Everybody could be any kind of a Christian he wanted
to; there was perfect freedom in that matter. But I confined public
religious teaching to the churches and the Sunday-schools, permitting
nothing of it in my other educational buildings. I could have
given my own sect the preference and made everybody a Presbyterian
without any trouble, but that would have been to affront a law
of human nature: spiritual wants and instincts are as various in
the human family as are physical appetites, complexions, and
features, and a man is only at his best, morally, when he is
equipped with the religious garment whose color and shape and
size most nicely accommodate themselves to the spiritual complexion,
angularities, and stature of the individual who wears it; and,
besides, I was afraid of a united Church; it makes a mighty power,
the mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into
selfish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means death to
human liberty and paralysis to human thought.
All mines were royal property, and there were a good many of them.
They had formerly been worked as savages always work mines--holes
grubbed in the earth and the mineral brought up in sacks of hide by
hand, at the rate of a ton a day; but I had begun to put the mining
on a scientific basis as early as I could.
Yes, I had made pretty handsome progress when Sir Sagramor's
challenge struck me.
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