Next Sunday we all went to church, about three mile, everybody a-horse-back. The men took their guns along, so did Buck, and kept them between their knees or stood them handy against the wall. The Shepherdsons done the same. It was pretty ornery preaching – all about brotherly love, and such like tiresomeness; but everybody said it was a good sermon, and they all talked it over going home, and had such a powerful lot to say about faith, and good works, and free grace, and preforeordestination, and I don’t know what all, that it did seem to me to be one of the roughest Sundays I had run across yet.
– Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 18. Worshippers with guns listening to a sermon on brotherly love! In his own naive way, Huck reveals the hypocrisy of the Grangerford’s and Shepherdson’s Christianity. The garbled term preforeordestination is an allusion to predestination, a doctrine that God ordained all that will happen.