The Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton Father Pemberton as brother ministers called him, Priest Pemberton as he was commonly styled by the country people—­would have seemed very old, if the medical patriarch of the village had not been so much older.  A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbors:  he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost; and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him before he can come near their camp.  Dr. Hurlbut, at ninety-two, made Priest Pemberton seem comparatively little advanced; but the college catalogue showed that he must be seventy-five years old, if, as we may suppose, he was twenty at the time of his graduation.

He was a man of noble presence always, and now, in the grandeur of his flowing silver hair and with the gray shaggy brows overhanging his serene and solemn eyes, with the slow gravity of motion and the measured dignity of speech which gave him the air of an old pontiff, he was an imposing personage to look upon, and could be awful, if the occasion demanded it.  His creed was of the sternest:  he was looked up to as a bulwark against all the laxities which threatened New England theology.  But it was a creed rather of the study and of the pulpit than of every-day application among his neighbors.  He dealt too much in the lofty abstractions which had always such fascinations for the higher class of New England divines, to busy himself as much as he might have done with the spiritual condition of individuals.  He had also a good deal in him of what he used to call the Old Man, which, as he confessed, he had never succeeded in putting off,—­meaning thereby certain qualities belonging to humanity, as much as the natural gifts of the dumb creatures belong to them, and tending to make a man beloved by his weak and erring fellow-mortals.

In the olden time he would have lived and died king of his parish, monarch, by Divine right, as the noblest, grandest, wisest of all that made up the little nation within hearing of his meeting-house bell.  But Young Calvinism has less reverence and more love of novelty than its forefathers.  It wants change, and it loves young blood.  Polyandry is getting to be the normal condition of the Church; and about the time a man is becoming a little overripe for the livelier human sentiments, he may be pretty sure the women are looking round to find him a colleague.  In this way it was that the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker became the colleague of the Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton.

If one could have dived deep below all the Christian graces—­the charity, the sweetness of disposition, the humility—­of Father Pemberton, he would have found a small remnant of the “Old Man,” as the good clergyman would have called it, which was never in harmony with the Rev. Mr. Stoker.  The younger divine felt his importance, and made his venerable colleague feel that he felt it.  Father Pemberton had a fair chance at rainy Sundays and hot summer-afternoon services; but the junior pushed him aside without ceremony whenever he thought there was like to be a good show in the pews.  As for those courtesies which the old need, to soften the sense of declining faculties and failing attractions, the younger pastor bestowed them in public, but was negligent of them, to say the least, when not on exhibition.