ch, just as the service was over. A flood of
melody from the organ floated solemnly through the open door, like an
invisible stream, which was bearing the church-goers into the world
again. The two lovers stood still and let the congregation pass slowly
by. A portion of it was composed of peasants with their wives and
children. Many residents of the city, who were spending the summer in
the country, had joined it, principally ladies, who nodded to Leah as
they passed, but owing to the religious views which the pair were known
to entertain, did not approach them at the moment.

"The pastor of this village is famed for his toleration and oratorical
talent," said Leah. "Does it not seem as if all these faces bore
witness, that a beautiful and noble gospel has just been preached, a
religion of love and charity? How differently the people look, when
they come from our city church, where your zealous opponent enters the
pulpit every Sunday with a heart full of hatred and desire for
persecution! These people have really been benefited; they have
sanctified their holiday, and we ought to thank them for secretly
pitying us, because they do not suspect we are doing so too, in our own
way."

"Certainly," replied Edwin, "so long as they confine themselves to
secret pity, and do not allow their acts to be affected by it, so long
as they do not force upon us the consciousness that we have other wants
and satisfy them in a different way. For after all the ultimate and
most common standard of a man's value is, whether he is capable of
devotion or not, whether he can raise his thoughts above the dust of
workday life and produce and worthily enjoy a holiday stillness. In
this alone men differ and foolishly wrangle about how it happens. Those
who only in dense crowds can succeed in remembering their common
humanity, their universal weakness, their need, and all that binds them
under the universal law, consider those persons arrogant and
presumptuous, who can only feel the presence of the eternal powers,
when communing with their own hearts in the deepest solitude, or with
their most intimate friends. Nothing alien and fortuitous must touch
me, if I am to approach what people have agreed to call God. The voice
of a good man, who wants to obtrude upon me his little well meant
passages from Scripture, the faces of his innocent hearers, to whom
each word is a revelation, baffle and destroy my best efforts to rise
above earthly appearances i