"Oh, quicken our drowsy powers!" she hears the pastor cry on a rising
wave of monotone, and starts the fan again. Is she in church or in
Rosemont? She sees Johanna beckoning in her old, cajoling way, asking,
as in fact, not fancy, she had done the evening before, for the latest
news of Cornelius, and hearing with pious thankfulness that Leggett has
reappeared in his official seat, made a speech that filled the house
with laughter and applause, put parties into a better humor with each
other than they had been for years, and remains, and, for the present,
will remain, unmolested.
Still Parson Tombs is praying. The fan waggles briskly, then more
slowly--slowly--slowly, and sinks to rest on her white-robed bosom. The
head, heavy with luminous brown hair, careens gently upon one cheek;
that ineffably sweet dissolution into all nature and space comes again,
and far up among the dream-clouds, just as she is about to recognize
certain happy faces, there is a rush of sound, a flood of consternation,
a start, a tumbling in of consciousness, the five senses leap to their
stations, and she sits upright fluttering her fan and glancing round
upon the seated congregation. The pastor has said amen.
Garnet spoke extemporaneously. The majority, who did not know every line
of the sermon was written and memorized, marvelled at its facility, and
even some who knew admitted it was wonderful for fervor, rhetorical
richness and the skill with which it "voiced the times" without so much
as touching those matters which Dixie, Rosemont's Dixie, did not want
touched. Parson Tombs and others moaned "Amen," "Glory," "Thaynk Gawd,"
etc., after every great period. Only General Halliday said to his
daughter, "He's out of focus again; claiming an exclusive freedom for
his own set."
The text was, "But I was born free."
Paul, the speaker said, was as profound a believer in law as in faith.
Jealous for every right of his citizenship, he might humble himself, but
he never lightly allowed himself to be humbled. Law is essential to
every civil order, but the very laying of it upon a man makes it his
title-deed to a freedom without which obedience is not obedience, nor
citizenship citizenship. No man is entirely free to fill out the full
round of his whole manhood who is not in some genuine, generous way an
author of the laws he obeys. "At this sacred desk and on this holy day I
thank God that Dixie's noble sons and daughters are at last, after great
tribulations, freer from laws and government not of their own choice
than ever before since war furled its torn and blood-drenched banner! We
have taught the world--and it's worth the tribulation to have taught the
world--under God, that a people born with freedom in the blood cannot be
forced even to do right! 'What you order me to do, alien lawmaker, may
be right, but I was born free!' My first duty to God is to be free, and
no freedom is freedom till it is purged of all indignity!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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