in the public crucible
together. When he went to the Church Seminary, it was a matter of course
that every member of the faculty was a Republican, and that every one of
his classmates had come from a Republican household. When, later on, he
entered the ministry, the rule was still incredulous of exceptions. One
might as well have looked in the Nedahma Conference for a divergence
of opinion on the Trinity as for a difference in political conviction.
Indeed, even among the laity, Theron could not feel sure that he had
ever known a Democrat; that is, at all closely. He understood very
little about politics, it is true. If he had been driven into a corner,
and forced to attempt an explanation of this tremendous partisan unity
in which he had a share, he would probably have first mentioned
the War--the last shots of which were fired while he was still in
petticoats. Certainly his second reason, however, would have been that
the Irish were on the other side.
He had never before had occasion to formulate, even in his own thoughts,
this tacit race and religious aversion in which he had been bred. It
rose now suddenly in front of him, as he sauntered from patch to patch
of sunlight under the elms, like some huge, shadowy, and symbolic
monument. He looked at it with wondering curiosity, as at something
he had heard of all his life, but never seen before--an abhorrent
spectacle, truly! The foundations upon which its dark bulk reared itself
were ignorance, squalor, brutality and vice. Pigs wallowed in the mire
before its base, and burrowing into this base were a myriad of narrow
doors, each bearing the hateful sign of a saloon, and giving forth
from its recesses of night the sounds of screams and curses. Above were
sculptured rows of lowering, ape-like faces from Nast's and Keppler's
cartoons, and out of these sprang into the vague upper gloom--on the one
side, lamp-posts from which negroes hung by the neck, and on the other
gibbets for dynamiters and Molly Maguires, and between the two glowed a
spectral picture of some black-robed tonsured men, with leering satanic
masks, making a bonfire of the Bible in the public schools.
Theron stared this phantasm hard in the face, and recognized it for a
very tolerable embodiment of what he had heretofore supposed he thought
about the Irish. For an instant, the sight of it made him shiver, as if
the sunny May had of a sudden lapsed back into bleak December. Then he
smiled, and the bad visi
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