s so precious to him that he will not subscribe to more or less
than he believes, or tolerate in inclusive statements speculative and
uncertain elements, traditional error, and all that body of rejected
doctrine which, though he himself be free from it, must yet be slowly
uprooted from the general belief; if emotion is so sacred to him that
his native and habitual reticence becomes so sensitive in this most
private part of life as to make it here something between God and him
only; if his heart of charity and hand of friendship find out his
fellow-men with no intervention; if for these reasons, or any of them,
or if from that modesty of nature, which is so much more common in
American youth than is believed, he hesitates, out of pure awe of the
responsibility before God and man which he incurs, to think himself
worthy of such vows, such hopes, such duties,--if in any way, being of
noble nature, he keeps by himself,--let him not think he thereby
withdraws from the life of Christendom, nor that in the Church itself he
may not still take some portion of its great good. So far as its
authority is of the heart only, so far as it has organized the religious
life itself without regard to other ends and free from intellectual,
historical, and governmental entanglements that are supplementary at
most, he needs no formal act to be one with its spirit; and, however
much he may deny himself by his self-limitation, he remains a
Christian."

* * * * *

There was no doubt about it; we were lost. The faint tracks in the soil
had long ago disappeared, and we followed, as was natural, the draws
between the slopes; and now, for the last quarter-hour, the grass had
deepened till it was above the wheels and to the shoulders of the
ponies. They did not mind; they were born to it. What solitude there was
in it, as we pulled up and came to a stand! What wildness was there!
Only the great blue sky, with a westward dropping sun of lonely
splendour, and green horizons, broken and nigh, of the waving prairie,
whispering with the high wind,--and no life but ours shut in among the
group of low, close hills all about, in that grassy gulf! The earth
seemed near, waiting for us; in such places, just like this, men lost
had died and none knew it; half-unconsciously I found myself thinking of
Childe Roland's Tower,--

"those two hills on the right
Couched,"--

and the reality of crossing the prairie in old