Environments may have their environments (just as fleas have other fleas to bite ’em, and so we go ad infinitum), and, thorough-going as was our theology, it had to succumb in the presence of our chivalry towards the sex; for throughout all our borders there lived not a man, lay or clerical, who would not have scorned to send a woman to the bottomless pit.
But as for the Virginia gentlemen, we shovelled them all in with an industry (ole Virginny nebber tire!) and an undoubting zeal that were above all praise.
That’s the reason I always did love a Virginian; he won’t stand any nonsense. “Do you believe that a prodigious majority of mankind were elected unto damnation, ages before they were born? No?” Swish! and that is the end of you! Another: “And so you say that baptizo means baptize, do you?”—“Why, don’t the dictionaries and all the Greek profess—” budjum! and where are you now?
For, in matters of this kind, we Virginians of that day, if you would agree with us, would agree with you; but—if not—you might go—your way,—for the King James version obtained in those times.
Ah, but we were out-and-outers in those good old days!
Ole Virginny nebber tire!
Strange! for time was when things were very different in the Old Dominion. Our ancestors had brought over with them the spirit of the merrie old England of hundreds of years ago; and merry men were they, too, for a long time after they landed on these fair shores.
And, after all, what was the harm? for do not philosophers tell us that a people’s conception of the Deity is but the reflex of the powers of nature (be they kindly or hostile) by which they are surrounded? And was not this a fair land? and if their sun was bright, but not too fierce, and their wheat-fields nodded to soft breezes, but knew not the hurricane, and if their snows were a fairy mantle for mother-earth, rather than a shroud, and Jack Frost spread, over pond and creek, ice just thick enough to store against what time the mint—the jolly jolly mint—should sprout,—if all nature smiled, why should these merry Norman-English pull long faces? Nor did they, but laughed and danced, bless their jovial souls!
But a time came when merrie England was merry no longer.
Somebody had invented a new religion.