“Yet now, when I propose to live solely for somebody else, you shake me off, and repudiate me?  Selfish you think?  I dare say I am, but religion now-a-day winks at that, nay fosters it.  Each church is an octopus, and the members are laboriously striving to disprove the Saviour’s admonition:  ‘Ye cannot serve God and mammon.’  I am no worse than my ritualistic sisters whom I meet and gossip with, under cover of the organ muttering, and sometimes I wonder if after all we are any nearer the kingdom of heaven that Christ preached, than the pagans whose customs we retain under evangelical names.  ’They sacrificed a white kid to the propitious divinities, and a black kid to the unpropiticus.’  Do not we likewise?  The church or one of its pensioners needs money; so instead of denying ourselves some secular amusement, cutting short our chablis, terrapin, pate de foie gras, gateau, Grec, Amontillado; wearing less sealskin and sables, buying fewer pigeon-blood rubies, absolutely mortifying the flesh in order to offer a contribution out of our pockets to God, how ingeniously we devise schemes to extract the largest possible amount of purely personal pleasure from the expenditure of the sum, we call our contribution to charity?  We build chapels, and feed orphans, and clothe widows, and endow reformatories, and establish beds in hospitals, how?  By a devout, consecrating self-denial which manifests itself in eating and drinking, in singing and dancing, at kirmess, charity balls, amateur theatricals, garden parties; where the cost of our XV.  Siecle costume is quadruple the price of the ticket that admits to our sacrifice of black and white kids in the same sanctuary.  We serve God with one hand, and we surely serve with the other the Mammon of selfishness and vanity.  We have Lenten service, Lenten dietetics, Lenten costumes even; Lenten progressive euchre, Lenten clubs; but where are the Lenten virtues, where the genuine humility, charity, self-dedication of body and soul to true holiness?”

“The church is a school.  If pupils will not heed admonition, and defy the efforts of instructors, is the institution responsible for the failure in education?  The eradication of selfishness is the mission of the churches; and if we individually practised at home a genuine self-denial for righteousness’ sake, we should collectively show the world fewer flaws for scoffing reprimand.”

“The Shepherds are too timid to control their flocks.  If they only had the nerve to pick us up, turn our hearts inside out, show us the black corners, and the ossifications, and call sin, sin, we should begin to realize what despicable shams we are.  Dr. Douglass, the Bishop, is the only one I know who lays us on the dissecting table, and who does not speak of ‘human fallibility’ when he means vice.  He told us one day that the Gospel required a line of demarcation between the godly and the ungodly, between Christians and unbelievers; but that it has become imaginary like the meridian and the equator; and that he very much feared the strongest microscope in the laboratories could not find where the boundary line ran between the World, the Flesh and the Devil, and the Kingdom of God in our souls.  I am sorry a distant State called him to her Episcopal chair, for his cold steel is needed among us.  Now tell me, Leo, what you intend to do with your life?”