Mr. Grant was a strong anti-secessionist, and
he spent much breath in arguing with the people in private. On his
return to his room, one day, he found a glass dish on the table, filled
with japonicas, camellias, roses, and other early flowers, with the card
of a married lady,--with whom he had had a debate,--inscribed, 'From the
hottest of the Secessionists.' He seems modified in his views a little
about 'the sum of all villanies,' since his return."
"Yes," said Mrs. North, "and the people here explain it by saying, 'O,
he was feted, and flattered.'
"Yes," she continued, "some of our people will sacrifice their
confidence in man or angel, rather than believe anything good about
slavery."
I said to her, "Add the Bible to those witnesses, Mrs. North."
"Husband," said she, "please reach me that long, thin, brown-covered
book on the what-not." She then read an extract from the sixty-third
page; it was a book by one now deceased, called, "Experience as a
Minister":
"I had not been long a minister, before I found this worship of the
Bible as a fetish hindering me at every step. If I declared the
Constancy of Nature's Laws, and sought therein great argument for the
Constancy of God, all the miracles came and held their mythologic finger
up.
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