Clara Barton was a religious woman. Her diaries, her home letters, her intimate confidences, all breathe a deeply religious spirit. But she was reserved concerning her personal religious feelings and convictions. Once, when she was abruptly asked by a stranger in a group of strangers what were her religious opinions, she answered that she could not undertake to answer so large a question in so short a time. She recorded this in her diary, with some resentment that she should have been called upon thus to stand and deliver at sight. But sitting beside a dying soldier, she had no hesitation in praying with him, nor of telling him unreservedly her own faith in God and immortality. She was reared a Universalist. In that faith she lived the greater part of her life. She did not, however, join the Universalist Church in her home town, and she went away quite early and never established personal relations with a church. Her satisfaction in church-going was almost wholly in the sermon. For music she did not care, and there was nothing in ritual that appealed to her. But a well-reasoned sermon she enjoyed. Henry Ward Beecher was her favorite preacher, and she did not miss an opportunity of hearing him if she could help it. A truly great sermon or great address of any kind made a strong impression upon her; nor was it wholly intellectual. She was remarkably receptive and open to spiritual impressions. A woman of intellect and will, she was also a woman of unusually sensitive feelings and of deep, though controlled, emotions. She was ever eager to learn and had to the end of her life unshaken faith in the discovery and application of new truth. It was reported in 1908 that Clara Barton had gone over to Christian Science. The report was not wholly correct. She became interested in Christian Science, but she never adopted it. The minister of the Universalist Church in Oxford, the Reverend Mr. Schoppe, became a Christian Science practitioner and reader, and she was much interested through him and his wife in this change on his part. She was interested in Mrs. Eddy. It seemed to her a notable thing for a woman, alone and against great opposition, to have accomplished what she did. She once witnessed the wreck of a sight-seeing automobile filled with Christian Science visitors to Boston, and she was impressed by the fortitude with which they bore pain.