t kind of consort--and that's
just why I more than don't care to go into one of them: I never heard a
sermon that didn't seem to be taking my Christ from me, and burying him
where I should never find him any more. For the somebody the clergy
talk about is not only nowise like my Christ, but nowise like a live
man at all. It always seemed to me more like a guy they had dressed up
and called by his name than the man I read about in my mother's big
Testament."

"How my father would have delighted in this man!" said Mary to herself.

"You see, miss," Jasper resumed, "I can't help knowing something about
these matters, because I was brought up in it all, my father being a
local preacher, and a very good man. Perhaps, if I had been as clever
as Sister Ann, I might be thinking now just as she does; but it seems
to me a man that is born stupid has much to be thankful for: he can't
take in things before his heart's ready for believing them, and so they
don't get spoiled, like a child's book before he is able to read it.
All that I heard when I went with my father to his preachings was to me
no more than one of the chapters full of names in the Book of
Chronicles--though I do remember once hearing a Wesleyan clergyman say
that he had got great spiritual benefit from those chapters. I wasn't
even frightened at the awful things my father said about hell, and the
certainty of our going there if we didn't lay hold upon the Saviour;
for, all the time, he showed but such a ghost or cloud of a man that he
called the Saviour as it wasn't possible to lay hold upon. Not that I
reasoned about it that way then; I only felt no interest in the affair;
and my conscience said nothing about it. But after my father and mother
were gone, and I was at work away from all my old friends--well, I
needn't trouble you with what it was that set me a-thinking--it was
only a great disappointment, such as I suppose most young fellows have
to go through--I shouldn't wonder," he added with a smile, "if that was
what you ladies are sent into this world for--to take the conceit out
of the likes of us, and give us something to think about. What came of
it was, that I began to read my mother's big Testament in earnest, and
then my conscience began to speak. Here was a man that said he was
God's son, and sent by him to look after us, and we must do what he
told us or we should never be able to see our Father in heaven! That's
what I made out of it, miss. And my co