Octavius chanced to be one of the places where they were able to hold their own within the church organization.  The Methodism of the town had gone along without any local secession.  It still held in full fellowship the radicals who elsewhere had followed their unbridled bent into the strongest emotional vagaries—­where excited brethren worked themselves up into epileptic fits, and women whirled themselves about in weird religious ecstasies, like dervishes of the Orient, till they fell headlong in a state of trance.  Octavian Methodism was spared extravagances of this sort, it is true, but it paid a price for the immunity.  The people whom an open split would have taken away remained to leaven and dominate the whole lump.  This small advanced section, with its men of a type all the more aggressive from its narrowness, and women who went about solemnly in plain gray garments, with tight-fitting, unadorned, mouse-colored sunbonnets, had not been able wholly to enforce its views upon the social life of the church members, but of its controlling influence upon their official and public actions there could be no doubt.

The situation had begun to unfold itself to Theron from the outset.  He had recognized the episodes of the forbidden Sunday milk and of the flowers in poor Alice’s bonnet as typical of much more that was to come.  No week followed without bringing some new fulfilment of this foreboding.  Now, at the end of two months, he knew well enough that the hitherto dominant minority was hostile to him and his ministry, and would do whatever it could against him.

Though Theron at once decided to show fight, and did not at all waver in that resolve, his courage was in the main of a despondent sort.  Sometimes it would flutter up to the point of confidence, or at least hopefulness, when he met with substantial men of the church who obviously liked him, and whom he found himself mentally ranging on his side, in the struggle which was to come.  But more often it was blankly apparent to him that, the moment flags were flying and drums on the roll, these amiable fair-weather friends would probably take to their heels.

Still, such as they were, his sole hope lay in their support.  He must make the best of them.  He set himself doggedly to the task of gathering together all those who were not his enemies into what, when the proper time came, should be known as the pastor’s party.  There was plenty of apostolic warrant for this.  If there had not been, Theron felt that the mere elementary demands of self-defence would have justified his use of strategy.