Here, too, Iris found an atmosphere of peace and love.  The same gentle, thoughtful faces, the same cheerful but reverential spirit, the same quiet, the same life of active benevolence.  But in all else how different from the Church of Saint Polycarp!  No clerical costume, no ceremonial forms, no carefully trained choirs.  A liturgy they have, to be sure, which does not scruple to borrow from the time-honored manuals of devotion, but also does not hesitate to change its expressions to its own liking.

Perhaps the good people seem a little easy with each other;—­they are apt to nod cheerfully, and have even been known to whisper before the minister came in.  But it is a relief to get rid of that old Sunday—­no,—­Sabbath face, which suggests the idea that the first day of the week is commemorative of some most mournful event.  The truth is, these people meet very much as a family does for its devotions, not putting off their humanity in the least, considering it on the whole quite a cheerful matter to come together for prayer and song and good counsel from kind and wise lips.  And if they are freer in their demeanor than some very precise congregations, they have not the air of a worldly set of people.  Clearly they have not come to advertise their tailors and milliners, nor for the sake of exchanging criticisms on the literary character of the sermon they may hear.  There is no restlessness and no restraint among this quiet, cheerful people.  One thing that keeps them calm and happy during the season so evidently trying to many congregations is, that they join very generally in the singing.  In this way they get rid of that accumulated nervous force which escapes in all sorts of fidgety movements, so that a minister trying to keep his congregation still reminds one of a boy with his hand over the nose of a pump which another boy is working,—­this spirting impatience of the people is so like the jets that find their way through his fingers, and the grand rush out at the final Amen! has such a wonderful likeness to the gush that takes place when the boy pulls his hand away, with such immense relief, as it seems, to both the pump and the officiating youngster.

How sweet is this blending of all voices and all hearts in one common song of praise!  Some will sing a little loud, perhaps,—­and now and then an impatient chorister will get a syllable or two in advance, or an enchanted singer so lose all thought of time and place in the luxury of a closing cadence that he holds on to the last semibreve upon his private responsibility; but how much more of the spirit of the old Psalmist in the music of these imperfectly trained voices than in the academic niceties of the paid performers who take our musical worship out of our hands!