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pounds of sin,” he said. “A lot to carry! But who takes away the sins of the world?”
    â€œJesus!” we dutifully chorused.
    â€œRight. When you ask Him for forgiveness, here’s what happens.” He produced a pin and popped the balloons one after another, including one that had drifted free and needed to be stuck back on. I think we all felt that the balloon-popping part of the lesson was quite a bit more exciting than the sanctified static electricity part.
    His most impressive demonstration of electricity in action involved one of his own inventions, which he called Jacob’s Ladder. It was a metal box about the size of the footlocker my toy army lived in. Two wires that looked like TV rabbit ears jutted up from it. When he plugged it in (this invention ran on wall current rather than batteries) and flipped the switch on the side, long sparks almost too bright to look at climbed the wires. At the top, they peaked and disappeared. When he sprinkled some powder above this device, the climbing sparks turned different colors. It made the girls ooh with delight.
    This also had some sort of religious point—at least in the mind of Charles Jacobs, it did—but I’ll be damned if I remember what it was. Something about the Divine Trinity, maybe? Once the Jacob’s Ladder wasn’t right there in front of us, the colored sparks rising and the current fizzing like an angry tomcat, such exotic ideas had a tendency to fade away like a transient fever.
    Yet I remember one of his mini-lectures very clearly. He was sitting on a chair that was turned around so he could face us over the back. His wife sat on the piano bench behind him, hands folded demurely in her lap, head slightly bowed. Maybe she was praying. Maybe she was just bored. I know that a lot of his audience was; by then most of the Harlow Methodist Youth had begun to tire of electricity and its attendant glories.
    â€œKids, science teaches us that electricity is the movement of charged atomic particles called electrons. When electrons flow, they create current, and the faster the electrons flow, the higher the voltage. That’s science, and science is fine, but it’s also finite . There always comes a point where knowledge runs out. What are electrons, exactly? Charged atoms, the scientists say. Okay, that’s fine as far as it goes, but what are atoms?”
    He leaned forward over the back of his chair, his blue eyes (they themselves looked electric) fixed on us.
    â€œ No one really knows! And that’s where religion comes in. Elec­tricity is one of God’s doorways to the infinite.”
    â€œI wish he’d bring in a lectric chair and fry up some white mice,” Billy Paquette sniffed one evening after the benediction. “ That would be in’dresting.”
    In spite of the frequent (and increasingly boring) lectures on holy voltage, most of us looked forward to Thursday Night School. When he wasn’t on his hobbyhorse, Reverend Jacobs could give lively, sometimes funny talks with lessons drawn from Scripture. He talked about real-life problems we all faced, from bullying to the temptation to cheat answers from someone else’s paper during tests we hadn’t studied for. We enjoyed the games, we enjoyed most of the lessons, and we enjoyed the singing, too, because Mrs. Jacobs was a fine pianist who never dragged the hymns.
    She knew more than hymns, too. On one never-to-be-forgotten night she played a trio of Beatles songs, and we sang along with “From Me to You,” “She Loves You,” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” My mother claimed that Patsy Jacobs was seventy times better on the piano than Mr. Latoure, and when the minister’s young wife asked to spend some of the church collection money on a piano tuner from Portland, the deacons approved the request unanimously.
    â€œBut perhaps no more Beatles songs,” Mr. Kelton said. He was the deacon who