me, Agnes," he said. "I was calling on the deaf old gentleman
up-stairs, and perceiving that devotions were being conducted here,
stopped that I might not interrupt them."

Calvin's commonplace nature had hardly been dazed by Agnes's prayer. He
was only confirmed in the idea that she was a woman of genius, and would
take half the work of a pastor off his hands. In the light of both
desire and convenience she had, therefore, appreciated in his eyes. To
marry her, become the proprietor of her snug home and ravishing person,
and send her off to pray with the sick and sup with the older women of
the flock, seemed to him such a comfortable consummation as to have
Heaven's especial approval. Thus do we deceive ourselves when the spirit
of God has departed from us, even in youth, and construe our dreams of
selfishness to be glimmerings of a purer life.

Calvin was precocious in assurance, because, in addition to being
unprincipled, he was in a manner ordained by election and birthright to
rule over Kensington. His father had been one of those strong-willed,
clear-visioned, intelligent young Eastern divinity students who brought
to a place of more voluptuous and easy burgher society the secular vigor
of New England pastors. Being always superior and always sincere, his
rule had been ungrumblingly accepted. Another generation, at middle age,
found him over them as he had been over their parents--a righteous,
intrepid Protestant priest, good at denunciation, counsel, humor, or
sympathy. The elders and deacons never thought of objecting to anything
after he had insisted upon it, and in this spirit the whole church had
heard submissively that Calvin Van de Lear was to be their next pastor.
This, of course, was conditional upon his behavior, and all knew that
his father would be the last man to impose an injurious person on the
church; they had little idea that "Cal." Van de Lear was devout, but
took the old man's word that grace grew more and more in the sons of the
Elect, and the young man had already professed "conviction," and
voluntarily been received into the church. There he assumed, like an
heir-apparent, the vicarship of the congregation, and it rather
delighted his father that his son so promptly and complacently took
direction of things, made his quasi pastoral rounds, led
prayer-meetings, and exhorted Sunday-schools and missions. A priest
knows the heart of his son no more than a king, and is less suspicious
of him. Th