“You are deceived, my dear friend,” said Mary. “Look at these cottages that glitter to the setting sun on the hill-side. Eighty years ago their inmates were the slaves of gross superstition--creatures who feared and worshipped they knew not what; and, with no discipline of purity connected with their uncertain beliefs, they could, like mere machines, be set in motion, either for good or ill, at the will of their capricious masters. These cottages, Dallas, are now inhabited by thinking men; there are Bibles in even the humblest of them--in even yonder hovel where the old widow lives--and these Bibles are read and understood. We may hear even now the notes of the evening psalm! Wist ye how the change was wrought? or what it was that converted mere animal men into rational creatures? Was it not that very Church which you have, alas! so rashly forsaken, and now denounce as intolerant? A strange intolerance, surely, that delivers men from the influence of their grosser nature, and delights to arm its vassals with a power before which all tyranny must eventually be overthrown. Be not deceived, Dallas! Men sometimes suffer themselves to be misled by theories of a perfect but impossible freedom--impossible, because unsuited to the low natures and darkened minds of those on whom they would bestow it--and then submit in despair to the quiet of a paralysing despotism, because they cannot realize what they have so fondly imagined. Know ye not that none but the wise and the good can be truly free--that the vile and the ignorant are necessarily slaves under whatever form of government they may chance to live? See you not that the deprecated sway of the Scottish Church has been in truth but a paternal tutelage--that her children were feeble in mind, and rude and untoward, when she first laid the hand of her discipline upon them--and that she has now well-nigh trained them up to be men? And think you that these, our poor countrymen, already occupy that place which He who died for them has willed they should attain to? or that the _many_, no longer a brute herd, but moral and thoughtful, and with the Bible in their hands, are to remain the willing, unresisting slaves of the _few_? No, Dallas! when men increase in goodness and knowledge, there must be also an onward progress towards civil liberty; and the political bias which you denounce as unfavourable to religion, is merely the onward groping of this principle. A strange intolerance, surely, that has already broken the fetters of the bondsman; they still clank about him, but being what he now is--intelligent and conscientious--they must inevitably drop off, let his master fret as he may, and leave him a freeman.” There was a pause, during which Dallas doggedly fixed his eyes on the ground. “I have viewed the subject,” he at length said, “with different eyes. And of this I am sure, there are in the Episcopal Church truly excellent men who cannot exist without doing good.”