. . . and I think some of my readers will, too. Sorry--I guess quoting others is lazy blogging, but this is just so great!
Miss Maudie settled her bridgework. "You know old Mr. Radley was a foot-washing Baptist--"
"That's what you are, ain't it?"
"My shell's not that hard, child. I'm just a Baptist."
"Don't you all believe in foot-washing?"
"We do. At home in the bathtub."
"But we can't have communion with you all--"
Apparently deciding that it was easier to define primitive baptistry than closed communion, Miss Maudie said: "Footwashers believe anything that's a pleasure is a sin. Did you know some of 'em came out of the woods one Saturday and passed by this place and told me me and my flowers were going to hell?"
"Your flowers, too?"
"Yes, ma'am. They'd burn right with me. They thought I spent too much time in God's outdoors and not enough time inside the house reading the Bible."
My confidence in pulpit Gospel lessened at the vision of Miss Maudie stewing forever in various Protestant hells. True enough, she had an acid tongue in her head, and she did not go about the neighborhood doing good, as did Miss Stephanie Crawford. But while no one with a grain of sense trusted Miss Stephanie, Jem and I had considerable faith in Miss Maudie. She had never told on us, had never played cat-and-mouse with us, she was not at all interested in our private lives. She was our friend. How so reasonable a creature could live in peril of everlasting torment was incomprehensible.
From To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Chapter 5
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