The few books that my pack contained made generous amends, on this day of rest, for the weight which they had added to my load. After breakfast I took one of them to a shaded corner of the church-yard, and read there until the service hour, and then I slipped into a seat half hidden by the baptismal font. In his sermon the rector contrasted the emasculated ideas of the present with reference to God's judgment of sin, with the virile thinking of the Middle Ages, expressed in such works of art as Dante's Inferno, and Angelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. Earnestly and eloquently he pleaded the reality of spiritual things to the minds of men in those ages of belief, and then he solemnly urged a return to the plain truths of inspiration, and to the teaching of the Church, that "God cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance," and that the punishment of unrepented evil is "eternal death." The church was well filled, and I looked it over with a quickened interest. The sexton and I, so far as I could see, were the only representatives of the poor. Outside were a number of coachmen and grooms and nurse-maids; but these, it is likely, were of another persuasion. Certainly they would have looked curiously out of place to our Protestant eyes among that well-dressed, prosperous company. I knew this body of worshippers at a glance; some of them I knew personally. It was easy to follow them all in imagination to country houses where the afternoon would be spent in what escape there offered from the heat. On the next day would be begun again the round of wholesome recreation and of social intercourse, relieved from the formality of town life, which makes up the summer rest, and which implies the leisure which is rendered possible only by the continuous work of a multitude of the poor, who constitute the parts of intricate social and domestic machinery. I seem to be dwelling upon a costly immunity from physical labor. It was not this that appealed to me. These worshippers had leisure, but they were far from being idle. My personal acquaintance went far enough to recognize among them persons whose lives are full of strenuous activity in channels of splendid usefulness. It was the social cleavage which yawned to my vision from the new point of view. The rich were there in the house of God, but not the poor; and the very atmosphere of the place seemed to preclude the presence of the poor. I had asked Sam to go to church with me. Sam had been watering the horses, and now had an empty bucket in each hand and some tobacco in his mouth. He stood still for a moment, regarding me intently, and shifting the tobacco from one cheek to the other. Then he asked me with much directness if I took him for a "dude." I said that I should then go alone. "That way?" asked Sam, with an eye to my gear. "It is the best that I can do," I explained. "Then go, and be fired for a bum," he replied, as he moved on toward the pump. CHAPTER II