“I'm just dying to see a camp-meeting!” said Celia. “You hear such racy accounts of what goes on at them.” “Don't go, I beg of you!” urged Theron, with doleful emphasis. “Don't let's even talk about them. I should like to feel this afternoon as if there was no such thing within a thousand miles of me as a camp-meeting. Do you know, all this interests me enormously. It is a revelation to me to see these thousands of good, decent, ordinary people, just frankly enjoying themselves like human beings. I suppose that in this whole huge crowd there isn't a single person who will mention the subject of his soul to any other person all day long.” “I should think the assumption was a safe one,” said the priest, smilingly, “unless,” he added on afterthought, “it be by way of a genial profanity. There used to be some old Clare men who said 'Hell to my soul!' when they missed at quoits, but I haven't heard it for a long time. I daresay they're all dead.” “I shall never forget that death-bed--where I saw you first,” remarked Theron, musingly. “I date from that experience a whole new life. I have been greatly struck lately, in reading our 'Northern Christian Advocate' to see in the obituary notices of prominent Methodists how over and over again it is recorded that they got religion in their youth through being frightened by some illness of their own, or some epidemic about them. The cholera year of 1832 seems to have made Methodists hand over fist. Even to this day our most successful revivalists, those who work conversions wholesale wherever they go, do it more by frightful pictures of hell-fire surrounding the sinner's death-bed than anything else. You could hear the same thing at our camp-meeting tonight, if you were there.” “There isn't so much difference as you think,” said Father Forbes, dispassionately. “Your people keep examining their souls, just as children keep pulling up the bulbs they have planted to see are there any roots yet. Our people are more satisfied to leave their souls alone, once they have been planted, so to speak, by baptism. But fear of hell governs them both, pretty much alike. As I remember saying to you once before, there is really nothing new under the sun. Even the saying isn't new. Though there seem to have been the most tremendous changes in races and civilizations and religions, stretching over many thousands of years, yet nothing is in fact altered very much. Where religions are concerned, the human race are still very like savages in a dangerous wood in the dark, telling one another ghost stories around a camp-fire. They have always been like that.”