Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/157

 open space, unencumbered and untaxed, where you can come and stay when you please and as long as you please? Pews mean an imposed long service, an imposed tax, an imposed restriction on one's freedom. You may want to go to church for five minutes of spiritual stimulation or for five hours of spiritual repose; in which case, locked in a pew, you must either disturb or be disturbed in following your desire. But the pews of this Newport church, I was told, are neither to be sold, nor rented, nor given away: they must be acquired. Even as an estate or a mansion or a throne, they are hereditary. No stranger, therefore, can come into this church to pray, unless, by gracious suffrage, he stand at the door. His, then, is the better chance of salvation. I shared the pew of mine host, which he must have acquired by right of conquest. For on the fly-leaf of the hymn book was written a name other than his own,—a name of one of the distinguished families of the early