One day when Dorothy and I were seated at Niblo’s at luncheon I felt some one touch my shoulder.  I looked up and saw Aldington, back of him Abigail, who was laughing at my expression of surprise.  We all broke into exclamations.  They had just returned from Europe.  They joined us in the meal; and there was scarcely enough time to tell back and forth all that was of mutual interest.  He saw me with the Independent and began to rally me.  “Did you know,” he said, “that the early Puritans in New England were the progenitors of one third of the whole population of the United States by 1834?  They constitute one half of the population of the states of Ohio and New York now, and they have gone into the northwest.  They will make trouble for your Douglas.  I admit that they have blighted art and hobbled literature.  They have expurgated Shakespeare, they have fought the theater, they are always ready for the moral battle.  They know what God wants better than anybody.  In a sense they are hounds in pursuit of a lot of things in the great hunt of life.  They are a stubborn lot.  It will be hard to take away from them anything that is their own, and also to keep them from destroying anything that they don’t want.”

“Well, now don’t you see,” I asked, “that Douglas is against all these people and that he has all these influences to fight?  For example, these Puritans cannot rule if popular sovereignty is adopted everywhere.  They are numerically too inferior.  How, for example, can you stop the railroads on Sunday if you let communities, states, control the matter?  But if these fanatics get into control of the Federal government, they can do it.  Don’t you see the point?  This is what Douglas is thinking about.  He knows that you can have freedom about life only where every man has a say.”

Then we began to talk of the religious revival.  Periodicals were noting the great turn of the public mind to religion.  “Fruits of the spirit” were extolled.  Great and glorious works of divine grace were wrought in Maine.  A village in Massachusetts had enjoyed “a heavenly refreshing from the presence of the Lord.”  In Cincinnati there was “an outpouring of the spirit.”  In the woods of Michigan men rode into a village to obtain mercy, having heard that the Lord was there.  In New York City noon prayer meetings were held.  A conductor found salvation suddenly while operating his horse car in Sixth Avenue.  A sailor saw Christ at the wheel.  Christ was met in parlors, in places of worldly gayety.  An actor had been rescued from his wicked calling.  Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote:  “We trust since prayer has once entered the counting rooms it will never leave it; and that the ledger, sandbox, the blotting book and the pen and ink will all be consecrated by heavenly presence.”  Her brother, the pastor of Plymouth church, had converted one hundred and ninety souls.  A theater was used for a place of worship.  Actors were called upon to repent:  You who have portrayed human nature