Could he? No, of course not. It was just an academic quotation. Schaeffer couldn't possibly take offense at the ram for including it.
Else Kronacher. She was the only woman he could think of who was more intransigent than his housekeeper. She was writing pamphlets herself now. The ram had its ewe. Ewegenia, she used as her pseudonym. The last pamphlet she wrote, he thought, had been deliberately meant to tweak his own fondness for Paine. Frau Kronacher had started with a quotation from Common Sense in regard to kingship:
But there is another and great distinction for which no truly natural or religious reason can be assigned, and that is the distinction of men into KINGS and SUBJECTS. Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and bad the distinctions of Heaven; but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind.
Else Kronacher did not care for the political implications of the statement that male and female were distinctions of nature.
Perhaps he could get rid of his housekeeper by proposing to Frau Kronacher's daughter Martha? He probably should remarry one of these days. The house would be very empty when Matthias left for the university.
What university should the boy attend?
He didn't have time to think about that right now. He had a pamphlet to write. A speech to give. Or several of each.
His time was too valuable now. So they said. Worse, they were right. Paine's words belonged in Franconia this year:
The Sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. 'Tis not the affair of a City, a County, a Province, or a Kingdom; but of a Continent—of at least one-eighth part of the habitable Globe. 'Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time, by the proceedings now.
A different continent, but it was nonetheless true.
So, for now, his time was too valuable for him to step out into the breeze. He turned back to the table and picked up his pen. Placing the first sheet of paper over one printed with heavy black lines to provide guidance in keeping the lines of his handwriting straight, he entered the heading.
The Past Lies as a Nightmare upon the Present.
At least, he still knew better than to think his efforts were indispensable. If he were not writing pamphlets, somebody else would write pamphlets. Not precisely the same ones, saying precisely the same things, but close enough.
If he ever forgot that, the ram might as well be a king.
On Ye Saints
Eva Musch
April 1633: Grantville, Thuringia
"Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones; dem bones dem bones dem dry bones . . ." Willard Thornton's perpetually off-key humming was starting to get on his wife Emma's nerves.
"Willard," she lamented, "I have papers to grade. I honestly do. I am trying to grade these papers. Honestly I am. Please, Honey, please. Take the dry bones out and spade the garden, or something."
"I'll be good," he swore, hand on his heart. "I promise, Teacher. Please let me stay inside. If you look up from those papers and out the window you will see that . . ."
"It's raining." Emma leaned over and kissed him on the back of the neck, then returned to the stack of senior English literature essays.
"Dem dry bones would be getting very wet." Willard returned to hunting and pecking on the old manual typewriter that he had gotten back when he was in high school. "The toe bone's connected to the foot bone, and the foot bone's connected to the ankle bone . . ."
Emma got up. After checking to see that each kid was about his or her assigned chores, she went into the kitchen to make meatloaf. Whatever it was, Willard would tell her about it when he got good and ready, but not one instant before.
Good and ready came on Monday evening.
"I never did my missionary service," Willard said, after he had led the family in their devotions. "Because, well, you know."
Emma knew. In 1980, Willard and Emma ran off and got married the night of their high school graduation, believing (quite rightly, in regard to Emma's side) that both sets of parents would be profoundly opposed to their marriage. Immediate marriage meant that he would not do his stint as an LDS missionary as his parents thought he should; and her parents, whether the marriage might be now or later, considered LDS to be a cult. They were both eighteen, with no more sense than the average run of teenagers. Willard had really been afraid that if he left for two years, Emma's parents would manage to change her mind. So they ran.