han half a century later, can scarce be understood; so rapidly has
developed meantime that modern spirit which is for us the tolerant
transition to a yet broader future. Had Kentucky been peopled by her
same people several generations earlier, the land would have run red
with the blood of religious persecutions, as never were England and
Scotland at their worst. So that this lad, brought in from his solemn,
cloistered fields and introduced to wrangling, sarcastic, envious
creeds, had already begun to feel doubtful and distressed, not knowing
what to believe nor whom to follow. He had commenced by being so
plastic a medium for faith, that he had tried to believe them all. Now
he was in the intermediate state of trying to ascertain which. From
that state there are two and two only final ones to emerge: "I shall
among them believe this one only;" or, "I shall among them
believe--none." The constant discussion of some dogma and disproof of
some dogma inevitably begets in a certain order of mind the temper to
discuss and distrust ALL dogma.

Not over their theologies alone were the churches wrangling before the
lad's distracted thoughts. If the theologies were rending religion,
politics was rending the theologies. The war just ended had not
brought, as the summer sermon of the Bible College professor had
stated, breadth of mind for narrowness, calm for passion. Not while men
are fighting their wars of conscience do they hate most, but after they
have fought; and Southern and Union now hated to the bottom and nowhere
else as at their prayers. David found a Presbyterian Church on one
street called "Southern" and one a few blocks away called "Northern":
how those brethren dwelt together. The Methodists were similarly
divided. Of Baptists, the lad ascertained there had been so many kinds
and parts of kinds since the settlement of Kentucky, that apparently
any large-sized family anywhere could reasonably have constituted
itself a church, if the parents and children had only been fortunate
enough to agree.

Where politics did not cleave, other issues did. The Episcopal Church
was cleft into a reform movement (and one unreformable). In his own
denomination internal discord raged over such questions as diabolic
pleasures and Apostolic music. He saw young people haled before the
pulpit as before a tribunal of exact statutes and expelled for moving
their feet in certain ways. If in dancing they whirled like a top
instead of being sh