certain mysterious, beautiful feeling gone. He could not have said what
this feeling was, did not himself know. Only, a slight film seemed to
pass before his eyes when he looked at his professor, so that he saw
him less clearly and as more remote.

One morning there was a sermon on the Catholics. David went dutifully
to his professor. He said he had never been to a Catholic Church and
would like to go. His professor assented cordially, evincing his
pleasure in the lad's frankness. But the next Sunday morning he was in
the Catholic Church again, thus for the first time missing the
communion in his own. Of all the congregations of Christian believers
that the lad had now visited, the Catholic impressed him as being the
most solemn, reverent, and best mannered. In his own church the place
did not seem to become the house of God till services began; and one
morning in particular, two old farmers in the pew behind him talked in
smothered tones of stock and crops, till it fairly made him homesick.
The sermon of the priest, too, filled him with amazement. It weighed
the claims of various Protestant sects to be reckoned as parts of the
one true historic church of God. In passing, he barely referred to the
most modern of these self-constituted Protestant bodies--David's own
church--and dismissed it with one blast of scorn, which seemed to
strike the lad's face like a hot wind: it left it burning. But to the
Episcopal Church the priest dispensed the most vitriolic criticism. And
that night, carried away by the old impulse, which had grown now almost
into a habit, David went to the Episcopal Church: went to number the
slain. The Bishop of the diocese, as it happened, was preaching that
night--preaching on the union of Christian believers. He showed how
ready the Episcopal Church was for such a union if the rest would only
consent: but no other church, he averred, must expect the Episcopal
Church ever to surrender one article of its creed, namely: that it
alone was descended not by historical continuity simply, but by Divine
succession from the Apostles themselves. The lad walked slowly back to
the dormitory that night with knit brows and a heavy heart.

A great change was coming over him. His old religious peace had been
unexpectedly disturbed. He found himself in the thick of the wars of
dogmatic theology. At that time and in that part of the United States
these were impassioned and rancorous to a degree which even now, less
t