The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Dwelling Place of Light, Complete
by Winston Churchill
[Author is the American Winston Churchill not the British]

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Title: The Dwelling Place of Light, Complete

Author: Winston Churchill

Last Updated: March 5, 2009
Release Date: October 5, 2006 [EBook #3649]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DWELLING PLACE OF LIGHT, ***

Produced by Pat Castevans and David Widger

THE DWELLING-PLACE OF LIGHT

By Winston Churchill

1917

CHAPTER I

In this modern industrial civilization of which we are sometimes wont to
boast, a certain glacier-like process may be observed. The bewildered,
the helpless--and there are many--are torn from the parent rock,
crushed, rolled smooth, and left stranded in strange places. Thus was
Edward Bumpus severed and rolled from the ancestral ledge, from the firm
granite of seemingly stable and lasting things, into shifting shale;
surrounded by fragments of cliffs from distant lands he had never seen.
Thus, at five and fifty, he found himself gate-keeper of the leviathan
Chippering Mill in the city of Hampton.

That the polyglot, smoky settlement sprawling on both sides of an
historic river should be a part of his native New England seemed at
times to be a hideous dream; nor could he comprehend what had happened
to him, and to the world of order and standards and religious sanctions
into which he had been born. His had been a life of relinquishments.
For a long time he had clung to the institution he had been taught to
believe was the rock of ages, the Congregational Church, finally to
abandon it; even that assuming a form fantastic and unreal, as embodied
in the edifice three blocks distant from Fillmore Street which he had
attended for a brief time, some ten years before, after his arrival in
Hampton. The building, indeed, was symbolic of a decadent and bewildered
Puritanism in its pathetic attempt to keep abreast with the age, to
compromise with anarchy, merely achieving a nondescript medley of
rounded, knob-like towers covered with mulberry-stained shingles. And
the minister was sensational and dramatic. He looked li