thodist holds his revival and implores
the sinner to come forward and kneel at the altar. And as it were, I am
holding a revival--I am persuading the negro and the white man as well
to kneel under the cross. Should there be any secrecy in such a work?"

"Well, no, not when you put it that way. But you know that we look upon
the Catholic religion as a foreign religion. It does not somehow seem
native to this soil. It is red with the pomp of monarchy, it has the
ceremonious restraint of the king's court; it hasn't the free noise of a
republic. I will not question its sincerity or the fact that it has in
view the betterment of man, but to us it will always seem an
importation."

"It was here first," the priest replied, gravely smiling. "It discovered
this country."

"We must grant that," the Major rejoined, "but still I insist that the
native born American regards it as a foreign institution, foreign to his
nature, to his sense of liberty, if not to his soul."

"My dear Major, Christ is foreign to no soil. The earth is His Father's
foot-stool. The soul of man is the abiding place of the love of the
Saviour, and no heart is out-landish. What you may call liberty is an
education, but the soul as God's province is not made so by training,
but came with the first twinkling of light, of reason, the dawn of
time."

"That's about as straight as any man can give it," old Gid joined in.
"But what puzzles me is why God is more at home in one man's heart than
in another. He fills some hearts with love and denies it to others; and
the heart that has been denied is cursed, through no fault of its
own--simply because it has not received--while the other heart is
blessed. I reckon the safest plan is to conclude that we don't know
anything about it. I don't, and that settles it so far as I'm concerned.
I can't accept man's opinion, for man doesn't know any more about it
than I do; so I say to myself, 'Gideon Batts, eat, drink and be merry,
for the first thing you know they will come along and lay you out where
the worm is whetting his appetite.' You have raked up quite a passle of
negroes, haven't you, colonel?"

The priest looked at him, but not resentfully. "My work has not been
without a fair measure of success," he answered, now sitting upright and
motionless. "You must have noticed that we are building quite a large
church."

"So I see," said the Major. "And you still believe that you are going to
preserve the negro's body a