at famous
college which used to be thought, twenty or thirty years ago, to have the
monopoly of training young men in the milder forms of heresy. His
ministrations were attended with decency, but not followed with
enthusiasm. "The beauty of virtue" got to be an old story at last. "The
moral dignity of human nature" ceased to excite a thrill of satisfaction,
after some hundred repetitions. It grew to be a dull business, this
preaching against stealing and intemperance, while he knew very well that
the thieves were prowling round orchards and empty houses, instead of
being there to hear the sermon, and that the drunkards, being rarely
church-goers, get little good by the statistics and eloquent appeals of
the preacher. Every now and then, however, the Reverend Mr. Fairweather
let off a polemic discourse against his neighbor opposite, which waked
his people up a little; but it was a languid congregation, at best,--very
apt to stay away from meeting in the afternoon, and not at all given to
extra evening services. The minister, unlike his rival of the other side
of the way, was a down-hearted and timid kind of man. He went on
preaching as he had been taught to preach, but he had misgivings at
times. There was a little Roman Catholic church at the foot of the hill
where his own was placed, which he always had to pass on Sundays. He
could never look on the thronging multitudes that crowded its pews and
aisles or knelt bare-headed on its steps, without a longing to get in
among them and go down on his knees and enjoy that luxury of devotional
contact which makes a worshipping throng as different from the same
numbers praying apart as a bed of coals is from a trail of scattered
cinders.

"Oh, if I could but huddle in with those poor laborers and working-women!"
he would say to himself. "If I could but breathe that atmosphere,
stifling though it be, yet made holy by ancient litanies, and cloudy with
the smoke of hallowed incense, for one hour, instead of droning over
these moral precepts to my half-sleeping congregation!" The intellectual
isolation of his sect preyed upon him; for, of all terrible things to
natures like his, the most terrible is to belong to a minority. No
person that looked at his thin and sallow cheek, his sunken and sad eye,
his tremulous lip, his contracted forehead, or who heard his querulous,
though not unmusical voice, could fail to see that his life was an uneasy
one, that he was engaged in so