The Damnation of Theron Ware
1896
Theron Ware arrives in the Adirondack backwater of Octavius believing he's been sent to prove himself as a minister, but the town offers him nothing he expected. A cynical Catholic priest, an atheist doctor of science, and the intoxicating Celia Madden await him, each one peeling away another layer of his faith until the man who came to save souls begins to wonder if there are any souls worth saving. Harold Frederic's 1896 masterpiece dissects the collision between Victorian piety and modern doubt with surgical precision, exposing the rot beneath small-town American sanctimony. It was a scandal in its time, a fifth-best-selling book that readers couldn't stop talking about. It foreshadows everything Sinclair Lewis would later make famous and stands as one of the most ruthlessly honest portraits of American religious life ever written. If you've ever wondered what happens when a believer's mind catches fire, this is the novel for you.
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“I am in love with your sinners,” responded Theron, as he shook hands with Celia, and trusted himself to look fully into her eyes. “I’ve had five days of the saints, over in another part of the woods, and they’ve bored the head off me.””
— Harold Frederic
“Theron lay awake, it seemed to him, for hours, listening tranquilly, and letting his mind wander at will through the pleasant antechambers of sleep, where are more unreal fantasies than dreamland itself affords.””
— Harold Frederic
“Meredith,' interposed Celia, 'makes one of his women, Emilia in England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again.””
— Harold Frederic
“Six months ago I was a good man. I not only seemed to be good, to others and to myself, but I was good. I had a soul; I had a conscience. I was going along doing my duty, and I was happy in it. We were poor, Alice and I, and people behaved rather hard toward us, and sometimes we were a little down in the mouth about it; but that was all. We really were happy; and I”
— Harold Frederic
“What you took to be improvement was degeneration. When you thought that you were impressing us most by your smart sayings and doings, you were reminding us most of the fable about the donkey trying to play lap-dog. And it wasn't even an honest, straightforward donkey at that!””
— Harold Frederic
“but it seems logical to me that a church should exist for those who need its help, and not for those who by their own profession are so good already that it is they who help the church.””
— Harold Frederic
“It's just what Wendell Phillips said,” she declared. “' The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.””
— Harold Frederic
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<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/the-damnation-of-theron-ware-987fd165-c00f-40b3-a7d2-a08c0c1e92e9"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/the-damnation-of-theron-ware-987fd165-c00f-40b3-a7d2-a08c0c1e92e9)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/the-damnation-of-theron-ware-987fd165-c00f-40b3-a7d2-a08c0c1e92e9][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/the-damnation-of-theron-ware-987fd165-c00f-40b3-a7d2-a08c0c1e92e9Cite this book
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Frederic, Harold. The Damnation of Theron Ware. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-damnation-of-theron-ware-987fd165-c00f-40b3-a7d2-a08c0c1e92e9.Frederic, H. (1896). The Damnation of Theron Ware. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-damnation-of-theron-ware-987fd165-c00f-40b3-a7d2-a08c0c1e92e9Frederic, Harold. The Damnation of Theron Ware. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-damnation-of-theron-ware-987fd165-c00f-40b3-a7d2-a08c0c1e92e9.
