The Damnation of Theron Ware

The Damnation of Theron Ware

by Harold Frederic

PART I

No such throng had ever before been seen in the building during all its

eight years of existence. People were wedged together most uncomfortably

upon the seats; they stood packed in the aisles and overflowed the

galleries; at the back, in the shadows underneath these galleries, they

formed broad, dense masses about the doors, through which it would be

hopeless to attempt a passage.

The light, given out from numerous tin-lined circles of flaring gas-jets

arranged on the ceiling, fell full upon a thousand uplifted faces--some

framed in bonnets or juvenile curls, others bearded or crowned with

shining baldness--but all alike under the spell of a dominant emotion

which held features in abstracted suspense and focussed every eye upon a

common objective point.

The excitement of expectancy reigned upon each row of countenances, was

visible in every attitude--nay, seemed a part of the close, overheated

atmosphere itself.

An observer, looking over these compact lines of faces and noting the

uniform concentration of eagerness they exhibited, might have guessed

that they were watching for either the jury's verdict in some peculiarly

absorbing criminal trial, or the announcement of the lucky numbers in

a great lottery. These two expressions seemed to alternate, and even to

mingle vaguely, upon the upturned lineaments of the waiting throng--the

hope of some unnamed stroke of fortune and the dread of some adverse

decree.

But a glance forward at the object of this universal gaze would have

sufficed to shatter both hypotheses. Here was neither a court of justice

nor a tombola. It was instead the closing session of the annual Nedahma

Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Bishop was about

to read out the list of ministerial appointments for the coming year.

This list was evidently written in a hand strange to him, and the slow,

near-sighted old gentleman, having at last sufficiently rubbed the

glasses of his spectacles, and then adjusted them over his nose

with annoying deliberation, was now silently rehearsing his task to

himself--the while the clergymen round about ground their teeth and

restlessly shuffled their feet in impatience.

Upon a closer inspection of the assemblage, there were a great many

of these clergymen. A dozen or more dignified, and for the most part

elderly, brethren sat grouped about the Bishop in the pulpit. As many

others, not quite so staid in mien, and indeed with here and there

almost a suggestion of frivolity in their postures, were seated on the

steps leading down from this platform. A score of their fellows sat

facing the audience, on chairs tightly wedged into the space railed off

round the pulpit; and then came five or six rows of pews, stretching

across the whole breadth of the church, and almost solidly filled with

preachers of the Word.

There were very old men among these--bent and decrepit veterans who

had known Lorenzo Dow, and had been ordained by elders who remembered

Francis Asbury and even Whitefield. They sat now in front places,

leaning forward with trembling and misshapen hands behind their hairy

ears, waiting to hear their names read out on the superannuated list, it

might be for the last time.

The sight of these venerable Fathers in Israel was good to the eyes,

conjuring up, as it did, pictures of a time when a plain and homely

people had been served by a fervent and devoted clergy--by preachers

who lacked in learning and polish, no doubt, but who gave their lives

without dream of earthly reward to poverty and to the danger and wearing

toil of itinerant missions through the rude frontier settlements. These

pictures had for their primitive accessories log-huts, rough household

implements, coarse clothes, and patched old saddles which told of weary

years of journeying; but to even the least sympathetic vision there

shone upon them the glorified light of the Cross and Crown. Reverend