But your clergyman will say perhaps, with what seems to you quite unnecessary coldness, that goodness is not to be reckoned in your chances of safety; that there is a Higher Goodness, whose merit is All-Sufficient.  This puzzles you sadly; nor will you escape the puzzle, until, in the presence of the Home altar, which seems to guard you, as the Lares guarded Roman children, you feel—­you cannot tell how—­that good actions must spring from good sources; and that those sources must lie in that Heaven toward which your boyish spirit yearns, as you kneel at your mother’s side.

Conscience too is all the while approving you for deeds well done; and—­wicked as you fear the preacher might judge it—­you cannot but found on those deeds a hope that your prayer at night flows more easily, more freely, and more holily toward “Our Father in Heaven.”  Nor indeed later in life—­whatever may be the ill-advised expressions of human teachers—­will you ever find that Duty performed, and generous endeavor will stand one whit in the way either of Faith or of Love.  Striving to be good is a very direct road toward Goodness and if life be so tempered by high motive as to make actions always good, Faith is unconsciously won.

Another notion that disturbs you very much, is your positive dislike of long sermons, and of such singing as they have when the organist is away.  You cannot get the force of that verse of Dr. Watts which likens heaven to a never-ending Sabbath; you do hope—­though it seems a half wicked hope—­that old Dr. ——­ will not be the preacher.  You think that your heart in its best moments craves for something more lovable.  You suggest this perhaps to some Sunday teacher, who only shakes his head sourly, and tells you it is a thought that the Devil is putting in your brain.  It strikes you oddly that the Devil should be using a verse of Dr. Watts to puzzle you!  But if it be so, he keeps it sticking by your thought very pertinaciously, until some simple utterance of your mother about the Love that reigns in the other world seems on a sudden to widen Heaven, and to waft away your doubts like a cloud.

It excites your wonder not a little to find people, who talk gravely and heartily of the excellence of sermons and of church-going, sometimes fall asleep under it all.  And you wonder—­if they really like preaching so well—­why they do not buy some of the minister’s old manuscripts, and read them over on week-days, or invite the clergyman to preach to them in a quiet way in private.

——­Ah, Clarence, you do not yet know the poor weakness of even maturest manhood, and the feeble gropings of the soul toward a soul’s paradise in the best of the world!  You do not yet know either, that ignorance and fear will be thrusting their untruth and false show into the very essentials of Religion.

Again you wonder, if the clergymen are all such very good men as you are taught to believe, why it is that every little while people will be trying to send them off, and very anxious to prove that, instead of being so good, they are in fact very stupid and bad men.  At that day you have no clear conceptions of the distinction between stupidity and vice, and think that a good man must necessarily say very eloquent things.  You will find yourself sadly mistaken on this point, before you get on very far in life.