are at prayer and the pine trees swing their shadows over the graves in
Redwine churchyard. But here in New York it is merely the day when you
change your occupations and amusements. Still, there is preaching for
those who are not drunk, or asleep, or in the parks, or at Coney
Island, or giving week-end parties at their country places, or planning
the millennium without God along socialistic scantlings of thought and
barb-wire theories of the brotherhood of man. And I went with the
girls to a fashionable church. And this is how the morals in me that
William planted came to take offense, and how I reached the conclusion
that I had best go back home, where life is indeed made too hard for
the spirit, but where at least one may be decently conscious of having
one according to the Scriptures.

The church we attended was nearly as grand-looking inside as a theater.
Every pew was filled, and there was no misbehavior on the back benches,
such as William contended with to the last. We had a plush-covered one
near the front, and a stool to put our feet on, and a library hooked to
the back of the pew in front of us, containing a bulletin of the
church's news. I didn't have time to find the "society column," but I
was looking for it when the preacher came in. I expected to hear a
perfectly-scarifying sermon, he looked so much like a tintype of the
prophet Jeremiah; but he took his text from Mark about the healing of
the man with the withered hand, and preached on the hypnotism of Jesus.
He made a clean sweep of the miracles in the most elegant, convincing
language you ever heard. And I sat and cried to think of what he'd
done to Scriptures William would have died to preserve. The girls were
mortified at the scene I was making. I don't reckon anybody had ever
cried in that church before, and I am sure no man was ever convicted of
his sins there.

When we reached home I told Sarah about going back to Redwine, first
thing. Then I came on upstairs and had it out with William in a very
few words, while I was pulling out the dresser drawers and putting my
things in the trunk.

"William," I said, kneeling down on the floor with my back to his
picture on my dresser, laying my collars in the tray, "you were right.
There is something wrong with the church system, something wrong with
the institutional religion that the church is propagating; but there is
nothing wrong with the truth of God for which you stood and made me
sta