The forenoon sunshine, beating strong upon the thin snow along the edges of
the porch floor, tattered them with a little thaw here and there; but it
had no effect upon the hard-packed levels of the street, up the middle of
which Bartley walked in a silence intensified by the muffled voices of
exhortation that came to him out of the churches. It was in the very heart
of sermon-time, and he had the whole street to himself on his way up to
Squire Gaylord's house. As he drew near, he saw smoke ascending from the
chimney of the lawyer's office,--a little white building that stood apart
from the dwelling on the left of the gate, and he knew that the old man was
within, reading there, with his hat on and his long legs flung out toward
the stove, unshaven and unkempt, in a grim protest against the prevalent
Christian superstition. He might be reading Hume or Gibbon, or he might be
reading the Bible,--a book in which he was deeply versed, and from which
he was furnished with texts for the demolition of its friends, his
adversaries. He professed himself a great admirer of its literature, and,
in the heat of controversy, he often found himself a defender of its
doctrines when he had occasion to expose the fallacy of latitudinarian
interpretations. For liberal Christianity he had nothing but contempt, and
refuted it with a scorn which spared none of the worldly tendencies of the
church in Equity. The idea that souls were to be saved by church sociables
filled him with inappeasable rancor; and he maintained the superiority of
the old Puritanic discipline against them with a fervor which nothing but
its re-establishment could have abated. It was said that Squire Gaylord's
influence had largely helped to keep in place the last of the rigidly
orthodox ministers, under whom his liberalizing congregation chafed for
years of discontent; but this was probably an exaggeration of the native
humor. Mrs. Gaylord had belonged to this church, and had never formally
withdrawn from it, and the lawyer always contributed to pay the minister's