Mary read to him biographies of the good and great. She read ennobling works of poetry and counsel. She brought before his mind by example how superior was earnestness to trivialty, strict integrity to knavery and falsehood, goodness and piety to wickedness and infidelity. As she read and commented, her voice became to Philip as the voice of an angel. Her work was indeed accomplished when, after having listened to her rendering of St. Paul's grand epistles, there sprang up in his heart, first: "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian;" then this full, heart-swelling sympathy with the Apostle's words: "For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." CHAPTER V. THE MISSIONARY'S RETROSPECT. Though Philip St. Leger would have done, in almost all things, as Mary Selby directed, upon one certain point he was inflexible. This was upon the subject of immersion; he would not go down into the waters of Lake Sunapee, following the custom of the Newbergians. During his boyhood his mother had been a member of the Presbyterian society; latterly, for some good reason or other, she had made a move into the Episcopal; whether through whim for popularity, or for conscience' sake was best known to herself. Her puritanical cousin, Mrs. Col. Selby, and a very worthy woman she was, regarded Mrs. St. Leger as a heretic, and looked upon the troubles with her children as a just punishment for having left the Church of her fathers. She had herself, however, meantime made very considerable concessions to her own religious convictions. For, while stoutly believing in sprinkling, in infant baptism, in open communion, and in each and every tenet of Presbyterianism, she had actually been received into the Calvinistic Baptist Church! What an unheard-of thing! It created no little talk among the good people of Newberg, and more for this reason: Mrs. Job Manning, a farmer's wife, who dutifully assisted her husband in earning a frugal living on the rocky sides of King's Hill, having been a Congregationalist, had been refused years previously, admittance to this same Church. She was poor, had a family of young children, had no way of traveling thirty miles to her own nearest meeting-house, and had humbly begged, with her husband, who was already a good Baptist, to be received into the Church. Failing this, since she could not consent to immersion, and shrank from the doctrine of close communion, she, or rather her husband, demanded that she might be allowed to partake occasionally of the Lord's Supper.