the voice of an humble, true man--"it may well be that I have done Him
wrong; for since now at my age I am compelled to allow that I am not
sure of Him, what more likely than that I may have been cherishing wrong
ideas concerning Him, and so not looking in the right direction for
finding Him?"

"Where did you get your notions of God, father--those, I mean, that you
took with you to the pulpit?"

A year ago even, if he had been asked the same question, he would at
once have answered, "From the Word of God;" but now he hesitated, and
minutes passed before he began a reply. For he saw now that it was not
from the Bible _he_ had gathered them, whence soever they had come at
first. He pondered and searched--and found that the real answer eluded
him, hiding itself in a time beyond his earliest memory. It seemed
plain, therefore, that the source whence first he began to draw those
notions, right or wrong, must be the talk and behavior of the house in
which he was born, the words and carriage of his father and mother and
their friends. Next source to that came the sermons he heard on Sundays,
and the books given him to read. The Bible was one of those books, but
from the first he read it through the notions with which his mind was
already vaguely filled, and with the comments of his superiors around
him. Then followed the books recommended at college, this author and
that, and the lectures he heard there upon the attributes of God and the
plan of salvation. The spirit of commerce in the midst of which he had
been bred, did not occur to him as one of the sources.

But he had perceived enough. He opened his mouth and bravely answered
her question as well as he could, not giving the Bible as the source
from which he had taken any one of the notions of God he had been in the