The last reference at once fixed the identity of the person, and caused Burridge to get up and leave the church.  He pondered over this for a time, severed his connections with the body, and having visited Graylock one Sunday drove there every Sabbath thereafter, each time going to a different church.  After enduring this for six months he generated a longing for a more convenient meeting-place, and finally allied himself with the Baptist Church of Eustis.  Here his anchor might possibly have remained fast had it not been that subtle broodings over his wrongs, a calm faith in the righteousness of his own attitude, and disgust with those whom he saw calmly expatiating upon the doctrines and dogmas of religion in his own town finally caused him to suspect a universal misreading of the Bible.  This doubt, together with his own desire for justification according to the Word, finally put the idea in his mind to make a study of the Bible himself.  He would read it, he said.  He would study Hebrew and Greek, and refer all questionable readings of words and passages back to the original tongue in which it had been written.

With this end in view he began a study of these languages, the importance of the subject so growing upon him that he neglected his business.  Day after day he labored, putting a Bible and a Concordance upon a pile of soap-boxes near the door of his store and poring over them between customers, the store meantime taking care of itself.  He finally mastered Greek and Hebrew after a fashion, and finding the word “repent” frequently used, and that God had made man in the image of Himself, with a full knowledge of right and wrong, he gravitated toward the belief that therefore his traducers in Noank knew what they were doing, and that before he needed to forgive them—­though his love might cover all—­they must repent.

He read the Bible from beginning to end with this one feeling subconsciously dominant, and all its loving commands about loving one another, forgiving your brother seventy times seven, loving those that hate you, returning good for evil, selling all that you have and giving it to the poor, were made to wait upon the duty of others to repent.  He began to give this interpretation at Eustis, where he was allowed to have a Sunday-school, until the minister came and told him once, “to his face,” as the local report ran:  “We don’t want you here.”

Meekly he went forth and, joining a church across the Sound on Long Island, sailed over every Sunday and there advanced the same views until he was personally snubbed by the minister and attacked by the local papers.  Leaving there he went to Amherst, always announcing now that he held distinctive views about some things in the Bible and asking the privilege of explaining.  In this congregation he was still comfortably at rest when I knew him.

“All sensitiveness,” the sail-maker had concluded after his long account.  “There ain’t anything the matter with Elihu, except that he’s piqued and grieved.  He wanted to be the big man, and he wasn’t.”