time missing the communion in his own. Of all the congregations of
Christian believers that the lad had now visited, the Catholic
impressed him as being the most solemn, reverent, and best
mannered. In his own church the place did not seem to become the
house of God till services began; and one morning in particular,
two old farmers in the pew behind him talked in smothered tones of
stock and crops, till it fairly made him homesick. The sermon of
the priest, too, filled him with amazement. It weighed the claims
of various Protestant sects to be reckoned as parts of the one true
historic church of God. In passing, he barely referred to the most
modern of these self-constituted Protestant bodies--David's own
church--and dismissed it with one blast of scorn, which seemed to
strike the lad's face like a hot wind: it left it burning. But to
the Episcopal Church the priest dispensed the most vitriolic
criticism. And that night, carried away by the old impulse, which
had grown now almost into a habit, David went to the Episcopal
Church: went to number the slain. The Bishop of the diocese, as it
happened, was preaching that night--preaching on the union of
Christian believers. He showed how ready the Episcopal Church was
for such a union if the rest would only consent: but no other
church, he averred, must expect the Episcopal Church ever to
surrender one article of its creed, namely: that it alone was
descended not by historical continuity simply, but by Divine
succession from the Apostles themselves. The lad walked slowly back
to the dormitory that night with knit brows and a heavy heart.

A great change was coming over him. His old religious peace had
been unexpectedly disturbed. He found himself in the thick of the
wars of dogmatic theology. At that time and in that part of the
United States these were impassioned and rancorous to a degree