"He taught them with his mouth when he was on the earth; and now he teaches them with his mind." "Then, miss, I will tell you why it seems to me that churches can't be the places to tune the fiddles for that kind of consort--and that's just why I more than don't care to go into one of them: I never heard a sermon that didn't seem to be taking my Christ from me, and burying him where I should never find him any more.

For the somebody the clergy talk about is not only nowise like my Christ, but nowise like a live man at all.

It always seemed to me more like a guy they had dressed up and called by his name than the man I read about in my mother's big Testament." "How my father would have delighted in this man!" said Mary to herself.
"You see, miss," Jasper resumed, "I can't help knowing something about these matters, because I was brought up in it all, my father being a local preacher, and a very good man.

Perhaps, if I had been as clever as Sister Ann, I might be thinking now just as she does; but it seems to me a man that is born stupid has much to be thankful for: he can't take in things before his heart's ready for believing them, and so they don't get spoiled, like a child's book before he is able to read it.
All that I heard when I went with my father to his preachings was to me no more than one of the chapters full of names in the Book of Chronicles--though I do remember once hearing a Wesleyan clergyman say that he had got great spiritual benefit from those chapters.

I wasn't even frightened at the awful things my father said about hell, and the certainty of our going there if we didn't lay hold upon the Saviour; for, all the time, he showed but such a ghost or cloud of a man that he called the Saviour as it wasn't possible to lay hold upon.