The Sort Of Thing That Used To Trouble My Sleep

Back in my drinking days my stomach would for damn sure be a lousy mess, and my liver would feel like a fat wad of pate throbbing behind my ribs. I couldn’t sleep for shit and I’d be up and down prowling the drafty house all night in the dark, handling the various little talismans I’d picked up on my travels, every one of which seemed to have lost whatever power they might once have had to enchant.
Eventually and inevitably I would turn on the lamp above my easy chair and search for the old moth-eaten volume on my bookshelves. This book, written by a distant relative on my mother’s side, was entitled And Ye Shall Bee A Mercyfull Steward to Them Al. The author, Reverend L.C. Greenwood, was an animal rights zealot in 15th-century England, and a man of blistering piety.
I had slain a great many animals in my time, a fact that was in those days much on my mind, and I would find rebuke on every moldering page of the Reverend’s text, which constituted, in fact, a sort of harsh and ceaseless rebuke that never failed to make my blood run cold in the wee hours.
Among Greenwood’s aggressive and disturbing torrent of censure were these words, which I stumbled across in a notebook this evening:

Thee almyghtye God hath wryttn in thine hearte thys knowledge of the sanctitie of all lyfe. As ye woulde doe to the leaste of God’s creatures, so wyll bee done unto thee in the place beyonde thys teeming worlde. Doe not then trod the squirmyng thynges of the dyrte, nor flogg nor flaye the ploddyng or scampryng beastes of the woode nor fyld. Nae shall thee gyve myschefe to the wyld thyngs of wing’d grace nor doe wickednesse to the breathyng bountye of the watters, neyther the symple fysh nor the leviathan of the deepe. Howe ever muche unlyke they may seme, eache hath been shapd by God’s hande, and muste bee shewn the love ye would shew thine owne blessd spawne.
Yae, as ye treate eache flyng creepyng thynge and lyvyng mystry so shall you bee treatd by the Lorde in the lyfe to come. As ye trod so shall ye bee trodden. Suche as doeth malyce and evyll shall bee as nothynge in the nexte worlde. They that persyst in forbyden endevors shall bee stalkd and harryd and persecuted through eternitie. Theyr bloode shall bee tappd and the skinne turnd from the insyde to the out like a raggd garment, and the fat shall bee flayd from theyr fleshe and fed to the evyll doers in hell. The verye heart of suche synners shall bee plunderd pumpyng from theyr chestes and fed to the devylls coale fyres of Sheol, and never again shall they know the mercyfull reste of the blessd.