I entered the familiar parsonage and inquired for its occupant.  He had walked to the end of the garden with Miss Hurribattle, who had been with him for some hours.  I was at liberty to await his return in a depressing theological lumber-room, called the study.  The First Church had liberally supplied its former ministers with the current literature of their craft.  Current literature! are not the words a mockery? could they ever have applied to those printed petrifactions?  One would sooner look for vitality among the frozen denizens of the Morgue on St. Bernard!  Yet I doubt if these stately authors, wrapped in the cerements of their prosiness, may reasonably reproach a forgetful world.  They ministered to the wants of their present, and by so doing were privileged to fashion a future which they might not enter and possess.  Complain indeed!  Why, their progeny had a good ten, twenty, or fifty years’ life of it, as the case might be,—­and here about us are men of greater enterprise and grasp doomed to work off paragraphs that perish on the day of printing.  Well, no earnest soul can fail to modify the character of his age, and thus of all ages.  So, if our generation demands ministry in newspapers instead of folios, a man may still win an honest immortality without the biography and the bother of it.

I looked up from the books to see the clergyman part with Miss Hurribattle at the gate, and then turn his steps towards the house.

There was something like embarrassment as we exchanged greetings, yet there was hardly time to mark this before it had passed.

“Ah, Heaven!” exclaimed Clifton, passionately, “how I envy that woman’s faith in the omnipotence of a trifle!  Suppose you or I can attain a judicial largeness of view, is it any compensation for that intense glow of the sympathies as they crowd into one specious channel?  Why this man’s yearning after intellectual satisfaction, when we only want a little fragment of truth to hang our sentiments upon?”

There was bitterness in the tone in which Clifton spoke.  It hinted of the living death of a proud, disappointed man, who has renounced his youth of high motives and warm ideas, who has learned to contemn his boyish ambition to do some great thing for the world.  Truly it is better to consume in the flame of a fierce sectarianism than to permit the spirit of youth to die when the gray hairs come.

“Nay, Sir,” said I, “it is for you to be heartily thankful for this exuberant enthusiasm which has come to town.  The complaint of the day is, that the doctrines of Christianity have either dissolved into abstractions or hardened into formalisms; and here you have a crop of fresh insights to direct aright, and to keep from degenerating into fanatical clamor.”