the first step was taken toward a local centre of commerce, and the village was fairly begun.  It had not yet reached a remarkable size, though there was a time-honored joke because an enthusiastic old woman had said once, when four or five houses and a new meeting-house were being built all in one summer, that she expected now that she might live to see Oldfields a seaport town.  There had been a great excitement over the second meeting-house, to which the conservative faction had strongly objected, but, after the radicals had once gained the day, other innovations passed without public challenge.  The old First Parish Church was very white and held aloft an imposing steeple, and strangers were always commiserated if they had to leave town without the opportunity of seeing its front by moonlight.  Behind this, and beyond a green which had been the playground of many generations of boys and girls, was a long row of horse-sheds, where the farmers’ horses enjoyed such part of their Sunday rest as was permitted them after bringing heavy loads of rural parishioners to their public devotions.  The Sunday church-going was by no means so carefully observed in these days as in former ones, when disinclination was anything but a received excuse.  In Parson Leslie’s—­the doctor’s grandfather’s—­day, it would have condemned a man or woman to the well-merited reproof of their acquaintances.  And indeed most parishioners felt deprived of a great pleasure when, after a week of separation from society, of a routine of prosaic farm-work, they were prevented from seeing their friends parade into church, from hearing the psalm-singing and the sermon, and listening to the news afterward.  It was like going to mass and going to the theatre and the opera, and making a round of short calls, and having an outing in one’s own best clothes to see other people’s, all rolled into one; beside which, there was (and is) a superstitious expectation of good luck in the coming week if the religious obligations were carefully fulfilled.  So many of the old ideas of the efficacy of ecclesiasticism still linger, most of them by no means unlawfully.  The elder people of New England are as glad to have their clergyman visit them in their last days as if he granted them absolution and extreme unction.  The old traditions survive in our instincts, although our present opinions have long since ticketed many thoughts and desires and customs as out of date and quite exploded.

We go so far in our vigorous observance of the first commandment, and our fear of worshiping strange gods, that sometimes we are in danger of forgetting that we must worship God himself.  And worship is something different from a certain sort of constant church-going, or from even trying to be conformers and to keep our own laws and our neighbors’.