y
known as Free Methodists, had relieved the parent flock of its principal
disturbing element. The rupture came fittingly at that time when all the
"isms" of the argumentative fifties were hurled violently together into
the melting-pot of civil war. The great Methodist Church, South, had
broken bodily off on the question of State Rights. The smaller and
domestic fraction of Free Methodism separated itself upon an issue
which may be most readily described as one of civilization. The seceders
resented growth in material prosperity; they repudiated the introduction
of written sermons and organ-music; they deplored the increasing laxity
in meddlesome piety, the introduction of polite manners in the pulpit
and classroom, and the development of even a rudimentary desire among
the younger people of the church to be like others outside in dress and
speech and deportment. They did battle as long as they could, inside
the fold, to restore it to the severely straight and narrow path of
primitive Methodism. When the adverse odds became too strong for them,
they quitted the church and set up a Bethel for themselves.

Octavius chanced to be one of the places where they were able to hold
their own within the church organization. The Methodism of the town had
gone along without any local secession. It still held in full fellowship
the radicals who elsewhere had followed their unbridled bent into the
strongest emotional vagaries--where excited brethren worked themselves
up into epileptic fits, and women whirled themselves about in weird
religious ecstasies, like dervishes of the Orient, till they
fell headlong in a state of trance. Octavian Methodism was spared
extravagances of this sort, it is true, but it paid a price for the
immunity. The people whom an open split would have taken away remained
to leaven and dominate the whole lump. This small advanced section, with
its men of a type all the more aggressive from its narrowness, and women
who went about solemnly in plain gray garments, with tight-fitting,
unadorned, mouse-colored sunbonnets, had not been able wholly to
enforce its views upon the social life of the church members, but of its
controlling influence upon their official and public actions there could
be no doubt.

The situation had begun to unfold itself to Theron from the outset.
He had recognized the episodes of the forbidden Sunday milk and of the
flowers in poor Alice's bonnet as typical of much more that was to
come