlds like ours — the idea rocks my mind a little; but I come back to it again and again and each time it serves me as a never-failing source of spiritual stimulation. It takes a girl in our factory about two days to learn to put the seventeen parts of a meat chopper together. It may be that these millions of worlds, each with its separate orbit, all bal- anced so wonderfully in space — it may be that they just hap- pened; it may be that by a billion years of tumbling about they finally arranged themselves. I don't know. I am merely a plain manufacturer of cutlery. But this I do know: That you can shake the seventeen parts of a meat chopper around in a washtub for the next seventeen billion years and you'll never make a meat chopper. All this time I was really wanting to believe in God, but I didn't quite dare. I'd trained myself for thirty odd years never to accept any conclusion until I had the facts to back it up, and I hated to commit myself to something that couldn't be acually proved. So I kept working along with my people at the factory, doing what I could to be a sort of father to them. The closer I got to them, the more I admired them. The amount of love, and patience and simple faith in the average lowly man and woman has become to me nothing short of marvelous. Men whom I have always regarded as rather slow-witted, ordinary fellows, I found to be real heroes when I got under their skins. All the enthusiasm that I had put into building up our business I put into trying to build those fellows up, to helping them make the most of themselves. Human personality became to me the most marvelous and precious and wonderful thing in the world. Then, suddenly, one Saturday afternoon, when I was alone in the office, it flashed across me that I had the proof I was looking for. The world might have created itself, I said to my- self, but the world couldn't have created something greater than itself. The creature can't be greater than the creator. And human personality is greater than the world. * * * To create personality there must have been personality. So in my own office in Millersville I found God. What 118 IMPROVEMENT ERA kind of a God is he? How does he act? I can't claim to have any special knowledge on questions like those. But I have an idea that Jesus hit about right. God can't be any worse than I am, for he created me and gave me whatever ideas of goodness I have. I wouldn't operate the sort of hell and heaven that people have given him credit for, and I know he wouldn't either. I've found out that I'm at my best when I'm being a sort of father to my three hundred folks, helping them along the best I can, trying to give them a chance to make the best of themselves. And that's what Jesus of Nazareth has told us God is, a Father — Father to all the world. On days when I was all tired out I used to say to my- self: "What a hopeless mess it is, this living. It's a rotten game played with loaded dice. We're put here, each with some spark of foolish egotism that makes him believe his life is vastly important. We struggle through to the end, and in the end find — nothing. Why should anyone bring a son into so sense- less, so answerless a world?" I don't feel that way any more. The happiest times in my life are when I find someone among my folks who really ap- preciates what I'm trying to do, and who turns in and tries to help. Having that in mind, I am ready to believe that He must have smiled for a second on that Saturday afternoon when I found him in my office here at Millersville. At least I like to think so. I like to picture him, big, power- ful, with the heart of a woman. Big enough to hold the worlds in his hand, and tender enough to care for every sparrow, working in his world, wanting to make it better, but able to make it progress only as fast as he can get fellows like me on his side. If that picture of him is true, if he really needs me as a working partner, then that's the answer to the riddle. My life really is as valuable, as important, as worth-while in the world, as I have always wanted to believe it. He needs me; that's importance enough. I haven't joined the Church yet, but I have an idea that I shall. There's a new minister in town, a young chap, and while his mind is pretty well spoiled yet with Old Testament ideas, he is young enough so that I have hopes of him. I have made him a proposition that if he will drop that Wednesday evening prayer meeting, which has been dead for twenty years, and or- ganize a Boy Scout club to meet on that night, I will go on his board of trustees. He's young, and eager to be of some use in the world, and I think I may make a pretty fair Christian of him yet, in spite of his bad start. In his heart he thinks, of course, that I am not a regular Christian, though he's too polite to say so. But he doesn't