she had made Cy confess nightly upon the basis of the Ten Commandments; then Carol was dismayed to find the Christian religion, in America, in the twentieth century, as abnormal as Zoroastrianism—­without the splendor.  But when she went to church suppers and felt the friendliness, saw the gaiety with which the sisters served cold ham and scalloped potatoes; when Mrs. Champ Perry cried to her, on an afternoon call, “My dear, if you just knew how happy it makes you to come into abiding grace,” then Carol found the humanness behind the sanguinary and alien theology.  Always she perceived that the churches—­Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Catholic, all of them—­which had seemed so unimportant to the judge’s home in her childhood, so isolated from the city struggle in St. Paul, were still, in Gopher Prairie, the strongest of the forces compelling respectability.

This August Sunday she had been tempted by the announcement that the Reverend Edmund Zitterel would preach on the topic “America, Face Your Problems!” With the great war, workmen in every nation showing a desire to control industries, Russia hinting a leftward revolution against Kerensky, woman suffrage coming, there seemed to be plenty of problems for the Reverend Mr. Zitterel to call on America to face.  Carol gathered her family and trotted off behind Uncle Whittier.

The congregation faced the heat with informality.  Men with highly plastered hair, so painfully shaved that their faces looked sore, removed their coats, sighed, and unbuttoned two buttons of their uncreased Sunday vests.  Large-bosomed, white-bloused, hot-necked, spectacled matrons—­the Mothers in Israel, pioneers and friends of Mrs. Champ Perry—­waved their palm-leaf fans in a steady rhythm.  Abashed boys slunk into the rear pews and giggled, while milky little girls, up front with their mothers, self-consciously kept from turning around.

The church was half barn and half Gopher Prairie parlor.  The streaky brown wallpaper was broken in its dismal sweep only by framed texts, “Come unto Me” and “The Lord is My Shepherd,” by a list of hymns, and by a crimson and green diagram, staggeringly drawn upon hemp-colored paper, indicating the alarming ease with which a young man may descend from Palaces of Pleasure and the House of Pride to Eternal Damnation.  But the varnished oak pews and the new red carpet and the three large chairs on the platform, behind the bare reading-stand, were all of a rocking-chair comfort.

Carol was civic and neighborly and commendable today.  She beamed and bowed.  She trolled out with the others the hymn: 

     How pleasant ’tis on Sabbath morn
     To gather in the church
     And there I’ll have no carnal thoughts,
     Nor sin shall me besmirch.

With a rustle of starched linen skirts and stiff shirt-fronts, the congregation sat down, and gave heed to the Reverend Mr. Zitterel.  The priest was a thin, swart, intense young man with a bang.  He wore a black sack suit and a lilac tie.  He smote the enormous Bible on the reading-stand, vociferated, “Come, let us reason together,” delivered a prayer informing Almighty God of the news of the past week, and began to reason.