MD3PAD 511-513

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

 >       Chapter 53 begins on page 511 with a lengthy quotation from
>Wicks' book of undelivered sermons.  It concerns the importance of doubt
>to faith.

That Wicks has a whole book of Undelivered Sermons isn't surprising: he appears to have come to faith through social protest - I see the spur to his belief in the line "Some few tatters of evidence to wrap our poor naked spirits against the coldness of a World where Mortality and its Agents may bully their way, wherever they choose to go" - made more poignant by the fact that his doubting faith indicates (or is this a preacherly bit of rhetoric to be taken as the opposite of the statement's plain meaning?) that even dreams or messages from the dead would make a warmer garment than belief in the Resurrection...anyway, what congregation would sit still for such a sermon?

Plus, of course, Wicks doesn't appear to be C of E (in fact, he describes his vocation as a "parsonical Disguise") or Quaker or any other sect...but for me this renders his faith even more poignant (trying to recall a quote about the poet as present everywhere but discernible nowhere...one of those books I thumbed through in the drugstore without buying...and the quote's getting mixed in my mind with "local habitation and a name" and also "the sphere whose center is everywhere")

It occurs to me that the sermon prefigures the woman's journey.  Or, the woman's journey embodies the spirit of the sermon?  both sermon and story permute themes from the Line expedition and from Cherrycoke's peregrinations

this story within the story opens out into the frame-tale eventually, but Mason and/or Dixon could also be reading it during their winter down-time