In the Beauty of the Lilies Read Free

as other than indispensable to God’s justice. With the mystery of His freedom vanished the passionately debated distinctions of sublapsarianism, supralapsarianism, and infralapsarianism,in regard to the precise moment when God imposes election. The mahogany tabletop in silence reflected with a tinted blur the colorful bowl suspended above it, a bowl emptying itself world without end. At the rim of this vast purge, this volcanic desolation, the house’s furnishings stood unchanged, temporarily enclosing and protecting the clergyman and his family.
    Temporarily, for few of these elegant if well-worn downstairs furnishings were his; they came with the parsonage and would pass to the use of the next minister and his brood. Only upstairs, in children’s beds and bureaus thriftily acquired as needs arose, and a linen-laden cedar chest—Stella’s cumbersome dowry—that had trailed them throughout the upper Midwest, and a scuffed mahogany fourposter they had bought second-hand in Oshkosh when the rope bed the parish had supplied gave them both painful backs, and a somewhat saccharine framed print of the Heinrich Hoffmann painting of Jesus praying in vain in the Garden of Gethsemane for this cup to pass from Him while the disciples slept—a gift of the parish in leaving Granite Falls—and a few crackled family portraits and small items of quality in silver and ivory descended to him from the Wilmots’ wealthier days as Manhattan importers and merchants, before the Civil War bred a rougher set of entrepreneurs and sent the declining family into the farmlands of New Jersey—only upstairs was some of the furniture theirs, to carry with them on their next move, to his next call. But where would they go without his faith to carry them? His faith was what paid their way.
    Yet would he call it back, his shaky half-faith, with its burden of falsity and equivocation, even if he could? In his present state he was a husk, depleted but at last distinct in shape, as if, after a long, enfeebling captivity, a secret anger and resentmentat his captors could be felt moving tinglingly through his veins. The cowardice of men and women in the face of the natural facts had forced upon him the discreditable role of magician. Ingersoll, among his other thunders, had promised the clergy liberation, unchaining them from mouldy books and musty creeds. He must look up the passage. He was shaking, a look at his hands discovered. A slight lumpy soreness, as if after a mismanaged swallow, had intruded itself into his throat. Anxious now not to deflect the women’s attention from the ham to himself, he walked with Indian stealth, suppressing the scrape of his leather soles, back through the spot on the dark wood floor where his theocentric universe had collapsed. The milled and carved configurations of the spiky staircase and the inner vestibule door with its big frosted-glass pane rimmed in milky translucent colors were as they had been ten minutes ago. The cap of the walnut newel post nearest him was an elongated four-sided pyramid upon a brief neck of several turnings of half-round molding; the detail presented itself to him as having a glowering Oriental aspect, as if the Gothic and Chinese styles were carved by the same barbaric hand, guided by the benighted, hopeless mentality which seeks ornament as a distraction from the intolerable severity of the universe. Bare, pure, devoid: even the Bible contained the information, in its less exegized verses.
All is vanity and vexation of spirit. How dieth the wise man? as the fool. If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me
?
    Clarence had preached on these texts, sought with his striving, affecting, rather fragile tenor voice to find the way around them, but there was, it now clearly appeared, no way. He went back into his study, his book-lined cave that smelledof himself, scented with