Quotable: Chapter: Of the Man at the Center His leisure left the Southerner free to brood as well as to dream, to exaggerate his fears as well as his hopes. Like all men everywhere, he hungered cloudily after a better and a happier world. And if this hunger could not move him to toil and battle for the realization of the vision here and now, it could and did impel him to the pursuit of the world beyond the world, could and did combine with everything within and without him to bear him to the sanctuary of religion. But not to the sanctuary of Anglicanism, surely. It was not simple and vivid enough. Its God without body, parts, or passions is an abstraction for intellectuals. It is priestly. It politely ignores hell and talks mellifluously of a God of Love. Its methods, begotten in the relaxing atmosphere of England and refined through centuries, are the methods of understatement. It regards emotion as a kind of moral smallpox. What our Southerner required, was a faith as simple and emotional as himself. A faith to draw men together in hordes, to terrify them with Apocalyptic rhetoric, to cast them into the pit, rescue them and at last bring them shouting into the fold of Grace. A faith, not of liturgy and prayer book, but of primitive frenzy and the blood sacrifice, often of fits and jerks and barks. The God demanded was a God-as-man, the Jehovah of the Old Testament, a God who might be seen, a God who had been seen, a passionate, whimsical God to be trembled before, but whose favor was the sweeter for that, a personal God, a God for the individualist, a God whose representatives were not silken priests but preachers risen from the people themselves. What was demanded here, was the God and the faith of the Methodists and the Baptists and the Presbyterians. These personal and often extravagant sects, sweeping the entire American country with their revivals in the first half of the nineteenth century, achieved their greatest success in the personal and extravagant South. And not only among the masses. Fully nine-tenths of the new planters, of the men who were to be masters of the great South were to be numbered among their adherents.--From The Mind of the South, W. J. Cash (1941) So it goes.
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 23:47:14 +0000
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