The reader is not to imagine that Mr. Gulmore and men of his class are so brutally ignorant as some would imagine. When, therefore, we hear them speak of our _institutions_ being in danger, they mean the _institutions_ of heresy and sectarianism; namely, parsons, and their wives and children, and countless sects and contradictions in creed--institutions that, sure enough, are in imminent danger, and doomed to fall before the irresistible and unerring progress of Catholicity. But will this divinely decreed result be injurious to the progress or prosperity of the republic? On the contrary, there can never be a real union among the States till the minds of the people, north and south, are united in faith and sentiment. And by the annihilation of sectarianism and its castes, the people will be freed from a very burdensome tax now going to the support of a large and lazy body of men, women, and children, whose only object in existence seems to be to eat and consume, and who, besides, by their idleness and habits, keep up a system of detraction, jealousy, and discord among otherwise well-disposed citizens, that, like so many cancers, are eating into the very vitals of the public morals. Let not the American citizen, therefore, bewail the certain decline and rapid decay of the _institutions_ of sectarianism, but rather pray for the dawn of that glorious approaching day when, as we are but a one people and a united nation, we may have but one religion, and a country that will know no sectional divisions. CHAPTER XVII. "HE AND HIS WHOLE HOUSE BELIEVED." Paul, now, though full of anxiety and care on account of his young charge, was comparatively well off. His good fortune removed him from the neighborhood of all that was low, fanatical, and cruel in New York, to the capital of Vermont. And he felt the change for the better, sensibly, in quitting the birthplace of "Millerism," and going into a comparatively enlightened region. He thought there were, as he said, some gentlemen and ladies here in Vermont; but he could never see one of either species, properly so called, where he lately lived. The truth was, Mr. Clarke, his present employer, was a well-bred, full-blooded Yankee; and though his notions of Catholicity were such as he gleaned from the rabid discourses of half-educated preachers, and a few anti-Popery tracts which he read, his gentle and noble mind could not sanction for an instant any thing like persecution on account of religion. Hence, besides the favorable impression which the talents of Paul made on him, he considered it time to show him some kindness, to compensate for the ill treatment he underwent under the machinations of Parson Gulmore and Amanda Prying, and their clerical associates.