“You put it strongly, Miss, and I will answer by a question.  If in sincerity we invoke God’s mercy, can the means that prompt the heart’s devotion, reliance, and love, be wrong?  His magnitude and perfection are a mystery to the untutored savage:  he knows only what he sees.  The earth to him, (as it was to the founders and patriarchs of our own faith,) is all the world.  He has no idea that it is only one, and a small one of a numerous family, and can conceive only that the sun rules his world; gives life and death to everything upon the earth—­but this inspires love and reverence for God.  The scientific man sees in the sun only an attractive centre, and sees space filled with self-illuminating orbs, and reasoning from the known to the unknown, he believes these centres of attraction to planetary families, and the imagination stretches away through space filled with centres and revolving worlds, and each centre with its dependents revolving around one great centre, and this great centre he believes is God.  His idea is only one step beyond the Indian’s, and has only the same effect:  it leads the heart to depend on and worship God.”

“You are a heretic, and must like a naughty boy be made to read your Bible and go to Sunday-school, and be lectured and taught the true faith.  Fy! fy! shall the heathen go to heaven?  Where is the provision for him in the Bible?  What are we to do with missions?  If this be true, there is no need that we should be sending good men and dear, pious women to convert the Chinese, the Feejees, and the poor Africans so benighted that their very color is black, and the Australians, and New Georgians, to be roasted and eaten by the cannibals there.  If they worship God in sincerity, you say that is all?”

“No, miss, faith without works is a futile reliance for heaven.  It is the first necessity, and perhaps the next and greatest, is, to ’Do unto all what you would have all do unto you.’  These are the words of the great Chinese philosopher, Confucius, and were taught four and a half centuries before Christ, yet we see Him teaching the same.  This, as Confucius said, was the great cardinal duty of man, and all else was but a commentary upon this.  This I fancy is all, at least it is very comprehensive.  You tell me the traditions of the people who worshipped here say that this was a cardinal law unto them?”

“You, sir, have lived too long among the heathen, if you are not one already.  You are like an August peach in July:  you are turning, and in a little while will be ripe.  You talk, as Uncle Toney says, like a book, and to me, like a new book, for yours are new thoughts to me.  Cousin, does he not astonish you?”

“By no means; true, they are new thoughts; but they are natural thoughts, and I do not fear to listen to them—­on the contrary, I could listen to them all day, and, Alice, I have often, very often, heard from you something like this.”

“Nonsense, cousin, nonsense; I am orthodox, you know, and a good girl and love to go to church, especially when I have a becoming new dress.”