"
She seldom spoke to him of religion, but it dwelt closely, vitally,
within her, and not as an inherited abstraction or correct social
observation, but definitely personal in its intercommunication. Lee
Randon had none at all; and in her rare references to it he could only
preserve an awkward silence. That had always been a bar between his
family and himself, particularly with the children: he was obliged to
maintain an endless hypocrisy about the miracles, the dogmas and
affairs, of Sunday school and the church. As a child he had been so
filled with a literal Presbyterian imagery that, when a degree of
reason discarded figures of speech seen as concrete actualities,
nothing had been left. With the lapse of a purely pictorial heaven and
hell, the loss of eternal white choirs and caldrons of the unrepentant,
only earth remained.
* * * * *
He could recall in gloomy detail his early impression of Paradise: it
was a sombre plain floating cloud-like in air, with, doubling through
it, an unspeakable sluggish river of blood; God, bearded and frowning
in the severity of chronic judgment, dominated from an architectural
throne a throng of the saved in straight garments and sandalled feet;
and, in the foreground, a lamb with a halo and an uplifted cross was
intent on the baptism of individuals issuing unaccountably white from
the thickly crimson flood.
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