Young Davenport supposed that this was all true. He also supposed that because of a blunder, made in ignorance and passion, in an age long past, a whole race had ever since been under the chastising hand of a just Jehovah, who had decreed that their humiliation and the expiation of the fatal blunder should be eternal. That there were Jews who were to-day good, devout and religious who still approved the attitude of Pilate toward the Christ, he did not know. He counted this class, therefore, as in some sort, Christians also. Mistaken in method, no doubt; superstitious and blundering perhaps; but still secretly filled with sorrow and shame for the awful crime of their race, and accepting the verdict of God and the disciplining punishment of time, he had no doubt of their final acceptance of what he believed established as eternal Truth, and their consequent redemption and salvation. The easy-going, gentle Episcopalianism of his home-training, with its morning and evening, perfunctory, family prayers, its "table grace" and its Sunday service, where all the leading families of the county were to be seen, and where the Rector read with so much finish and the choir sang so divinely, the same old hymns, week after week, had so far been as much a part of his life,--and were accepted as mechanically,--as were the daily meals, the unpaid negro labor, and the fact that his father, the old "Squire," sat in the best pew, because he had built and endowed the finest church in the State. All these things had come to Griffith as quite a matter of course; as some equally important things have come to you and to me--and not at all as matter of surprise or as questions for argument. That his father, the old major, swore roundly, from time to time, at the slaves, did not appeal to the boy's mind as either strange or reprehensible; so true is it that those things which come to us gradually, and in the regular order of events, do not arouse within us doubts and questionings as do sudden or startling additions to our development or intellectual equipment, when thrust unexpectedly in upon our ordinary surroundings. Such moral or social questions as were involved in the ownership of slaves had, up to that time, produced no more mental qualms in the boy than have the same questions as to ownership of lands or of horses upon you or me at the present time. Jerry had been Griffith's own particular "boy" ever since he could remember, and, although Jerry was the older of the two, it would be wholly unfair to all parties concerned not to state clearly and fully that the righteousness and inevitability of the relationship of owned and owner, had no more sinister meaning for Jerry than it had for his young "Mos' Grif." So prone are we all to accept as a finality that to which custom has inured us.