A year and a half in a school of the Moravian Brotherhood in the Black Forest, though it showed me another aspect of the same general line of belief, did not wholly obliterate my fear of hell, with its correlated desire for salvation. The poetry of the semi-religious life in that remote village set among ancient haunted forests, gave to natural idealistic tendencies another turn. The masters, whom we termed Brother, were strenuous, devoted, self-sacrificing men, all later to go forth as Missionaries to Labrador. Humbug, comfort, personal ambition played no part in their lives. The _Liebesmahl_ in their little wooden church, for all its odd simplicity, was a genuine and impressive ceremony that touched something in me no church service at home, with Sankey’s hymns on a bad harmonium, had ever reached. At this Communion Service, or Love Feast, sweet, weak tea in big white thick cups, followed by a clothes-basket filled with rolls, were handed round, first to the women, who sat on one side of the building, and then to the men and boys on the other side. There was a collective reality about the little ceremony that touched its sincerity with beauty. Similarly was Easter morning beautiful, when we marched in the early twilight towards the little cemetery among the larch trees and stood with our hats off round an open grave, waiting in silence for the sunrise. The air was cool and scented, our mood devotional and solemn. There was a sense of wonder among us. Then, as the sun slipped up above the leagues of forest, the Eight Brothers, singing in parts, led the ninety boys in the great German hymn, “_Christus ist auferstanden_....” The surroundings, too, of the school influenced me greatly. Those leagues of Black Forest rolling over distant mountains, velvet-coloured, leaping to the sky in grey cliffs, or passing quietly like the sea in immense waves, always singing in the winds, haunted by elves and dwarfs and peopled by charming legends--those forest glades, deep in moss and covered in springtime with wild lily-of-the-valley; those tumbling streams that ran for miles unseen, then emerged to serve the peasants by splashing noisily over the clumsy water-wheel of a brown old sawmill before they again lost themselves among the mossy pine roots; those pools where water-pixies dwelt, and those little red and brown villages where we slept in our long walks--the whole setting of this Moravian school was so beautifully simple that it lent just the proper atmosphere for lives consecrated without flourish of trumpets to God. It all left upon me an impression of grandeur, of loftiness, and of real religion ... and of a Deity not specially active on Sundays only. CHAPTER V