forty per cent.

I suppose things are just the same elsewhere,--I mean the peculiar
kind of discontent that crept into the Church of England congregation
in Mariposa after the setting up of the Beacon. There were those who
claimed that they had seen the error from the first, though they had
kept quiet, as such people always do, from breadth of mind. There
were those who had felt years before how it would end, but their lips
were sealed from humility of spirit. What was worse was that there
were others who grew dissatisfied with the whole conduct of the
church.

Yodel, the auctioneer, for example, narrated how he had been to the
city and had gone into a service of the Roman Catholic church: I
believe, to state it more fairly, he had "dropped in,"--the only
recognized means of access to such a service. He claimed that the
music that he had heard there was music, and that (outside of his
profession) the chanting and intoning could not be touched.

Ed Moore, the photographer, also related that he had listened to a
sermon in the city, and that if anyone would guarantee him a sermon
like that he would defy you to keep him away from church. Meanwhile,
failing the guarantee, he stayed away.

The very doctrines were impeached. Some of the congregation began to
cast doubts on eternal punishment,--doubts so grave as to keep them
absent from the Lenten Services of Sorrow. Indeed, Lawyer Macartney
took up the whole question of the Athanasian Creed one afternoon with
Joe Milligan, the dentist, and hardly left a clause of it intact.