pils!"

"H'm--ah--yes, quite so--that is--I think--"

"Do you, a preacher, think?" the girl went on hurriedly. "Or do you
only _think_ that you think? Do you still believe with the world that
the passing of a stream of human thought, or a series of mental
pictures, through your mentality constitutes _real_ thinking? Do you
believe that jumping from one human mental concept to another
twenty-four hours a day constitutes thinking? Have you yet learned to
distinguish between God's thoughts and their opposites, human
thoughts? Do you know what Jesus taught? Have you a real, working,
demonstrable knowledge of Christianity? Do you heal the sick, raise
the dead, and preach the truth that sets men free from the mesmerism
of evil? If so, then you are unevangelical, too, and you and I are
both heretics, and we'd better--we'd better leave this building at
once, for I find that the Inquisition is still alive, even in
America!"

She stopped, and caught her breath. Her face was flushed, and her
whole body quivered with emotion.

"The Inquisition! Why, my dear young lady, this is a Christian
nation!"

"Then," said the girl, "you have still much to learn from the pagan
nations that have gone before."

"Bless my soul!" exclaimed the doctor, again adjusting his glasses
that he might see her more clearly. "My dear child, you have been
thinking too much, and too seriously."

"No, Doctor," she replied; "but you preachers have not been thinking
enough, nor even half seriously. Oh," she went on, while her eyes grew
moist, and ever and again her throat filled, "I had expected so much
in this great country! And I have found so little--so little that is
not wholly material, mechanical, and unreal! I had imagined that, with
all your learning and progress, which Padre Jose told me about, you
would know God much better than we in the darkened South. But your god
is matter, machinery, business, gold, and the unreal things that can
be bought with money. Some one wrote, in a recent newspaper, that
America's god was 'mud and mammon!' What do I find the girls here in
this school talking about but dress, and society, and the unreal,
passing pleasures of the physical senses! Do they know God? No--nor
want to! Nor do the preachers! There are religious services here every
Sunday, and sermons by preachers who come down from the city.
Sometimes a Baptist; sometimes a Presbyterian; and sometimes an
Episcopalian, or a Methodist. What is the result? Co