Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: m A VILLAGE DISCUSSION I Had pulled up at the door of a village store and gone in to make a purchase. I was standing at the counter. It was a cold day, and there were a half-dozen men sitting around the stove. All were strangers to me, for the village was out of my regular course of driving. I would have gone out immediately after making my little purchase, but that a remark from one of the men to the surrounding group interested me. It was made by a man whose face was bright and intelligent, but whose tone and style of talking marked him at once as somewhat dogmatic and given to laying down the law among his neighbors. I found afterwards that he was a young medical man, who had been but two or three years in the village, studious in his profession and remarkably successful, but fond of collisions with the Freewill Baptist minister, whose church was the only one in the neighborhood. The Doctor was an " educated man;" that is, he was a college graduate, and a man of some reading. The Minister was not an educated man, and the Doctorwas a thorn in his side. Many localities in the country are situated much as this was. But, on the whole, the good-sense of the average man is superior to illogical reasoning, however specious, in or out of the pulpit, and sound orthodox belief holds its own against unsound reason and imaginary theology. They were talking about miracles, and the young Doctor said: " You know as well as I do, Stephen, that everything in this world moves in regular order. The laws of nature are what we all have to depend on, and they never change. It's certain that if you plant potatoes they won't come up pumpkins. Neither you nor any man here ever saw a miracle. You never heard of one in your life in these parts. You never heard of pumpkin vines growing from potat...