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“It was extraordinarily kind of you to call so early, my dear fellow,” said Jones as he followed his guest to the door of the little rectory. “I take it as a mark of Christian brotherhood; and naturally, as a clergyman, I want to be as close as possible to every one who is working in any way for the good of the place where my parish lies.”

“Of course!” answered Hopkins. “That’s all right. I guess you won’t have any trouble about Christian brotherhood in Samaria. Good-bye till Monday afternoon.”

But as he walked across the green, the skirts of his black frock-coat flapping in the September breeze, and his brown Fedora hat set at a reflective angle on the back of his head, he pondered a little over the precise significance of his confrere’s last remark, which had not altogether pleased him. Was there a subtle shade of difference between those who were working “in any way” for the good of Samaria, and the “clergyman” who felt bound to be on good terms with them?

On Monday afternoon they had appointed to take a country walk together, and Hopkins, who was a lean, long-legged, wiry fellow, with a deep chest, gray eyes, and a short, crisp brown beard and moustache, led the way at a lively pace over hill and dale around Lake Marapaug and back,–fourteen miles in three hours. Jones was rather red when they returned to the front gate of the rectory about five o’clock, and he wiped his beaded forehead with his handkerchief as he invited his comrade to come in and have a cup of tea.

“No, thank you,” said Hopkins, “I’m just ready for a bit of work in my study, now. Nice little stroll, wasn’t it? I want you to know the country about here, and the people too. You mustn’t feel strange in this Puritan region where my church has been established so long. We’ll soon make you feel at home. Good-bye.”

An hour later, when Jones had sipped his tea, he looked up from an article in the Pall Mall Review and began to wonder whether Hopkins had meant anything in particular by that last remark.

“He’s an awfully good chap, to be sure, but just a bit set in his way. I fancy he has some odd notions. Well, perhaps I shall be able to put him right, if I am patient and friendly. It is rather plain that I shall have a lot of missionary work to do here among these dissenters.”

So he turned to his bookshelves and took down a volume on The Primitive Diaconate and the Reconstruction of Christendom. Meantime Hopkins was in his study making notes for a series of sermons on “The Scriptural Polity of the Early New England Churches.”

Well, you can see from this how the great Leviathan conflict began. Two men meeting with good intentions, both anxious, even determined, to be the best of friends, yet each unconsciously pressing upon the other the only point of difference between them. Now add to this a pair of consciences aggravated by the sense of official responsibilities, and a number of ladies who were alike in cherishing for one or the other of these two men a warm admiration, amounting in several cases, shall I say, to a sentimental adoration, and you have a collection of materials not altogether favourable to a peaceful combination.

My business, however, is with Leviathan, and therefore I do not propose to narrate the development of the rivalry between these two excellent men. How Mr. Jones introduced an early morning service, and Mr. Hopkins replied with an afternoon musical vespers: how a vested choir of boys was installed in the brown church, and a cornet and a harp appeared in the gallery of the white church: how candles were lighted in the Episcopalian apse, (whereupon Erastus Whipple resigned from the vestry because he said he knew that he was “goin’ to act ugly”), and a stereopticon threw illuminated pictures of Palestine upon the wall behind the Congregational pulpit (which induced Abijah Lemon to refuse to pass the plate the next Sunday, because he said he “wa’nt goin’ to take up no collection for a peep-show in meetin'”): how a sermon beside the graveyard on “the martyrdom of King Charles I,” was followed, on the green, by a discourse on “the treachery of Charles II”: how Mrs. Slicer and Mrs. Cutter crossed each other in the transfer of their church relations, because the Slicer boys were not asked to sing in the vested choir, and because Orlando Cutter was displaced as cornetist by a young man from Hitchfield: how the Jonesites learned to speak of themselves as “churchmen” and of their neighbours as “adherents of other religious bodies,” while the Hopkinsians politely inquired as to the hours at which “mass was celebrated” in the brown edifice and were careful to speak of their own services as “Divine worship”: how Mr. Jones went so far, in his Washington’s Birthday Speech, as to compliment the architectural effect of “the old meeting-house on the green, that venerable monument of an earnest period of dissent,” to which Mr. Hopkins made the retort courteous by giving thanks, in his prayer on the same occasion, for “the gracious memories of fraternal intercourse which still hallowed the little brown chapel beside the cemetery”: how all these strokes and counterstrokes were given and exchanged in a decorous and bloodless religious war which enlivened a Samaritan autumn and winter almost to the point of effervescence: and how they were prevented from doing any great harm by the general good feeling and the constitutional sense of humour of the village, it is not my purpose, I say, to relate in detail.