The People of the Ruins by Edward Shanks

Author:Edward Shanks [Shanks, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781935869580
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Cursor
Published: 2012-11-20T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER IX. MARCHING OUT

I

THE nightmare settled again around Jeremy with a double darkness and bewilderment. Again he labored in the workshops with his octogenarian assistants, but this time at first under a new oppression and a new hopelessness. Yet in some ways his mind was easier since he had understood that the frenzied haste which the Speaker urged on him was not urged without reason. After the council of war, the terrible old man, still jubilant, still strung up to the highest pitch of nervous energy, opened his mind to Jeremy without reserve. Jeremy, alarmed by his shining eyes, his feverish manner, his wild and abrupt gestures, still could not help seeing that his discourse was that of a sane man, a practical statesman, who was putting all he had on a single throw because there was no other choice.

“My family has ruled without dispute,” the Speaker said, “for a hundred years—and that is a long time. We had no position, we merely stepped into the place of the old government, and the people let us because they were so tired. They obeyed us because they had been in the habit of obeying us, when there was no one else for them to follow. But we were not chosen, and we are too new to claim divine right. We cannot even look to our religion for support, because the country is divided. We here in the south are mostly by way of being Catholics, but though the Holy Father would give us his help, we have never dared to accept it. They are violent Methodists in Wales, and in Yorkshire and the north they are nearly all Spiritualists.”

Jeremy inquired with interest what this new religion might be; but the Speaker could only describe it as it existed, and then but vaguely. He could not give the history of its growth. Jeremy gathered that the Spiritualists still called themselves Christians, but depended much less on the ministrations of any church than on advice received in various grotesque ways from departed friends and relatives. Their creed seemed to have degenerated into a gloomy and superstitious form of ancestor-worship. They had absorbed also, he guessed, some of the tenets of what had been called Christian Science; and the compound had produced a great many extravagant manifestations. The Spiritualists owned no law or discipline in the spiritual world, but acted on the latest intelligence received from the dead. Most of them held firmly that evil was a delusion, a doctrine which had come to have a strange influence on conduct. All of them believed without a question in the future life; and the absolute quality of their belief, the Speaker thought, had gradually changed among them the distaste for fighting which at one time possessed the whole country. It would further, he thought, make them formidable soldiers. The picture he drew of them, still living in the decay of an industrial system, packed close amid the ruins of the old towns in a bleak country, dismayed and repelled Jeremy.

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