OLD HOMESTEAD 



gave them a chance to extend their acquaintance and to go home 

 with the girls. Besides all this, these prayer meetings and sing- 

 ing schools were both very respectable and moral institutions, 

 to attend which it was only necessary to ask permission, and to 

 take a lively interest in them was to be in society. 



In the early days the prayer meetings were held at the neigh- 

 bors' houses, first with one and then another, and were very 

 interesting outside the religious features, frequently leading to 

 good-natured debate among the older people. People in those 

 days were not contented to swallow a creed and adopt beliefs 

 without at least talking about it. They did swallow their creeds 

 and blindly accept their beliefs beyond any degree that the same 

 is done now, but on the slightest criticism or suggestion a debate 

 or controversy was at once opened. 



Night after night Eider Wilcox would pace up and down our 

 long kitchen, gesticulating and arguing with father, who sat in 

 his chair tipped back against the old brick oven. Their favorite 

 subject of contention was *'free will" and "predestination," 

 Mr. Wilcox holding strongly to the Presbyterian theory, while 

 father combated him on a sort of modified ground. They always 

 finished where they began, agreeing that it was a mystery too 

 deep for human understanding. 



In our home we always had Bible reading and prayer every 

 morning immediately after breakfast. It was father's early cus- 

 tom to take chapter after chapter in succession, going through 

 the Bible by course, but as time went on he skipped about, 

 leaving out the uninteresting parts of the Old Testament that he 

 might have time to read the writings of the disciples or take up 

 something from Job, the history of Solomon, the sweet songs of 

 David, or other of the better writers. Sometimes, if the chapter 

 had something especially interesting in it, it was followed by a 



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