"No, thank you, Miss Jane. You may save yourself the trouble, for he has given me over to hardness of heart and 'a reprobate mind,' and his patience is not only 'clean gone forever,' but he has carefully washed his hands of all future interest in my rudderless and drifting soul. Let me speak this once, and henceforth I promise to hold my peace. I do not require to be 'talked to' by anybody,--I only need to be let alone. Sabbath-schools are indisputably excellent things,--and I can testify that they are ponderous ecclesiastical hammers, pounding creeds and catechisms into the mould of memory; but these nurseries of the church nourish and harbor some Satan's imps among their half-fledged saints; and while they certainly accomplish a vast amount of good, they are by no means infallible machines for the manufacture of Christians,--of which fact I stand in melancholy attestation. I have a vague impression that piety does not grow up in a night, like Jonah's gourd or Jack the Giant-killer's beanstalk; but is a pure, glittering, spiritual stalactite, built by the slow accretion of dripping tears. Do you suppose that you can successfully train my soul as you have managed my body?--that you can hold my nose and pour a dose of faith down my throat, like ipecac or cod-liver oil? In matters of theology I am no ostrich, and, if you afflict me _ad nauseam_ with religious dogmas, you must not wonder that my moral digestion rebels outright. I shall not dispute the fact that in justice to your precepts and example I ought to be a Christian; but, since I am not, I may as well tell you at once and save future trouble, that I can neither be baited into the church like a hawk into a steel-trap, nor scared and driven into it like bees into a hive by the rattling of tin pans and the screaking of horns. Don't look at me so dolefully, dear Miss Jane, as if you had already seen my passport to perdition signed and sealed. You, at least, have done your whole duty,--have set all the articles of orthodoxy, well-flavored and garnished, before me; and, if I am finally lost, my spiritual starvation can never be charged against you in the last balance-sheet. I am not ignorant of the Bible, nor altogether unacquainted with the divers creeds that spring from its pages as thick, as formidable, as ferocious, as the harvest from the dragon's teeth; and, thanking you for all you have taught me, I here undertake to pilot my own soul in this boiling, bellowing sea of life. I doubt whether some of the charts you value will be of any service in my voyage, or whether the beacons by which you steer will save me from the reefs; but, nevertheless, I take the wheel, and, if I wreck my soul,--why, then, I wreck it."