I am one with them.
_I_ never go to church."
"Why?"
"Simply because I never find any touch of the true Spirit of Christ
there--and the whole tone of the place makes me feel distinctly un-
Christian. The nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine youths possibly would
sympathise with me. A church is a building more or less beautiful or
ugly as the case may be, and in the building there is generally a
man who reads prayers in a sing-song tone of voice, and perhaps
another man who preaches without eloquence on some text which he
utterly fails to see the true symbolical meaning of. There are no
Charles Kingsleys nowadays,--if there were, I should call myself a
'Kingsleyite'. But as matters stand I am not moved by the church to
feel religious. I would rather sit quietly in the fields and hear
the gentle leaves whispering their joys and thanksgivings above my
head, than listen to a human creature who has not even the education
to comprehend the simplest teachings of nature, daring to assert
himself as a teacher of the Divine. My own chief object in life has
been and still is to speak on this and similar subjects to the
people who are groping after lost Christianity. They need helping,
and I want to try in my way to help them.
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