d you, as
the Lares guarded Roman children, you _feel_--you cannot tell how--that
good actions must spring from good sources; and that those sources must
lie in that Heaven toward which your boyish spirit yearns, as you kneel
at your mother's side.

Conscience too is all the while approving you for deeds well done;
and--wicked as you fear the preacher might judge it--you cannot but
found on those deeds a hope that your prayer at night flows more easily,
more freely, and more holily toward "Our Father in Heaven." Nor indeed
later in life--whatever may be the ill-advised expressions of human
teachers--will you ever find that _Duty performed_, and _generous
endeavor_ will stand one whit in the way either of Faith or of Love.
Striving to be good is a very direct road toward Goodness and if life be
so tempered by high motive as to make actions always good, Faith is
unconsciously won.

Another notion that disturbs you very much, is your positive dislike of
long sermons, and of such singing as they have when the organist is
away. You cannot get the force of that verse of Dr. Watts which likens
heaven to a never-ending Sabbath; you _do_ hope--though it seems a half
wicked hope--that old Dr. ---- will not be the preacher. You think that
your heart in its best moments craves for something more lovable. You
suggest this perhaps to some Sunday teacher, who only shakes his head
sourly, and tells you it is a thought that the Devil is putting in your
brain. It strikes you oddly that the Devil should be using a verse of
Dr. Watts to puzzle you! But if it be so, he keeps it sticking by your
thought very pertinaciously, until some simple utterance of your mother
about the Love that reigns in the other world seems on a sudden to widen
Heaven, and to waft away your doubts like a cloud.

It excites your wonder not a little to find people, who talk gravely and
heartily of the excellence of sermons and of church-going, sometimes
fall asleep under it all. And you wonder--if they really like preaching
so well--why they do not buy some of the minister's old manuscripts, and
read them over on week-days, or invite the clergyman to preach to them
in a quiet way in private.

----Ah, Clarence, you do not yet know the poor weakness of even
maturest manhood, and the feeble gropings of the soul toward a soul's
paradise in the best of the world! You do not yet know either, that
ignorance and fear will be thrusting their untruth and false show into
t