w. One of the professors of the
university, of the faculty of the Bible College, had been travelling
over the state during the summer, pleading its cause before the people.
He had come into that neighborhood to preach and to plead. The lad
would be there to hear.

The church in which the professor was to plead for learning and
religion was the one first set up in the Kentucky wilderness as a house
of religious liberty; and the lad was a great-grandchild of the founder
of that church, here emerging mysteriously from the deeps of life four
generations down the line.

III

The church which David's grim old Indian-fighting great-grandfather had
dedicated to freedom of belief in the wilderness, cutting off a parcel
of his lands as he had hotly sworn and building on it a schoolhouse
also, stood some miles distant across the country. The vast estate of
the pioneer had been cut to pieces for his many sons. With the next
generation the law of partible inheritance had further subdivided each
of these; so that in David's time a single small farm was all that had
fallen to his father; and his father had never increased it. The church
was situated on what had been the opposite boundary of the original
grant. But he with most of the other boys in the neighborhood had
received his simple education in that school; and he had always gone to
worship under that broad-minded roof, whatsoever the doctrines and
dogmas haply preached.

These doctrines and dogmas of a truth were varied and conflicting
enough; for the different flocks and herds of Protestant believers with
their parti-colored guides had for over fifty years found the place a
very convenient strip of spiritual pasture: one congregation now
grazing there jealously and exclusively; afterwards another.

On this quiet bright Sunday morning in the summer of 1865, the building
(a better than the original one, which had long before been destroyed
by accidental burning) was overcrowded with farming folk, husbands and
wives, of all denominations in the neighborhood, eager to hear the new
plea, the new pleader. David's father and mother, intense sectarians
and dully pious souls, sat among them. He himself, on a rearmost bench,
was wedged fast between two other lads of about his own age--they dumb
with dread lest they should be sent away to this university. The
minister soon turned the course of his sermon to the one topic that was
uppermost and bottommost in the minds of all