For Johnson the idea that an afterlife might not exist was an appalling thought, but although he thought that spirits could protect and counsel those still living, he kept himself distant from the more credulous Methodists, and recognised that his religion required proof of an afterlife.
It was an appalling thought, and Mr. Bergman made it go away.
It seems strange, though, that exercise - a great way to lose weight - is such an appalling thought to most people.
Becoming an Islander might have been an appalling thought last year, but he knew about the reconstruction of the team, and his wife has relatives in White Plains.
"Forrest Gump" as the culmination of a hundred years of the art of cinema: this appalling thought prompted me to accept an invitation to serve on the jury of the 1995 Cannes Film Festival.
An appalling thought is that plenty of supposedly responsible people did see that video tape, and saw in it only what they wanted to see the willful rationalizations that sustain domestic violence.
The fact that the EU's politics will be devoted to tackle this self-created problem sideling other pressing matters are an appalling thought.
Gus Cairns is a journalist and AIDS activist who tells me: "All the denialists I've known have been driven by a conviction that it's such an appalling thought that it has to be denied and there has to be an escape somehow.
There's a difference between action and thought, however appalling those thoughts may be.
In Lavery's play, some of the doomed have irritating personalities, gross lavatorial habits and appalling sexual thoughts.
