in their usual hymn:--

"How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your faith in His excellent word."

Up in his room, a few hundred yards away, the lad that moment might
be trimming his lamp for a little more reading. More than once he
waited, listening in the darkness, to the reliant music of the
stalwart, stern old poem. How devotedly he too had been used to
sing it!

That summer through, then, he kept on at the work of trying to
settle things before college reopened--things which involved a
great duty. Where the new thought of the age attacked dogma,
Revelation, Christianity most, there most he read. He was not the
only reader. He was one of a multitude which no man could know or
number; for many read in secret. Ministers of the Gospel read in
secret in their libraries, and locked the books away when their
church officers called unexpectedly. On Sunday, mounting their
pulpits, they preached impassioned sermons concerning faith--
addressed to the doubts, ravaging their own convictions and
consciences.

Elders and deacons read and kept the matter hid from their pastors.
Physicians and lawyers read and spoke not a word to their wives and
children. In the church, from highest ecclesiastic and layman,
wherever in the professions a religious, scientific, scholarly
mind, there was felt the central intellectual commotion of those
years--the Battle of the Great Three.