Truth and earnestness are the distinguishing traits of the German character; and these qualities show no less strongly in the youth who frequent the universities than in the professors themselves.  The latter, conscientious to a nicety in exposing the fullest fruits of their laborious researches, are ever faithful to the trust reposed in them.  Placed by the State in a position beyond ordinary ambition and above pecuniary cares, they can devote themselves exclusively to their calling, concentrating their powers in one channel,—­to raise, to ennoble, to educate.  It contributes not a little to their success, that their hearers are permeated, whatever wild and unbridled freaks they may fall into at times, with the fullest sense of honor and manly worth, with an ardent love for knowledge and science for their own sake, not for future utility.  Their sympathies are awake for the good everywhere, their minds receptive of the highest teachings.  Their loves and likes are great and strong,—­as it behooves, when the first bubblings of mental and physical activity are manifested in action.  They abandon themselves, body and soul, to the occupation of the moment, be it study, be it pleasure.  Their gatherings and feasts and excursions are ennobled by vocal music from the rich store of healthy, vigorous German song,—­ from which they learn, in the words of one of their most popular melodies, to honor “woman’s love, man’s strength, the free word, the bold deed, and the FATHERLAND!”

* * * * *

THE PROFESSOR’S STORY.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE SECRET IS WHISPERED.

The Reverend Chauncy Fairweather’s congregation was not large, but select.  The lines of social cleavage run through religious creeds as if they were of a piece with position and fortune.  It is expected of persons of a certain breeding, in some parts of New England, that they shall be either Episcopalians or Unitarians.  The mansion-house gentry of Rockland were pretty fairly divided between the little chapel with the stained window and the trained rector, and the meeting-house where the Reverend Mr. Fairweather officiated.

It was in the latter that Dudley Venner worshipped, when he attended service anywhere,—­which depended very much on the caprice of Elsie.  He saw plainly enough that a generous and liberally cultivated nature might find a refuge and congenial souls in either of these two persuasions, but he objected to some points of the formal creed of the older church, and especially to the mechanism which renders it hard to get free from its outworn and offensive formulae,—­remembering how Archbishop Tillotson wished in vain that it could be “well rid of” the Athanasian Creed.  This, and the fact that the meeting-house was nearer than the chapel, determined him, when the new, rector, who was not quite up to his mark in education, was appointed, to take a pew in the “liberal” worshippers’ edifice.