He did not get it; and after a time he stopped reading the book. Left to
himself he might have sensed its meaning, but on all sides of him were the
voices of the men--the men at Wildman's who owned to no faith and yet were
filled with dogmatisms as they talked behind the stove in the grocery; the
brown-bearded, thin-lipped minister in the brick church; the shouting,
pleading evangelists who came to visit the town in the winter; the gentle
old grocer who talked vaguely of the spirit world,--all these voices were
at the mind of the boy pleading, insisting, demanding, not that Christ's
simple message that men love one another to the end, that they work
together for the common good, be accepted, but that their own complex
interpretation of his word be taken to the end that souls be saved.
In the end the boy of Caxton got to the place where he had a dread of the
word soul. It seemed to him that the mention of the word in conversation
was something shameful and to think of the word or the shadowy something
for which the word stood an act of cowardice. In his mind the soul became
a thing to be hidden away, covered up, not thought of. One might be
allowed to speak of the matter at the moment of death, but for the healthy
man or boy to have the thought of his soul in his mind or word of it on
his lips--one might better become blatantly profane and go to the devil
with a swagger.
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