During those seven months the lad had been attracting notice more
and more. The Bible students had cast up his reckoning unfavorably:
he was not of their kind--they moved through their studies as one
flock of sheep through a valley, drinking the same water, nipping
the same grass, and finding it what they wanted. His professors had
singled him out as a case needing peculiar guidance. Not in his
decorum as a student: he was the very soul of discipline. Not in
slackness of study: his mind consumed knowledge as a flame tinder.
Not in any irregularities of private life: his morals were as snow
for whiteness. Yet none other caused such concern.

All this the pastor knew; he had himself long had his eye on this
lad. During his sermons, among the rows of heads and brows and eyes
upturned to him, oftenest he felt himself looking at that big
shock-head, at those grave brows, into those eager, troubled eyes.
His persistent demonstrations that he and his brethren alone were
right and all other churches Scripturally wrong--they always seemed
to take the light out of that countenance. There was silence in the
study now as the lad modestly seated himself in a chair which the
pastor had pointed out.

After fidgeting a few moments, he addressed the logician with a
stupefying premise:--

"My great-grandfather," he said, "once built a church simply to
God, not to any man's opinions of Him."

He broke off abruptly.