Free The Life of Hope by Paul Quarrington

only understand as human, but felt must be divine. His erections had to be from God. He even checked his Bible, but it seemed obscure. There were references only to “his staff” and “his rod” which shall lead them.
    This liquid from his loins, Hope thought, there was something to this.
    Liquid
    Boston, Massachusetts, 1846
    Regarding the Fortunes of Hope, we know the following: that they reached a nadir in his so-called “Black Days”; that he was frequently Intemperate
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    Joseph Benton Hope devised the following theory: the word wasn’t made “flesh” at all, this being somehow a mistranslation. (The etymology Hope would work out later.) The word was rather made “liquid.” Liquid is the basis of the Lord’s creation, after all. Did not the Spirit of God move upon the face of the waters? And—this was all preached in a sermon, one of the last that J. B. Hope delivered—when the men of Ai smote them thirty-six men, did not the hearts of the people melt, and become as water? And hearken to the words of the twenty-second psalm: “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax, it is melted in the midst of my bowels.” Liquid is the basis of human life, Hope contended. And thus, ye should drink deeply.
    Joe Hope became the town drunk, no mean feat considering he had recently moved to the city of Boston. His face was known in every tavern within a twenty-mile radius; known, laughed at, resented and often feared. Joe Hope took to wearing black clothes, and these in turn made his pallor so white as to seem lifeless. Joe Hope would lunge into an establishment with hisBible held high, and as he drank Hope would quote from the Good Book endlessly. “Mine heart within me is broken because of the prophets!” Joe Hope would shout. “All my bones shake! I am like a drunken man, and like a man whom wine hath overcome, because of the Lord, and because of the words of his holiness!” Joe Hope shouted so loudly and for so long that his voice broke in the most literal sense; it collapsed into his throat, froglike and inhuman.
    Alcohol seemed to be the only thing that could heighten his awareness and expand him the way his first orgasm had. He seemed to learn new things and be open to the voice of God. He thought things he had never thought before. He did things he would never have done before. He also bumped into things, broke things and generally found himself wrestling more often with the reality of the physical world. It took its toll. During one drunken rampage Joe Hope lost his right eye. Various rumors circulated as to how this had happened. One story had it that he’d been hexing a milk-maiden beneath the moon, forcing her through Phreno-Mesmerism to dance naked and to copulate with bulls—according to this tale, the girl’s father still had Joe Hope’s eyeball impaled on one prong of his pitchfork. Another story was that a discomfuddled Hope had become over-exuberant during one of his barroom sermons. “And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out! It is better to enter the king … dom … oh-oh.” Most likely Joe Hope had stumbled into something, for he had no resistance to alcohol; one or two sips and he began weaving, and by his fourth or fifth drink he was spastic. So, although his Christmas Eve tumble off the ropewalk and into the icy Boston Harbor was widely regarded as an attempt to commit suicide, it seems equally probable that Joseph Benton Hope had but tripped over his own two feet.
    Nothing So Petty As Dreams
    Boston, Massachusetts, 1847
    Regarding the followers of Hope, we know the following: that his two most loyal disciples, George and Martha Quinton, discovered his seemingly lifeless body in the waters of Boston Harbor; that George could affect no resuscitation; that Martha, after her fashion, beat upon Joseph Benton Hope’s body; that it was revived
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    Joseph Benton Hope was having a strange dream (although from around that point in his life forward, he