It has often set me thinking when I find that I can always pick up plenty of empty nuts under my shagbark-tree.  The squirrels know them by their lightness, and I have seldom seen one with the marks of their teeth in it.  What a school-house is the world, if our wits would only not play truant!  For I observe that men set most store by forms and symbols in proportion as they are mere shells.  It is the outside they want and not the kernel.  What stores of such do not many, who in material things are as shrewd as the squirrels, lay up for the spiritual winter-supply of themselves and their children!  I have seen churches that seemed to me garners of these withered nuts, for it is wonderful how prosaic is the apprehension of symbols by the minds of most men.  It is not one sect nor another, but all, who, like the dog of the fable, have let drop the spiritual substance of symbols for their material shadow.  If one attribute miraculous virtues to mere holy water, that beautiful emblem of inward purification at the door of God’s house, another cannot comprehend the significance of baptism without being ducked over head and ears in the liquid vehicle thereof.

[Perhaps a word of historical comment may be permitted here.  My late reverend predecessor was, I would humbly affirm, as free from prejudice as falls to the lot of the most highly favored individuals of our species.  To be sure, I have heard Him say that ’what were called strong prejudices were in fact only the repulsion of sensitive organizations from that moral and even physical effluvium through which some natures by providential appointment, like certain unsavory quadrupeds, gave warning of their neighborhood.  Better ten mistaken suspicions of this kind than one close encounter.’  This he said somewhat in heat, on being questioned as to his motives for always refusing his pulpit to those itinerant professors of vicarious benevolence who end their discourses by taking up a collection.  But at another time I remember his saying, ’that there was one large thing which small minds always found room for, and that was great prejudices.’  This, however, by the way.  The statement which I purposed to make was simply this.  Down to A.D. 1830, Jaalam had consisted of a single parish, with one house set apart for religions services.  In that year the foundations of a Baptist Society were laid by the labors of Elder Joash Q. Balcom, 2d.  As the members of the new body were drawn from the First Parish, Mr. Wilbur was for a time considerably exercised in mind.  He even went so far as on one occasion to follow the reprehensible practice of the earlier Puritan divines in choosing a punning text, and preached from Hebrews xiii, 9:  ’Be not carried about with divers and strange doctrines.’  He afterwards, in accordance with one of his own maxims,—­’to get a dead injury out of the mind as soon as is decent, bury it, and then ventilate,’—­in accordance with this maxim, I say, he lived on very friendly