She laughed as she returned, "One might think from your awful seriousness that you were a preacher. Father Confessor, if you please--" she began mockingly, then stopped--arrested by the expression of his face. "Oh I beg your pardon, have I been rude?" With a forced laugh he answered, "Oh no, indeed, not at all. It is only that your views of the Christian religion surprise me." "My views of the Christian religion," she repeated, very serious now. "I did not know that my views of Christianity were mentioned." He was bewildered. "But the church! You were speaking of the church." "And the church and Christianity are one and the same of course." Again with a touch of sarcasm, more pronounced, "You will tell me next, I suppose, that a minister really ministers." Dan was astonished and hurt. He had learned much of the spirit of Christianity in his backwoods home, but he knew nothing of churches except that which the school had taught him. He had accepted the church to which he belonged at its own valuation, highly colored by biased historians. Such words as these were to his ears little less than sacrilege. He was shocked that they should come from one whose personality and evident character had impressed him so strongly. His voice was doubtful and perplexed as he said: "But is not that true church of Christ, which is composed of his true disciples, Christian? Surely, they can no more be separated than the sun can be separated from the sunshine; and is not the ministry a vital part of that church?" Miss Farwell, seeing him so troubled, wondered whether she understood him. She felt that she was talking too freely to this stranger, but his questions drew her on, and she was curiously anxious that he should understand her. "I was not thinking of that true church composed of the true disciples of Christ," she returned. "And that is just it, don't you see? _This true church that is so inseparable from the religion of Christ is so far forgotten that it never enters into any thought of the church at all._ The sun always shines, it is true, but we do not always have the sunshine. There are the dark and stormy days, you know, and sometimes there is an eclipse. To me these are the dark days, so dark that I wonder sometimes if it is not an eclipse." She paused then added deliberately, "This selfish, wasteful, cruel, heartless thing that men have built up around their opinions, and whims, and ambitions, has so come between the people and the Christianity of the Christ, that they are beginning to question if, indeed, there is anywhere such a thing as the true church."