The child had met this and some other equally encouraging statements as to her spiritual conditions, early in life, and fought the battle of spiritual independence prematurely, as many children do.  If all she did was hateful to God, what was the meaning of the approving or else the disapproving conscience, when she had done “right” or “wrong”?  No “shoulder-striker” hits out straighter than a child with its logic.  Why, I can remember lying in my bed in the nursery and settling questions which all that I have heard since and got out of books has never been able to raise again.  If a child does not assert itself in this way in good season, it becomes just what its parents or teachers were, and is no better than a plaster image.—­How old was I at the time?  I suppose about 5823 years old,—­that is, counting from Archbishop Usher’s date of the Creation, and adding the life of the race, whose accumulated intelligence is a part of my inheritance, to my own.  A good deal older than Plato, you see, and much more experienced than my Lord Bacon and most of the world’s teachers.—­Old books are books of the world’s youth, and new books are fruits of its age.  How many of all these old folios round me are like so many old cupels!  The gold has passed out of them long ago, but their pores are full of the dross with which it was mingled.

And so Iris—­having thrown off that first lasso, which not only fetters, but chokes those whom it can hold, so that they give themselves up trembling and breathless to the great soul-subduer, who has them by the windpipe—­had settled a brief creed for herself, in which love of the neighbor, whom we have seen, was the first article, and love of the Creator, whom we have not seen, grew out of this as its natural development, being necessarily second in order of time to the first unselfish emotions which we feel for the fellow-creatures who surround us in our early years.

The child must have some place to worship.  What would a young girl be who never mingled her voice with the songs and prayers that rose all around her with every returning day of rest?  And Iris was free to choose.  Sometimes one and sometimes another would offer to carry her to this or that place of worship; and when the doors were hospitably opened, she would often go meekly in by herself.  It was a curious fact, that two churches as remote from each other in doctrine as could well be divided her affections.

The Church of Saint Polycarp had very much the look of a Roman Catholic chapel.  I do not wish to run the risk of giving names to the ecclesiastical furniture which gave it such a Romish aspect; but there were pictures, and inscriptions in antiquated characters, and there were reading-stands, and flowers on the altar, and other elegant arrangements.  Then there were boys to sing alternately in choirs responsive to each other, and there was much bowing, with very loud responding, and a long service and a short sermon,