The church which David's grim old Indian-fighting great-grandfather
had dedicated to freedom of belief in the wilderness, cutting off a
parcel of his lands as he had hotly sworn and building on it a
schoolhouse also, stood some miles distant across the country. The
vast estate of the pioneer had been cut to pieces for his many
sons. With the next generation the law of partible inheritance had
further subdivided each of these; so that in David's time a single
small farm was all that had fallen to his father; and his father
had never increased it. The church was situated on what had been
the opposite boundary of the original grant. But he with most of
the other boys in the neighborhood had received his simple
education in that school; and he had always gone to worship under
that broad-minded roof, whatsoever the doctrines and dogmas haply
preached.

These doctrines and dogmas of a truth were varied and conflicting
enough; for the different flocks and herds of Protestant believers
with their parti-colored guides had for over fifty years found the
place a very convenient strip of spiritual pasture: one
congregation now grazing there jealously and exclusively;
afterwards another.

On this quiet bright Sunday morning in the summer of 1865, the
building (a better than the original one, which had long before
been destroyed by accidental burning) was overcrowded with farming
folk, husbands and wives, of all denominations in the neighborhood,
eager to hear the new plea, the new pleader. David's father and
mother, intense sectarians and dully pious souls, sat among them.