There was a long pause, broken again by uncle Bryan's voice:
'If we consider the nature of our condition here, we must see there is no occasion for such thing as revealed religion. What is it we want to know? Does not the creation, the universe we behold, preach to us the existence of an Almighty Power, that governs and regulates the whole? And is not the evidence that this creation, holds out to our senses infinitely stronger than anything we can read in a book that any impostor might make and call the word of God? As for morality, the knowledge of it exists in every man's conscience.'
Presently he laid the book aside, and my mother took it up. Uncle Bryan stretched forth his hand with the intention of keeping it from her; but he was too late. He gazed at her furtively from beneath his horn spectacles, as she turned over the pages. After a few minutes' inspection of the book she returned his gaze sadly, and, with a protecting motion, drew me to her side. I had not liked uncle Bryan's laugh, and I liked it less now.
'Chris, my dear child,' said my mother, in a tone of infinite tenderness, 'go upstairs and bring down my Bible.'
I did as she desired, and my mother caressed me close, with her arm round my waist. Uncle Bryan sat on one side of the fireplace, reading the Age of Reason; my mother sat on the other side, reading the Bible.
[CHAPTER X.]
OUR NEW HOME.
A day or two afterwards I surprised my mother and uncle Bryan in the midst of a conversation which I supposed had reference to myself. My mother was in a very earnest mood, but uncle Bryan, except that he listened attentively to what she was saying, seemed in no way stirred. In all my life's experiences I never met or heard of a man who was more thoroughly attentive to every little detail that passed around him than was uncle Bryan; but although he gave his whole mind to the smallest matter for the time being, he evinced no indication of it, and persons who did not understand his character might reasonably have supposed him to be utterly indifferent to what was going on.
'You will promise me, Bryan,' my mother said.
'I will promise nothing, Emma,' he replied; 'I made a promise once in my life, and I received a promise in return. I know what came of it.' He smiled bitterly, and added, his words seeming to me to be prompted more by inner consciousness than by the signs of distress in my mother's face, 'But you can make your mind easy. It is not in my nature to force my views upon any one. Force! as if it were any matter of mine! What comes to him must come as it has come to me--through the light of experience.'