It was an ideal summer Sunday:  sunshiny, clear and still.  I believe if I had been some Rip Van Winkle waking after twenty years’ sleep I should have known it for Sunday.  Away off over the hill somewhere we could hear a lazy farm boy singing at the top of his voice:  the higher cadences of his song reached us pleasantly through the still air.  The hens sitting near the lane fence, fluffing the dust over their backs, were holding a small and talkative service of their own.  As we turned into the main road we saw the Patterson children on their way to church, all the little girls in Sunday ribbons, and all the little boys very uncomfortable in knit stockings.

“It seems a pity to go to church on a day like this,” I said to Harriet.

“A pity!” she exclaimed.  “Could anything be more appropriate?”

Harriet is good because she can’t help it.  Poor woman!—­but I haven’t any pity for her.

It sometimes seems to me the more worshipful I feel the less I want to go to church.  I don’t know 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.