Mary Frances Earp Describes Her Childhood and Religion

   In my childhood, I can’t say I was religious. What I was was feisty in the way that most kids are. As preacher's kids, the lot of us got taken to church service at least three times a week, and so church was natural to me, the singing and praying and preaching To all of us kids, I should say. We’d go to the creek bank sometimes and we’d play church. I usually got to be the preacher, cause I was full of myself and had a good memory for the kinds of things Pa would say. I’d preach at the sinners and try to convert them, though in fact I was as bad as the next one. One day Matty and me and a couple of others slipped over into a neighbor’s field where they was growing watermelons. Ours hadn’t turned out well that year, but these were beauties, big and round green stripers. We was picking them up to see who could lift the heaviest when we dropped one and it broke open. They was nothing for it then but to eat it, so that’s what we did, and it was larruping good, but we kept mum about it. Stolen fruits are sweetest, you know. We wasn’t really stealing, we just happened to drop that melon so we ate it. 

Later on, in my early teens, when it was time for me to be converted and join the church, this weighed on my conscience some. I knew I’d taken a bite of the apple, but I pushed it to one side. I don’t know that I actually converted, that would mean I changed in some basic way, and I don’t think I did. As I said, church came naturally to me. I went to the altar, I cried some and said some words about having been a bad girl and being resolved now to do right, and I was extended the hand of fellowship. Hug, I should say, rather than hand. The right hug of fellowship. Have I said that the United Brethren was clannish? We was. Just a group of families united by bonds of kinship that knowed each other well and didn’t care for outsiders. I’d never been outside that family, so I didn’t feel any need to join it anymore than I’d need to join my own family. Pa tole me that there were some people that were natural Christian souls, he had a Latin word for it, and we both figured that was me. I didn’t say nothing about that melon, though many years later I was to realize that sin casts a long shadow.

When I got grown in my bodily strength, I was like a hog full of dogmatism and intolerance, and I was contentious. If I didn’t like your religion I’d git in your face and tell you so. I’d let you know you were damned and going to hell for being a Campbellite or Millerite or Smithite, whatever you was, and I’d quote you chapter and verse. But a body learns a few things after being dead sixty years. I’ve become more tolerant, and now I want to be numbered among the peace makers. I got awfully tired of being contentious and argumentative. Now I’m content to say that the Gospel in a Word is Love and love has a human form. Then let the rest of it go. Except sometimes I go back to being my old self as contentious and contrary as ever. Well, don’t let it confuse you. You been warned.