Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where [is] the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.
-Jeremiah, 6:16

Then was Babbitt caught up in the black tempest.

Instantly all the indignations which had been dominating him and the spiritual dramas through
    which he had struggled became pallid and absurd before the ancient and overwhelming realities, the
    standard and traditional realities, of sickness and menacing death, the long night, and the thousand
    steadfast implications of married life. He crept back to her. As she drowsed away in the tropic
    languor of morphia, he sat on the edge of her bed, holding her hand, and for the first time in many
    weeks her hand abode trustfully in his.

He draped himself grotesquely in his toweling bathrobe and a pink and white couch-cover, and sat
    lumpishly in a wing-chair. The bedroom was uncanny in its half-light, which turned the curtains to
    lurking robbers, the dressing-table to a turreted castle. It smelled of cosmetics, of linen, of sleep. He
    napped and woke, napped and woke, a hundred times. He heard her move and sigh in slumber; he
    wondered if there wasn't some officious brisk thing he could do for her, and before he could quite
    form the thought he was asleep, racked and aching. The night was infinite. When dawn came and
    the waiting seemed at an end, he fell asleep, and was vexed to have been caught off his guard, to
    have been aroused by Verona's entrance and her agitated "Oh, what is it, Dad?"

His wife was awake, her face sallow and lifeless in the morning light, but now he did not compare
    her with Tanis; she was not merely A Woman, to be contrasted with other women, but his own self,
    and though he might criticize her and nag her, it was only as he might criticize and nag himself,
    interestedly, unpatronizingly, without the expectation of changing--or any real desire to
    change--the eternal essence.

There's a lot of smart college professors and tea-guzzling slobs in this burg that say I'm a
    roughneck and a never-wuzzer and my knowledge of history is not-yet. Oh, there's a gang of
    woolly-whiskered book-lice that think they know more than Almighty God, and prefer a lot of Hun
    science and smutty German criticism to the straight and simple Word of God. Oh, there's a swell
    bunch of Lizzie boys and lemon-suckers and pie-faces and infidels and beer-bloated scribblers that
    love to fire off their filthy mouths and yip that Mike Monday is vulgar and full of mush. Those
    pups are saying now that I hog the gospel-show, that I'm in it for the coin. Well, now listen, folks!
    I'm going to give those birds a chance! They can stand right up here and tell me to my face that
    I'm a galoot and a liar and a hick! Only if they do...if they do...don't faint with surprise if some
    of those rum-dumm liars get one good swift poke from Mike, with all the kick of God's Flaming
    Righteousness behind the wallop! Well, come on, folks! Who says it? Who says Mike Monday is a
    fourflush and a yahoo? Huh? Don't I see anybody standing up? Well, there you are! Now I guess
    the folks in this man's town will quit listening to all this kyoodling from behind the fence; I guess
    you'll quit listening to the guys that pan and roast and kick and beef, and vomit out filthy
    atheism; and all of you'll come in, with every grain of pep and reverence you got, and boost all
    together for Jesus Christ and his everlasting mercy and tenderness!