w why it is, but these forms, simple though
they are, trouble me. The moment an emotion, especially a religious
emotion, becomes an institution, it somehow loses life. True emotion is
rare and costly and that which is awakened from without never rises to
the height of that which springs spontaneously from within.

Back of the church stands a long low shed where we tied our horse. A
number of other buggies were already there, several women were standing
in groups, preening their feathers, a neighbour of ours who has a
tremendous bass voice was talking to a friend:

"Yas, oats is showing up well, but wheat is backward."

His voice, which he was evidently trying to subdue for Sunday, boomed
through the still air. So we walked among the trees to the door of the
church. A smiling elder, in an unaccustomed long coat, bowed and greeted
us. As we went in there was an odour of cushions and our footsteps on
the wooden floor echoed in the warm emptiness of the church. The Scotch
preacher was finding his place in the big Bible; he stood solid and
shaggy behind the yellow oak pulpit, a peculiar professional look on his
face. In the pulpit the Scotch preacher is too much minister, too little
man. He is best down among us with his hand in ours. He is a sort of
human solvent. Is there a twisted and hardened heart in the community he
beams upon it from his cheerful eye, he speaks out of his great charity,
he gives the friendly pressure of his large hand, and that hardened
heart dissolves and its frozen hopelessness loses itself in tears. So he
goes through life, seeming always to understand. He is not surprised by
wickedness nor discouraged by weakness: he is so sure of a greater
Strength!

But I must come to my experience, which I am almost tempted to call a
resurrection--the resurrection of a boy, long since gone away, and of a
tall lank preacher who, in his humility, looked upon himself as a
failure. I hardly know how it all came back to me; possibly it was the
scent-laden breeze that came in from the woods and through the half-open
church window, perhaps it was a line in one of the old songs, perhaps it
was the droning voice of the Scotch preacher--somehow, and suddenly, I
was a boy again.

----To this day I think of death as a valley: a dark shadowy valley:
the Valley of the Shadow of Death. So persistent are the impressions of
boyhood! As I sat in the church I could see, as distinctly as though I
were there, the church of my