The Ram Rebellion(174)
He called his mind back to order. Clearly, he had remained a widower for too long.
"Her position is privileged, in a way." Vulpius waved his hand. "If it wasn't, there wouldn't be many advantages to contacting her. Not many advantages to us, that is. She has the freedom to go wherever she will in the castle. That doesn't mean that she has any affection for the Freiherr."
"Practical of her," Ableidinger said.
"I doubt," Vulpius warned, "that she's given any thought to political theory. Or has any ideals about it."
Frau Lydia Färber, although no longer a Frau Stadtraetin since the late councilman's death, was nonetheless still, by the standards of Bamberg after a decade of war, a well-to-do woman. She found a guide for Willard Thornton and paid him. In spite of the season, Willard alternated his time—a week in Bamberg, talking to the women there to whom Frau Färber had given copies of the Book of Mormon and sometimes to their friends; three weeks out in the countryside, distributing not only LDS literature but also Meyfarth's pamphlets.
Both of the Thorntons rather liked Meyfarth. They had gotten to know one another pretty well since he and Willard walked into Bamberg together.
While Willard was out in the villages, his wife Emma, who had to do a lot of studying about LDS history and such when she converted, wrote up a great deal of what she remembered about the church's organizational principles into pamphlets. Willard's friend Meyfarth translated those, adding sections on the best way to incorporate them into the existing structure of village Gemeinden, and sent them out into circulation within the ram movement as well.
Meyfarth was a funny guy, Emma thought, so terribly serious and conscientious. He had taken at least an hour to talk about the fact that his personal liking for them did not in any way mean that he was endorsing their teachings, or even that he respected their teachings. "Only," he had insisted, "that I have come to see that if truth is to have a chance to prevail against error, then the civil authorities may not be given the right to suppress any one body of ideas. No, I do not respect your beliefs. If I respected them, I would join your church. I do respect your right to have and teach those beliefs."
So anxious, he had been, as though he had expected them to order him to go away and never come back. "I do not respect your faith," he had continued. "I believe that it is contrary to biblical truth. Utterly contrary, utterly wrong. As Herr Blackwell would say, `wrong-headed.' But I respect that you honestly hold that faith. And, however reluctantly, I have come to accept that if the law forbids one variety of error, that of the papists, from forbidding us to teach the truth, then the same law must also prohibit us from forbidding the teaching of other errors, such as those of the Calvinists and Anabaptists. And that we, to gain the right of free teaching, must allow it as well. But . . ."
"But you think that we are going to hell." Willard had completed what Meyfarth clearly did not want to say.
"Well, yes. And I also make no claim that everyone else within Lutheranism shares my views. For which reason, if `We mean it' does not prevail, I may someday lose my head. But until that day . . . I am here."
Emma also talked to Frau Färber's friends, and to other Bamberg women. When the weather was good enough, she handed out literature at the weekly market. Someone had replaced the booth that the friar had torn down the day that Willard was beaten. She winced. She did not like to think of what Willard's back had looked like when he came home after that happened.
She even managed to give away some more copies of the Book of Mormon. Not to mention many, many, copies of the abbreviated edition of Robert's Rules of Order. Emma had run out of that. Meyfarth had said with great seriousness that the ram would find funds to reprint it. Or, possibly, the ewe.
When he showed her the ram literature, with Brillo, not to mention the caricature of Veleda Riddle as Ewegenia, symbol of the Franconian League of Women Voters, Emma practically went into hysterics.
Until Meyfarth introduced her to some of the men. And said that Willard's guide through the villages was one of them; that others remained here in Bamberg to keep watch over her, and over Frau Färber. And, Meyfarth said with a rather shamed face, over him. Although he was a Lutheran minister and should not, properly, be involved in such matters.
He also introduced her to the ewe. Else Kronacher, a printer's widow. And to Frau Else's daughter Martha, a formidable young woman in her mid-twenties. Meyfarth seemed more than a little in awe of her.