Jim, who was a strict Presbyterian, rejoiced that I had picked out a Congregational Church for religious worship, and old Lukanitch confessed that if I persuaded his children to go with me to Plymouth Church very often they might desert the Roman Catholic faith of their ancestors. I felt assured, however, that St. Sava and the Orthodoxy of my mother would never lose me through the influence of Beecher’s genius, because Beecher was preaching to all humanity and not to a particular creed. His words were like the life-giving radiation of the sun, which shines upon all things alike. I saw in him a living example of that type of American who, like Hamilton, Jay, Livingston, and the other great men of whom I had heard at the Philadelphia exposition, were the spiritual and the intellectual giants of the Revolutionary period. My study of the history of Hamilton’s life had shown me that the number of these giants was large; many of them signed the Declaration of Independence. I did not fail to see in this a most propitious omen of a great future for the country. What a spiritual giant Lincoln must have been, I thought, when I heard Beecher refer to him with humblest veneration! Beecher was the sunrise which dispelled much of that mist which prevented my eyes, just as it prevents all foreign eyes, from seeing the clear outline of American civilization. Four years previously I had for the first time attended an American church service in Delaware City, and had carried away the impression that in matters of public worship America was not up to the standards prescribed by the Serbian Church. Beecher and his Plymouth Church changed my judgment completely. Beecher’s congregation seemed to me like a beehive full of honey-hearted beings. Each of them reminded me of the Americans who had befriended me at the railroad-station in Vienna, and had rescued me from the official dragon who threatened to send me back to the prisons of the military frontier. I firmly believed that Beecher was preaching a new gospel, the American gospel of humanity, the same gospel which his great sister had preached. Every member of his congregation looked to me like a faithful disciple of this doctrine.