ve disappointed you! Know it as well as you do; but
I could not have done differently."

"YOU not believe in Christianity! YOU not believe the Bible!"

The suppressed enraged voice summed up again the old contemptuous
opinion.

The young man felt that there was another than himself whom it wounded.

"Sir, you must not speak to me with that feeling! Try to see that I am
as sincere as you are. As to the goodness of my mind, I did not derive
it from myself and am not to blame. I have only made an earnest and an
honest use of what mind was given me. But I have not relied upon it
alone. There are great men, some of the greatest minds of the world,
who have been my teachers and determined my belief."

"All your life you had the word of God as your teacher and you believed
it. Now these men tell you not to believe it and you believe them. And
then you complain that I do not think more highly of you."

"Father," cried David, "there is one man whose name is very dear to us
both. The blood of that man is in me as it is in you. Sir, it is your
grandfather. Do you remember what the church of his day did with him?
Do you forget that, standing across the fields yonder, is the church he
himself built to freedom of opinion in religious matters? I grew up,
not under the shadow of that church, for it casts none, but in the
light of it. I have seen many churches worship there. I have had before
me, from the time I could remember, my great-grandfather's words: they
seemed to me the voice of God by whom all men were created, and the
spirit of Christ by whom, as you believe, men are to be saved."

The younger man stopped and waited in vain for the older one to reply.
But his father also waited, and David went on:--

"I do not expect you to stand against the church in what it has done
with me: that HAD to be done. If you had been an elder of that church,
I know you, too, would have voted to expel me. What I do ask of you is
that you think me as sincere in my belief as I think you in yours. I do
ask for your toleration, your charity. Everything else between us will
be easy, if you can see that I have done only what I could. The faith
of the world grows, changes. Sons cannot always agree with their
fathers; otherwise the world would stand still. You do not believe many
things your own grandfather believed--the man of whose memory you are
so proud. The faith you hold did not even exist among men in his day. I
can no longer agree with you