The lack of harmony in individual churches--and there is a good deal of it--is not reassuring to the outsider. The cynical attitude of a good many non-church-going Smiths is due to the strifes, often contemptibly petty, prevailing within church walls. It seems difficult for Christians to dwell together in peace and concord. In almost every congregation there appears to be a party favorable to the minister and one antagonistic to him. A minister who seemed to me to fill more fully the Christian ideal than any man I have known was harassed in the most brutal fashion by a congregation incapable of appreciating the fidelity and self-sacrifice that marked his ministry. I recall with delight the fighting qualities of another clergyman who was an exceptionally brilliant pulpit orator. He was a Methodist who had fallen to the lot of a church that had not lately been distinguished for able preaching. This man filled his church twice every Sunday, and it was the one sought oftenest by strangers within the city’s gates; yet about half his own membership hated him cordially. Though I was never of his flock, I enjoyed his sermons; and knowing something of his relations with the opposition party in his congregation, I recall with keenest pleasure how he fought back. Now and then an arrow grazed his ear; but he was unheedful of warnings that he would be pilloried for heresy. He landed finally in his old age in an obscure church, where he died, still fighting with his back to the wall. Though the shepherd’s crook as a weapon is going out of style, I have an idea that clergymen who stand sturdily for their own ideals receive far kindlier consideration than those who meekly bow to vestries, trustees, deacons, elders, and bishops. Music has long been notoriously a provoker of discord. Once in my news-hunting days I suffered the ignominy of a “scoop” on a choir-rumpus, and I thereupon formed the habit of lending an anxious ear to rumors of trouble in choir-lofts. The average ladder-like _Te Deum_, built up for the display of the soprano’s vocal prowess, has always struck me as an unholy thing. I even believe that the horrors of highly embellished offertories have done much to tighten purse-strings and deaden generous impulses. The presence behind the pulpit of a languid quartette praising God on behalf of the bored sinners in the pews has always seemed to me the profanest of anomalies. Nor has long contemplation of vested choirs in Episcopal churches shaken my belief that church music should be an affair of the congregation.