had never encountered a dissenting opinion on this point.  His boyhood had been spent in those bitter days when social, political, and blood prejudices were fused at white heat 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 vision went off into space.  He saw instead Father Forbes, in the white and purple vestments, standing by poor MacEvoy’s bedside, with his pale, chiselled, luminous, uplifted face, and he heard only the proud, confident clanging of the girl’s recital,—­Beatum MICHAELEM ARCHANGELUM, Beatum JOANNEM BAPTISTAM, PETRUM et PAULUM—­em!—­Am!—­Um!—­like strokes on a great resonant alarm-bell, attuned for the hearing of heaven.  He caught himself on the very verge of feeling that heaven must have heard.