I didn’t say a new faith,—­said the little gentleman;—­old or new, it can’t help being different here in this American mind of ours from anything that ever was before; the people are new, Sir, and that makes the difference.  One load of corn goes to the sty, and makes the fat of swine,—­another goes to the farm-house, and becomes the muscle that clothes the right arms of heroes.  It isn’t where a pawn stands on the board that makes the difference, but what the game round it is when it is on this or that square.

Can any man look round and see what Christian countries are now doing, and how they are governed, and what is the general condition of society, without seeing that Christianity is the flag under which the world sails, and not the rudder that steers its course?  No, Sir!  There was a great raft built about two thousand years ago,—­call it an ark, rather,—­the world’s great ark! big enough to hold all mankind, and made to be launched right out into the open waves of life,—­and here it has been lying, one end on the shore and one end bobbing up and down in the water, men fighting all the time as to who should be captain and who should have the state-rooms, and throwing each other over the side because they could not agree about the points of compass, but the great vessel never gelling afloat with its freight of nations and their rulers;—­and now, Sir, there is and has been for this long time a fleet of “heretic” lighters sailing out of Boston Bay, and they have been saying, and they say now, and they mean to keep saying, “Pump out your bilge-water, shovel over your loads of idle ballast, get out your old rotten cargo, and we will carry it out into deep waters and sink it where it will never be seen again; so shall the ark of the world’s hope float on the ocean, instead of sticking in the dock-mud where it is lying!”

It’s a slow business, this of getting the ark launched.  The Jordan wasn’t deep enough, and the Tiber wasn’t deep enough, and the Rhone wasn’t deep enough, and the Thames wasn’t deep enough,—­and perhaps the Charles isn’t deep enough; but I don’t feel sure of that, Sir, and I love to hear the workmen knocking at the old blocks of tradition and making the ways smooth with the oil of the Good Samaritan.  I don’t know, Sir,—­but I do think she stirs a little,—­I do believe she slides;—­and when I think of what a work that is for the dear old three-breasted mother of American liberty, I would not take all the glory of all the greatest cities in the world for my birthright in the soil of little Boston!

—­Some of us could not help smiling at this burst of local patriotism, especially when it finished with the last two words.

And Iris smiled, too.  But it was the radiant smile of pleasure which always lights up her face when her little neighbor gets excited on the great topics of progress in freedom and religion, and especially on the part which, as he pleases himself with believing, his own city is to take in that consummation of human development to which he looks forward.