usted the matter. If the minister
speaks in his great-coat and thick gloves or mittens, if the howling
blasts of winter drive in across the assembly fresh streams of
ventilation that move the hair upon their heads, they are none the less
content, if only he gives them good strong exercise. Under their hard
and, as some would say, stolid faces, great thoughts are brewing, and
these keep them warm. Free-will, fixed fate, foreknowledge absolute,
trinity, redemption, special grace, eternity--give them anything high
enough, and the tough muscle of their inward man will be climbing
sturdily into it; and if they go away having something to think of, they
have had a good day. A perceptible glow will kindle in their hard faces
only when some one of the chief apostles, a Day, a Smith, or a Bellamy,
has come to lead them up some higher pinnacle of thought or pile upon
their sturdy minds some heavier weight of argument--fainting never under
any weight, even that which, to the foreign critics of the discourses
preached by them and others of their day, it seems impossible for any,
the most cultivated audience in the world, to have supported. These
royal men of homespun--how great a thing to them was religion!

The sons and daughters grew up, all, as you will perceive, in the
closest habits of industry. The keen jocky way of whittling out a living
by small bargains sharply turned, which many suppose to be an essential
characteristic of the Yankee race, is yet no proper inbred distinction,
but only a casual result, or incident, that pertains to the transition
period between the small, stringent way of life in the previous times of
home-production and the new age of trade. In these olden times, these
genuine days of homespun, they supposed, in their simplicity, that
thrift represented work, and looked about seldom for any more delicate
and sharper way of getting on. They did not call a man's property his
_fortune_, but they spoke of one or another as being _worth_ so much;
conceiving that he had it laid up as the reward or fruit of his
deservings. The house was a factory on the farm, the farm a grower and
producer for the house. The exchanges went on briskly enough, but
required neither money nor trade. No affectation of polite living, no
languishing airs of delicacy and softness indoors, had begun to make the
fathers and sons impatient of hard work out of doors, and set them at
contriving some easier and more plausible way of living. Th