I shall not attempt to reproduce the sermon. His sketch of the advance of skepticism in Europe, in England, and in the North, struck me as labored; showing clearly that he had been set upon the task. But I shall not criticise it. He was at home, certainly, when he pictured the life of a pious, Christian woman whose yoke-fellow was an atheist. It was a fearful picture (from the point of view of his hearers,—and he was preaching to them), of which every detail was harrowing. But I leave that picture to the imagination of my readers. It is the last feather that breaks the camel’s back. Alice had lost. The dying cousin had won. CHAPTER LXIV. I have stated, elsewhere, that the dogma of the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures was held, at this period, throughout the length and breadth of Virginia. It was held, in truth, in a way to warm the heart of a thoroughgoing theologian; for to doubt it was to be totally bereft of reason. But many of my middle-aged fellow-citizens who are accustomed to laugh at the Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility, will be surprised when I remind them that, at that day, we believed, also, in something very nearly akin to the plenary inspiration of sermons (those of our own sect, of course). And my Bushwhackerish candor compels me to go further, and to add that it seems to me that we Virginia Protestants, at that day, carried the dogma of parsonic infallibility to even greater lengths than Catholics do that of the papal. For, as I understand it, it is only in matters of faith that the Pope cannot err (and if he be infallible more than that, I kiss his holiness’s toe and beg absolution); whereas, our Protestant pontiffs did not hesitate to pronounce on all manner of questions,—questions of hygiene, for example; going so far as to add an eleventh commandment. As it is short, I will give it: “Thou shalt not dance!” they cried in thunder tones; and, trembling, their flocks obeyed! Yet dancing is (as you may find in the first dictionary you shall lay your hands on)—dancing is but the rhythmic capering of the young of our species for a brief season (ah, _how_ brief and fleeting!). The rhythmic capering of the boys and girls, reinforced, perhaps, by an occasional widower (vivacious, high-prancing, nor hard to please), or else a sporadic widow or so, forgetting her first and for getting her second. This capering our Protestant pontiffs put down. Motion, _per se_, they argued, was harmless; for the lamb, most scriptural of animals, frisketh where he listeth. ’Twas the rhythm of motion that was hurtful. “Miss Sally,” cried a colored slave and sister to her young mistress, “you jump de rope and swing in de hammock, and you a member o’ de church!” [Her very words; nor were they the remains of a half-forgotten African fetich. They were a legitimate deduction from the theology current in my young days.] “Thou shalt not dance!” they thundered.