a noble girl, and would feel regret at
inflicting pain. Poor Bart! Generous Mrs. Ridgeley! It also occurred
to Mrs. Ridgeley that Mrs. Markham did not return to the subject of
the goods, and she was really afraid that Julia might lose her dress.

CHAPTER XI.

UNCLE ALECK.

The marvellous power of Christianity to repeat itself in new forms
apparently variant, and reveal itself under new aspects, or rather its
wonderful fulness and completeness, that enables the different ages of
men, under ever-varying conditions of culture and development, to find
in it their greatest needs supplied, and their highest civilization
advanced, may be an old observation. A change in the theological
thought and speculation of New England was beginning to make its way
to the surface at about the time of the migration of its sons and
daughters to the far-off Ohio wilderness, and many minds carried with
them into the woods a tinge of the new light. Theodore Parker had not
announced the heresy that there was an important difference between
theology and religion, and that life was of more consequence than
creed. But Calvinism had come to mean less to some minds, and there
was another turning back to the great source by strong new seekers,
to whom the accepted formulas had become empty, dry shells, to be
pulverized, and the dead dust kneaded anew with the sweet waters of
the ever fresh fountain. Those who bore the germs of the new thought
to the wild freedom of nature, in the woods, found little to restrain
or direct it; and, as is usual upon the remoulding of religious
thought, while the strong religious nature questions only as to the
true, many of different temperament boldly question the truth of all.
The seeds and sources of a religious revolution are remote, and
its apparent results a generation of heretics and infidels. Heresy
sometimes becomes orthodoxy in its turn, and in its career towards
that, and in its days of zeal and warfare, the infidel often becomes
its convert.

Those in the new colony, who turned to the somewhat softer and sweeter
givings out of the Great Teacher, and to whom these qualities made the
predominant elements of his doctrines, were few in numbers, scattered
and weak, while the mass of the immigrants were staunch in the
theology of their old home. The holders of the new ideas not only
suffered from the odium of all new heresies, but their doctrines were
especially odious, as tending to destroy the whole