“Nothing settled by the meeting?” said Mr. Buffle, echoing a despondent suggestion by Deacon Bates.  “Of course not.  You don’t suppose that what theologians have been squabbling over for two thousand years can be settled in a day, do you?  We made a beginning and that’s a good half of anything.  Why, I and every other man that builds boats have been hard at work for years, looking for the best model, and we haven’t settled the question yet.  We’re in earnest about it—­we can’t help but be, for there’s money in it, and while we’re waiting we do the next best thing—­we use the best ones we know about.”

“Don’t you think you’d get at the model sooner, if some of you weren’t pig-headed about your own, and too fond of abusing each other’s?” asked Mr. Radley.

“Certainly,” admitted Mr. Buffle, “and that’s why I wanted us to get up a Bible-class like the one we have.  If everybody will try to see what’s good in his neighbor’s theories and what’s bad in his own, his fortune—­his religion, I mean—­is a sure thing.  Fiddling on one string always makes a thin sort of a tune.”

“There were a good many small tunes begun yesterday, then,” observed Squire Woodhouse.

“Well,” said Mr. Buffle, “I thought something of the kind, myself, but a man can’t break an old habit to pieces all at once.  Things will be different before long, though.”

“There is no reason why they shouldn’t,” said Principal Alleman, “excepting one reason that’s stronger than any other.  You can’t get to the bottom of any of the sayings of Christ, the Prophets or the Apostles, without finding that they mean, Do Right.  And when you reach that point, what is in the man and not what is in the book comes into play; or, rather, it always should but seldom does.”

“I suppose that’s so,” said Mr. Buffle, soberly.

“In and of ourselves we can do nothing,” remarked Deacon Bates.

“It’s very odd, then, that we should have been told to do so much,” replied Principal Alleman.

“It was to teach us our dependence upon a higher power,” said Deacon Bates, with more than his usual energy.

“Are we only to be taught, and never to learn, then?” asked Principal Alleman.  “Some of my pupils seem to think so, but those who depend least upon the teacher and act most fully up to what they have been taught are the ones I call my best scholars.”

Deacon Bates’s lower lip pushed up its neighbor; in the school-room, the Principal’s theory might apply, but in religion it was different, or he (Deacon Bates) had always been mistaken, and this possibility was not to be thought of for an instant.  Fortunately for his peace of mind, the boat touched her city dock just then, and from that hour until five in the afternoon, when he left his store for the boat, religious theories absented themselves entirely from Deacon Bates’s mind.