Thereafter, instead of babbling blasphemies, the convalescent became silent for the most part, yet cheerful and beautifully rational when he did speak, so that fear came gradually to leave the old man's heart for longer and longer intervals. Indeed, one day when Bernal had long lain silent, he swept lingering doubts from the old man's mind by saying, with a curious little air of embarrassment, yet with a return of that old-time playful assumption of equality between them—"I'm afraid, old man, I may have been a little queer in my talk—back there."

The old man's heart leaped with hope at this, though the acknowledgment struck him as being inadequate to the circumstance it referred to.

"You were flighty, boy, now and then," he replied, in quite the same glossing strain of inadequacy.

"I can't tell you how queerly things came back to me—some bits of consciousness and memory came early and some came late—and they're still struggling along in that disorderly procession. Even yet I've not been able to take stock. Old man, I must have been an awful bore."

"Oh, no—not that, boy!" Then, in glad relief, he fell upon his knees beside the couch, praying, in discreetly veiled language, that the pure heart of a babbler might not be held guilty for the utterances of an irresponsible head.

Yet, after many days of sane quiet and ever-renewing strength—days of long walks in the summer woods or long readings in the hammock when the shadows lay east of the big house, there came to be observed in the young man a certain moody reticence. And when the time for his return to college was near, he came again to his disquieted grandfather one day, saying:

"I think there are some matters I should speak to you about, sir." Had he used the term "old man," instead of "sir," there might still have been no cause for alarm. As it was, the grandfather regarded him in a sudden, heart-hurried fear.

"Are the matters, boy, those—those about which you may have spoken during your sickness?"

"I believe so, sir."

The old man winced again under the "sir," when his heart longed for the other term of playful familiarity. But he quickly assumed a lightness of manner to hide the eagerness of his heart's appeal:

"Don't talk now, boy—be advised by me. It's not well for you—you are not strong. Please let me guide you now. Go back to your studies, put all these matters from your mind—study your studies and play your play. Play harder than you study—you need it more. Play out of doors—you must have a horse to ride. You have thought too much before your time for thinking. Put away the troublesome things, and live in the flesh as a healthy boy should. Trust me. When you come to—to those matters again, they will not trouble you."

In his eagerness, first one hand had gone to the boy's shoulder, then the other, and his tones grew warm with pleading, while the keen old eyes played as a searchlight over the troubled young face.

"I must tell you at least one thing, sir."

The old man forced a smile around his trembling mouth, and again assumed his little jaunty lightness.

"Come, come, boy—not 'sir.' Call me 'old man' and you shall say anything."

But the boy was constrained, plainly in discomfort. "I—I can't call you that—just now—sir."

"Well, if you must, tell me one thing—but only one! only one, mind you, boy!" In fear, but smiling, he waited.

"Well, sir, it's a shock I suffered just before I was sick. It came to me one night when I sat down to dinner—fearfully hungry. I had a thick English chop on the plate before me; and a green salad, oily in its bowl, and crisp, browned potatoes, and a mug of creamy ale. I'd gone to the place for a treat. I'd been whetting my appetite with nibbles of bread and sips of ale until the other things came; and then, even when I put my knife to the chop—like a blade pushed very slowly into my heart came the thought: 'My father is burning in hell—screaming in agony for a drop of this water which I shall not touch because I have ale. He has been in this agony for years; he will be there forever.' That was enough, sir. I had to leave the little feast. I was hungry no longer, though a moment before it had seemed that I couldn't wait for it. I walked out into the cold, raw night—walked till near daylight, with the sweat running off me. And the thing I knew all the time was this: that if I were in hell and my father in heaven, he would blaspheme God to His face for a monster and come to hell to burn with me forever—come with a joke and a song, telling me never to mind, that we'd have a fine time there in hell in spite of everything! That was what I knew of my poor, cheap, fiddle-playing mountebank of a father. Just a moment more—this is what you must remember of me, in whatever I have to say hereafter, that after that night I never ceased to suffer all the hell my father could be suffering, and I suffered it until my mind went out in that sickness. But, listen now: whatever has happened—I'm not yet sure what it is—I no longer suffer. Two things only I know: that our creed still has my godless, scoffing, unbaptised father in hell, and that my love for him—my absolute oneness with him—has not lessened.

"I'll stop there, if you wish, leaving you to divine what other change has taken place."

"There, there," soothed the old man, seizing the shoulders once more with his strong grip—"no more now, boy. It was a hard thing, I know. The consciousness of God's majesty comes often in that way, and often it overwhelms the unprepared. It was hard, but it will leave you more a man; your soul and your faith will both survive. Do what I have told you—as if you were once more the puzzled little Bernal, who never could keep his hair neatly brushed like Allan, and would always moon in corners. Go finish your course. Another year, when your mind has new fortitude from your recreated body, we will talk these matters as much as you like. Yet I will tell you one thing to remember—just one, as you have told me one: You are in a world of law, of unvarying cause and effect; and the integrity of this law cannot be destroyed, nor even impaired, by any conceivable rebellion of yours. Yet this material world of law is but the shadow of the reality, and that reality is God—the moral law if you please, as relentless, as inexorable, as immutable in its succession of cause and effect as the physical laws more apparent to us; and as little to be overthrown as physical law by any rebellion of disordered sentiment. The word of this God and this Law is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, wherein is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy Him.

"Now," continued the old man, more lightly, "each of us has something to remember—and let each of us pray for the other. Go, be a good boy—but careless and happy—for a year."

The old man had his way, and the two boys went presently back to their studies.

The girl, Nancy, remembered them well for the things each had said to her.

Allan, who, though he constantly praised her, had always the effect of leaving her small to herself. "Really, Nance," he said, "without any joking, I believe you have a capacity for living life in its larger aspects."

And on the last day, Bernal had said, "Nance, you remember when we were both sorry you couldn't be born again—a boy? Well, from what the old gentleman says, one learns in time to bow to the ways of an inscrutable Providence. I dare say he's right. I can see reasons now, my girl, why it was well that you were not allowed to meddle with Heaven's allotment of your sex. I'm glad you had to remain a girl."

One compliment pleased her. The other made her tremble, though she laughed at it.



CHAPTER IV

A FEW LETTERS

(From Bernal Linford to the Reverend Allan Delcher.)

Dear Grandfather: The college year soon ends; also my course. I think you hoped I wouldn't want again to talk of those matters. But it isn't so. I am primed and waiting, and even you, old man, must listen to reason. The world of thought has made many revolutions since you shut yourself into that study with your weekly church paper. So be ready to hear me.

Affectionately, BERNAL LINFORD.

(From the Reverend Allan Delcher to Bernal Linford.)

"Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions." I am sending you a little book.

GRANDFATHER.

(From Bernal Linford to the Reverend Allan Delcher.)

Dear Old Man: How am I going to thank you for the "little book"—for Butler's Analogy? Or rather, how shall I forgive you for keeping it from me all these years? I see that you acquired it in 1863—and I never knew! I must tell you that I looked upon it with suspicion when I unwrapped it—a suspicion that the title did not allay. For I recalled the last time you gave me a book—the year before I came here. That book, my friend, was "Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia." I began it with deep respect for you. I finished with a profound distrust of all Abyssinians and an overwhelming grief for the untimely demise of Mrs. Johnson—for you had told me that the good doctor wrote this book to get money to bury her. How the circle of mourners for that estimable woman must have widened as Rasselas made its way out into the world! Oh, Grandad, if only they had been able to keep her going some way until he needn't have done it! If only she could have been spared until her son got in a little money from the Dictionary or something!

All of which is why I viewed with unfriendly distrust your latest gift, the Analogy of Joseph Butler, late Lord Bishop of Durham. But, honestly, old man, did you know how funny it was when you sent it? It's funnier than any of the books of Moses, without being bloody. What a dear, innocent old soul the Bishop is! How sincerely he believes he is reasoning when he is merely doing a roguish two-step down the grim corridor of the eternal verities—with a little jig here and there, and a pause to flirt his frock airily in the face of some graven image of Fact. Ah, he is so weirdly innocent. Even when his logical toes go blithely into the air, his dear old face is most resolutely solemn, and I believe he is never in the least aware of his frivolous caperings over the floor of induction. Indeed, his unconsciousness is what makes him an unfailing delight. He even makes his good old short-worded Saxon go in lilting waltz-time.

You will never know, Grandad, what this book has done for me. I am stimulated in the beginning by this: "From the vast extent of God's dominion there must be some things beyond our comprehension, and the Christian scheme may be one of them." And at the last I am soothed with this heart-rending pas seul: "Concluding remarks by which it is clearly shown that those men who can evade the force of arguments so probable for the truth of Christianity undoubtedly possess dispositions to evil which would cause them to reject it, were it based on the most absolute demonstration." Is not that a pearl without price in this world of lawful conclusions?

By the way, Grandad—recalling the text you quote in your last—did you know when you sent me to this university that the philosophy taught, in a general way, is that of Kant; that most university scholars smile pityingly at the Christian thesis? Did you know that belief in Genesis had been laughed away in an institution like this? With no intention of diverting you, but merely in order to acquaint you with the present state of popular opinion on a certain matter, I will tell you of a picture printed in a New York daily of yesterday. It's on the funny page. A certain weird but funny-looking beast stands before an equally funny-looking Adam, in a funny Eden, with a funny Eve and a funny Cain and Abel in the background. The animal says, "Say, Ad., what did you say my name was? I've forgotten it again." Our first male parent answers somewhat testily, as one who has been vexed by like inquiries: "Icthyosaurus, you darned fool! Can't you remember a little thing like that?"

In your youth this would doubtless have been punished as a crime. In mine it is laughed at by all classes. I tell you this to show you that the Church to-day is in the position of upholding a belief which has become meaningless because its foundation has been laughed away. Believing no longer in the god of Moses who cursed them, Christians yet assume to believe in their need of a Saviour to intercede between them and this exploded idol of terror. Unhappily, I am so made that I cannot occupy that position. To me it is not honest.

Old man, do you remember a certain saying of Squire Cumpston? It was this: "If you're going to cross the Rubicon, cross it! Don't wade out to the middle and stand there: you only get hell from both banks!"

And so I have crossed; I find the Squire was right about standing in the middle. Happily, or unhappily, I am compelled to believe my beliefs with all my head and all my heart. But I am confident my reasons will satisfy you when you hear them. You will see these matters in a new light.

Believe me, Grandad, with all love and respect,

Affectionately yours, BERNAL LINFORD.

(From the Reverend Allan Delcher to Bernal Linford.)

My Boy: For one bitten with skepticism there is little argument—especially if he be still in youth, which is a time of raw and ready judgments and of great spiritual self-sufficiency. You wanted to go to Harvard. I wanted you to go to Princeton, because of its Presbyterianism and because, too, of Harvard's Unitarianism. We compromised on Yale—my own alma mater, as it was my father's. To my belief, this was still, especially as to its pulpit, the stronghold of orthodox Congregationalism. Was I a weak old man, compromising with Satan? Are you to break my heart in these my broken years? For love of me, as for the love of your own soul, pray. Leave the God of Moses until your soul's stomach can take the strong meat of him—for he is strong meat—and come simply to Jesus, the meek and gentle—the Redeemer, who died that his blood might cleanse our sin-stained souls. Centre your aspirations upon Him, for He is the rock of our salvation, if we believe, or the rock of our wrecking to endless torment if we disbelieve. Do not deny our God who is Jesus, nor disown Jesus who is our God, nor yet question the inerrance of Holy Writ—yea, with its everlasting burnings. "He that believeth and is baptised shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned."

I am sad. I have lived too long.

GRANDFATHER.

(From Bernal Linford to the Reverend Allan Delcher.)

Grandad: It's all so plain, you must see it. I told you I had crossed to the farther bank. Here is what one finds there: Taking him as God, Jesus is ineffectual. Only as an obviously fallible human man does he become beautiful; only as a man is he dignified, worthy, great—or even plausible.

The instinct of the Jews did not mislead them. Jesus was too fine, too good, to have come from their tribal god; yet too humanly limited to have come from God, save as we all come from Him.

Since you insist that he be considered as God, I shall point out those things which make him small—as a God. I would rather consider him as a man and point out those things which make him great to me—things which I cannot read without wet eyes—but you will not consider him as man, so let him be a God, and let us see what we see. It is customary to speak of his "sacrifice." What was it? Our catechism says, "Christ's humiliation consisted in his being born, and that in a low condition, made under the law, undergoing the miseries of this life, the wrath of God and the cursed death of the cross; in being buried and continuing under the power of death for a time."

As I write the words I wonder that the thing should ever have seemed to any one to be more than a wretched piece of God-jugglery, devoid of integrity. Are we to conceive God then as a being of carnal appetites, humiliated by being born into the family of an honest carpenter, instead of into the family of a King? This is the somewhat snobbish imputation.

Let us be done with gods playing at being human, or at being half god and half human. The time has come when, to prolong its usefulness, the Church must concede—nay, proclaim—the manhood of Jesus; must separate him from that atrocious scheme of human sacrifice, the logical extension of a primitive Hebrew mythology—and take him in the only way that he commands attention: As a man, one of the world's great spiritual teachers. Insisting upon his godship can only make him preposterous to the modern mind. Jesus, born to a carpenter's wife of Nazareth, declares himself, one day about his thirtieth year, to be the Christ, the second person in the universe, who will come in a cloud of glory to judge the world. He will save into everlasting life those who believe him to be of divine origin. Yet he has been called meek! Surely never was a more arrogant character in history—never one less meek than this carpenter's son who ranks himself second only to God, with power to send into everlasting hell those who disbelieve him! He went abroad in fine arrogance, railing at lawyers and the rich, rebuking, reproving, hurling angry epithets, attacking what we to-day call "the decent element." He called the people constantly "Fools," "Blind Leaders of the Blind," "faithless and perverse," "a generation of vipers," "sinful," "evil and adulterous," "wicked," "hypocrites," "whited sepulchres."

As the god he worshipped was a tribal god, so he at first believed himself to be a tribal saviour. He directed his disciples thus: "Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not. But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel"—(who emphatically rejected and slew him for his pretensions). To the woman of Canaan whose daughter was vexed with a devil, he said: "It is not meet to take the children's bread to cast it to dogs." Imagine a God calling a woman a dog because she was not of his own tribe!

And the vital test of godhood he failed to meet: It is his own test, whereby he disproves his godship out of his own mouth. Compare these sayings of Jesus, each typical of him:

"Resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." Yet he said to his Twelve:

"And whosoever shall not receive you nor hear you, when you depart thence shake off the dust of your feet for a testimony against them."

Is that the consistency of a God or a man?

Again: "Blessed are the merciful," but "Verily I say unto you it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city." Is this the mercy which he tells us is blessed?

Again: "And as ye would that men should do to you do ye also to them likewise." Another: "Woe unto thee, Chorazin, woe unto thee, Bethsaida ... and thou, Capernaum, which are exalted unto heaven, shall be brought down to hell." Is not this preaching the golden rule and practicing something else, as a man might?

Again: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.

"For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren, what do ye more than others? Do not even the publicans so?" That, sir, is a sentiment that proves the claim of Jesus to be a teacher of morals. Here is one which, placed beside it, proves him to have been a man.

"Whosoever shall confess me before men, him shall the son of man also confess before the angels of God;

"but whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my father, which is in heaven."

Is it God speaking—or man? "Do not even the publicans so?"

Beside this very human contradiction, it is hardly worth while to hear him say "Resist not evil," yet make a scourge of cords to drive the money-changers from the temple in a fit of rage, human—but how ungodlike!

Believe me, the man Jesus is better than the god Jesus; the man is worth while, for all his inconsistencies, partly due to his creed and partly to his emotional nature. Indeed, we have not yet risen to the splendour of his ideal—even the preachers will not preach it.

And the miracles? We need say nothing of those, I think. If a man disprove his godship out of his own mouth, we shall not be convinced by a coin in a fish's mouth or by his raising Lazarus, four days dead. So long as he says, "I will confess him that confesseth me and deny him that denieth me," we should know him for one of us, though he rose from the dead before our eyes.

Then at the last you will say, "By their fruits ye shall know them." Well, sir, the fruits of Christianity are what one might expect. You will say it stands for the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. That it has always done the reverse is Christianity's fundamental defect, and its chief absurdity in this day when the popular unchurchly conception of God has come to be one of some dignity.

"That ye may know how that the Lord doth put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel." There is the rock of separation upon which the Church builded; the rock upon which it will presently split. The god of the Jews set a difference between Israel and Egypt. So much for the fatherhood of God. The Son sets the same difference, dividing the sheep from the goats, according to the opinions they form of his claim to godship. So much for the brotherhood of man. Christianity merely caricatures both propositions. Nor do I see how we can attain any worthy ideal of human brotherhood while this Christianity prevails: We must be sheep and goats among ourselves, some in heaven, some in hell, still seeking out reasons "Why the Saints in Glory Should Rejoice at the Sufferings of the Damned." We shall be saints and sinners, sated and starving. A God who separates them in some future life will have children that separate themselves here upon His own very excellent authority. That is why one brother of us must work himself to death while another idles himself to death—because God has set a difference, and his Son after him, and the Church after that. The defect in social Christendom to-day, sir, is precisely this defect of the Christian faith—its separation, its failure to teach what it chiefly boasts of teaching. We have, in consequence, a society of thinly veneered predatoriness. And this, I believe, is why our society is quite as unstable today as the Church itself. They are both awakening to a new truth—which is not separation.

The man who is proud of our Christian civilisation has ideals susceptible of immense elevation. Christianity has more souls in its hell and fewer in its heaven than any other religion whatsoever. Naturally, Christian society is one of extremes and of gross injustice—of oppression and indifference to suffering. And so it will be until this materialism of separation is repudiated: until we turn seriously to the belief that men are truly brothers, not one of whom can be long happy while any other suffers.

Come, Grandad, let us give up this God of Moses. Doubtless he was good enough for the early Jews, but man has always had to make God in his own image, and you and I need a better one, for we both surpass this one in all spiritual values—in love, in truth, in justice, in common decency—as much as Jesus surpassed the unrepentant thief at his side. Remember that an honest, fearless search for truth has led to all the progress we can measure over the brutes. Why must it lose the soul?

BERNAL.

(From the Reverend Allan Delcher to Bernal Linford.)

My boy, I shall not believe you are sane until I have seen you face to face. I cannot believe you have fallen a victim to Universalism, which is like the vale of Siddim, full of slime-pits. I am an old man, and my mind goes haltingly, yet that is what I seem to glean from your rambling screed. Come when you are through, for I must see you once more.

"For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. He that believeth on him is not condemned; but he that believeth not is condemned already because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten son of God."

Lastly—doubt in infinite things is often wise, but doubt of God must be blasphemy, else he would not be God, the all-perfect.

I pray it may be your mind is still sick—and recall to you these words of one I will not now name to you: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

ALLAN DELCHER.



CHAPTER V

"IS THE HAND OF THE LORD WAXED SHORT?"

A dismayed old man, eagerly trying to feel incredulous, awaited the home-coming of his grandsons at the beginning of that vacation.

Was the hand of the Lord waxed short, that so utter a blasphemer—unless, indeed, he were possessed of a devil—could walk in the eye of Jehovah, and no breach be made upon him? Even was the world itself so lax in these days that one speaking thus could go free? If so, then how could God longer refrain from drowning the world again? The human baseness of the blaspheming one and the divine toleration that permitted it were alike incredible.

A score of times the old man nerved himself to laugh away his fears. It could not be. The young mind was still disordered.

On the night of the home-coming he greeted the youth quite as if all were serene within him, determined to be in no haste and to approach the thing lightly on the morrow—in the fond hope that a mere breath of authority might blow it away.

And when, the next morning, they both drifted to the study, the old man called up the smile that made his wrinkles sunny, and said in light tones, above the beating of an anxious heart:

"So it's your theory, boy, that we must all be taken down with typhoid before we can be really wise in matters of faith?"

But the youth answered, quite earnestly:

"Yes, sir; I really believe nothing less than that would clear most minds—especially old ones. You see, the brain is a muscle and thought is its physical exercise. It learns certain thoughts—to go through certain exercises. These become a habit, and in time the muscle becomes stiff and incapable of learning any new movements—also incapable of leaving off the old. The religion of an old person is merely so much reflex nervous action. It is beyond the reach of reason. The individual's mind can affect it as little as it can teach the other muscles of his body new suppleness."

He spoke with a certain restrained nervousness that was not reassuring. But the old man would not yet be rebuffed from his manner of lightness.

"Then, wanting an epidemic of typhoid, we of the older generation must die in error."

"Yes, sir—I doubt even the efficacy of typhoid in most cases; it's as difficult for an old person to change a habit of thought as to take the wrinkles from his face. That is why what we very grandly call 'fighting for the truth' or 'fighting for the Lord' is merely fighting for our own little notions; they have become so vital to us and we call them 'truth.'"

The youth stopped, with a palpable air of defiance, before which the old man's assumption of ease and lightness was at last beaten down. He had been standing erect by the table, still with the smile toning his haggardness. Now the smile died; the whole man sickened, lost life visibly, as if a dozen years of normal aging were condensed into the dozen seconds.

He let himself go into the big chair, almost as if falling, his head bowed, his eyes dulled to a look of absence, his arms falling weakly over the chair's sides. A sigh that was almost a groan seemed to tell of pain both in body and mind.

Bernal stood awkwardly regarding him, then his face lighted with a sudden pity.

"But I thought you could understand, sir; I thought you were different; you have been like a chum to me. When I spoke of old persons it never occurred to me that you could fall into that class! I never knew you to be unjust, or unkind, or—narrow—perhaps I should say, unsympathetic."

The other gave no sign of hearing.

"My body was breaking so fast—and you break my heart!"

"There you are, sir," began the youth, a little excitedly. "Your heart is breaking not because I'm not good, but because I form a different opinion from yours of a man rising from the dead, after he has been crucified to appease the anger of his father."

"God help me! I'm so human. I can't feel toward you as I should. Boy, I won't believe you are sane." He looked up in a sudden passion of hope. "I won't believe Christ died in vain for my girl's little boy. Bernal, boy, you are still sick of that fever!"

The other smiled, his youthful scorn for the moment overcoming his deeper feeling for his listener.

"Then I must talk more. Now, sir, for God's sake let us have the plain truth of the crucifixion. Where was the sacrifice? Can you not picture the mob that would fight for the honour of crucifixion to-morrow, if it were known that the one chosen would sit at the right hand of God and judge all the world? I say there was no sacrifice, even if Christian dogma be literal truth. Why, sir, I could go into the street and find ten men in ten minutes who would be crucified a hundred times to save the souls of us from hell—not if they were to be rewarded with a seat on the throne of God where they could send into hell those who did not believe in them—but for no reward whatever—out of a sheer love for humanity. Don't you see, sir, that we have magnified that crucifixion out of all proportion to the plainest truth of our lives? You know I would die on a cross to-day, not to redeem the world, but to redeem one poor soul—your own. If you deny that, at least you won't dare deny that you would go on the cross to redeem my soul from hell—the soul of one man—and do you think you would demand a reward for doing it, beyond knowing that you had ransomed me from torment? Would it be necessary to your happiness that you also have the power to send into hell all those who were not able to believe you had actually died for me?

"One moment more, sir—" The thin, brown, old hand had been raised in trembling appeal, while the lips moved without sound.

"You see every day in the papers how men die for other men, for one man, for two, a dozen! Why, sir, you know you would die to save the lives of five little children—their bare carnal lives, mind you, to say nothing of their immortal souls. I believe I'd die myself to save two thousand—I know I would to save three—if their faces were clean and they looked funny enough and helpless. Here, in this morning's paper, a negro labourer, going home from his work in New York yesterday, pushed into safety one of those babies that are always crawling around on railroad tracks. He had time to see that he could get the baby off but not himself, and then he went ahead. Doubtless it was a very common baby, and certainly he was a very common man. Why, I could go down to Sing Sing tomorrow, and I'll stake my own soul that in the whole cageful of criminals there isn't one who would not eagerly submit to crucifixion if he believed that he would thereby ransom the race from hell. And he wouldn't want the power to damn the unbelievers, either. He would insist upon saving them with the others."

"Oh, God, forgive this insane passion in my boy!"

"It was passion, sir—" he spoke with a sudden relenting—"but try to remember that I've sought the truth honestly."

"You degrade the Saviour."

"No; I only raise man out of the muck of Christian belief about him. If common men all might live lives of greater sacrifice than Jesus did, without any pretensions to the supernatural, it only means that we need a new embodiment for our ideals. If we find it in man—in God's creature—so much the better for man and so much the more glory to God, who has not then bungled so wretchedly as Christianity teaches."

"God forgive you this tirade—I know it is the sickness."

"I shall try to speak calmly, sir—but how much longer can an educated clergy keep a straight face to speak of this wretchedly impotent God? Christians of a truth have had to bind their sense of humour as the Chinese bound their women's feet. But the laugh is gathering even now. Your religion is like a tree that has lain long dead in the forest—firm wood to the eye but dust to the first blow. And this is how it will go—from a laugh—not through the solemn absurdities of the so-called higher criticism, the discussing of this or that miracle, the tracing of this or that myth of fall or deluge or immaculate conception or trinity to its pagan sources; not that way, when before the inquiring mind rises the sheer materialism of the Christian dogma, bristling with absurdities—its vain bungling God of one tribe who crowns his career of impotencies—in all but the art of slaughter—by instituting the sacrifice of a Son begotten of a human mother, to appease his wrath toward his own creatures; a God who even by this pitiful device can save but a few of us. Was ever god so powerless? Do you think we who grow up now do not detect it? Is it not time to demand a God of virtue, of integrity, of ethical dignity—a religion whose test shall be moral, and not the opinion one forms of certain alleged material phenomena?"

When he had first spoken the old man cowered low and lower in his chair, with little moans of protest at intervals, perhaps a quick, almost gasping, "God forgive him!" or a "Lord have mercy!" But as the talk went on he became slowly quieter, his face grew firmer, he sat up in his chair, and at the last he came to bend upon the speaker a look that made him falter confusedly and stop.

"I can say no more, sir; I should not have said so much. Oh, Grandad, I wouldn't have hurt you for all the world, yet I had to let you know why I could not do what you had planned—and I was fool enough to think I could justify myself to you!"

The old eyes still blazed upon him with a look of sorrow and of horror that was yet, first of all, a look of power; the look of one who had mastered himself to speak calmly while enduring uttermost pain.

"I am glad you have spoken. You were honest to do so. It was my error not to be convinced at first, and thus save myself a shock I could ill bear. But you have been sick, and I felt that I should not believe without seeing you. I had built so much—so many years—on your preaching the gospel of—of my Saviour. This hope has been all my life these last years—now it is gone. But I have no right to complain. You are free; I have no claim upon you; and I shall be glad to provide for you—to educate you further for any profession you may have chosen—to start you in any business—away from here—from this house—"

The young man flushed—wincing under this, but answered:

"Thank you, sir. I could hardly take anything further. I don't know what I want to do, what I can do—I'm at sea now. But I will go. I'm sure only that I want to get out—away—I will take a small sum to go with—I know you would be hurt more if I didn't; enough to get me away—far enough away."

He went out, his head bowed under the old man's stern gaze. But when the latter had stepped to the door and locked it, his fortitude was gone. Helplessly he fell upon his knees before the big chair—praying out his grief in hard, dry sobs that choked and shook his worn body.

When Clytie knocked at the door an hour later, he was dry-eyed and apparently serene, but busy with papers at his table.

"Is it something bad about Bernal, Mr. Delcher," she asked, "that he's going away so queer and sudden?"

"You pray for him, too, Clytie—you love him—but it's nothing to talk of."

But the alarm of Clytemnestra was not to be put down by this.

"Oh, Mr. Delcher—" a look of horror grew big in her eyes—"You don't mean to say he's gone and joined the Universalists?"

The old man shook his head.

"And he ain't a Unitarian?"

"No, Clytie; but our boy has been to college and it has left him rather un—unconforming in some little matters—some details—doubtless his doctrine is sound at core."

"But I supposed he'd learn everything off at that college, only I know he never got fed half enough. What with all its studies and football and clubs and things I thought it was as good as a liberal education."

"Too liberal, sometimes! Pray for Bernal—and we won't talk about it again, Clytie, if you please."

Presently came Allan, who had heard the news.

"Bernal tells me he will not enter the ministry, sir; that he is going away."

"We have decided that is best."

"You know, sir, I have suspected for some time that Bernal was not as sound doctrinally as you could wish. His mind, if I may say it, is a peculiarly literal one. He seems to lack a certain spiritual comprehensiveness—an enveloping intuition, so to say, of the spiritual value in a material fact. During that unhappy agitation for the revision of our creed, I have heard him, touching the future state of unbaptised infants, utter sentiments of a heterodoxy that was positively effeminate in its sentimentality—sentiments which I shall not pain you by repeating. He has often referred, moreover, with the same disordered sentimentality, to the sad fate of our father—about whose present estate no churchman can have any doubt. And then about our belief that even good works are an abomination before God if performed by the unregenerate, the things I have heard him—"

"Yes—yes—let us not talk of it further. Did you wish to see me especially, Allan?"

"Well, yes, sir, I had wished to, and perhaps now is the best moment. I wanted to ask you, sir, how you would regard my becoming an Episcopalian. I am really persuaded that its form of worship, translating as it does so much of the spiritual verity of life into visible symbols, is a form better calculated than the Presbyterian to appeal to the great throbbing heart of humanity. I hope I may even say, without offense, sir, that it affords a wider scope, a broader sweep, a more stimulating field of endeavour, to one who may have a capacity for the life of larger aspects. In short, sir, I believe there is a great future for me in that church."

"I shouldn't wonder if there was," answered the old man, who had studied his face closely during the speech. Yet he spoke with an extreme dryness of tone that made the other look quickly up.

"It shall be as you wish," he continued, after a meditative pause—"I believe you are better calculated for that church than for mine. Obey your call."



CHAPTER VI

IN THE FOLLY OF HIS YOUTH

At early twilight Bernal, sore at heart for the pain he had been obliged to cause the old man, went to the study-door for a last word with him.

"I believe there is no one above whose forgiveness I need, sir—but I shall always be grieved if I can't have yours. I do need that."

The old man had stood by the open door as if meaning to cut short the interview.

"You have it. I forgive you any hurt you have done me; it was due quite as much to my limitations as to yours. For that other forgiveness, which you will one day know is more than mine—I—I shall always pray for that."

He stopped, and the other waited awkwardly, his heart rushing out in ineffectual flood against the old man's barrier of stern restraint. For a moment he made folds in his soft hat with a fastidious precision. Finally he nerved himself to say calmly:

"I thank you, sir, for all you have done—all you have ever done for me and for Allan—and, good-bye!"

"Good-bye!"

Though there was no hint of unkindness in the old man's voice, something formal in his manner had restrained the other from offering his hand. Still loath to go without it, he said again more warmly:

"Good-bye, sir!"

"Good-bye!"

This time he turned and went slowly down the dim hall, still making the careful folds in his hat, as if he might presently recall something that would take him back. At the foot of the stairs he stopped quickly to listen, believing he had heard a call from above; but nothing came and he went out. Still in the door upstairs was the old man—stern of face, save that far back in his eyes a kind spirit seemed to strive ineffectually.

Across the lawn from her hammock Nancy called to Bernal. He went slowly toward her, still suffering from the old man's coldness—and for the hurts he had unwittingly put upon him.

The girl, as he went forward, stood to greet him, her gown, sleeveless, neckless, taking the bluish tinge that early twilight gives to snow, a tinge that deepened to dusk about her eyes and in her hair. She gave him her hand and at once he felt a balm poured into his tortured heart. After all, men were born to hurt and be hurt.

He sat in the rustic chair opposite the hammock, looking into Nancy's black-lashed eyes of the Irish gray, noting that from nineteen to twenty her neck had broadened at the base the least one might discern, that her face was less full yet richer in suggestion—her face of the odds and ends when she did not smile. At this moment she was not only unsmiling, but excited.

"Oh, Bernal, what is it? Tell me quick. Allan was so vague—though he said he'd always stand by you, no matter what you did. What have you done, Bernal? Is it a college scrape?"

"Oh, that's only Allan's big-hearted way of talking! He's so generous and loyal I think he's often been disappointed that I didn't do something, so he could stand by me. No—no scrapes, Nance, honour bright!"

"But you're leaving—"

"Well, in a way I have done something. I've found I couldn't be a minister as Grandad had set his heart on my being—"

"But if you haven't done anything wicked, why not?"

"Oh, I'm not a believer."

"In what?"

"In anything, I think—except, well, in you and Grandad and—and Allan and Clytie—yes, and in myself, Nance. That's a big point. I believe in myself."

"And you're going because you don't believe in other things?"

"Yes, or because I believe too much—just as you like to put it. I demanded a better God of Grandad, Nance—one that didn't create hell and men like me to fill it just for the sake of scaring a few timid mortals into heaven."

"You know Aunt Bell is an unbeliever. She says no one with an open mind can live twenty years in Boston without being vastly broadened—'broadening into the higher unbelief,' she calls it. She says she has passed through nearly every stage of unbelief there is, but that she feels the Lord is going to bring her back at last to rest in the shadow of the Cross."

As Aunt Bell could be heard creaking heavily in a willow rocker on the piazza near-by, the young man suppressed a comment that arose within him.

"Only, unbelievers are apt to be fatiguing" the girl continued, in a lower tone. "You know Aunt Bell's husband, Uncle Chester—the meekest, dearest little man in the world, he was—well, once he disappeared and wasn't heard of again for over four years—except that they knew his bank account was drawn on from time to time. Then, at last, his brother found him, living quietly under an assumed name in a little town outside of Boston—pretending that he hadn't a relative in the world. He told his brother he was just beginning to feel rested. Aunt Bell said he was demented. While he was away she'd been all through psychometry, the planchette, clairvoyance, palmistry, astrology, and Unitarianism. What are you, Bernal?"

"Nothing, Nance—that's the trouble."

"But where are you going, and what for?"

"I don't know either answer—but I can't stay here, because I'm blasphemous—it seems—and I don't want to stay, even if I weren't sent. I want to be out—away. I feel as if I must be looking for something I haven't found. I suspect it's a fourth dimension to religion. They have three—even breadth—but they haven't found faith yet—a faith that doesn't demand arbitrary signs, parlour-magic, and bloody, weird tales in a book that becomes their idol."

The girl looked at him long in silence, swaying a little in the hammock, a bare elbow in one hand, her meditative chin in the other, the curtains of her eyes half-drawn, as if to let him in a little at a time before her wonder. Then, at last:

"Why, you're another Adam—being sent out of the garden for your sin. Now tell me—honest—was the sin worth it? I've often wondered." She gave an eager little laugh.

"Why, Nance, it's worth so much that you want to go of your own accord. Do you suppose Adam could have stayed in that fat, lazy, silly garden after he became alive—with no work, no knowledge, no adventure, no chance to do wrong? As for earning his bread—the only plausible hell I've ever been able to picture is one where there was nothing to do—no work, no puzzling, no chances to take, no necessity of thinking. Now, isn't that an ideal hell? And is it my fault if it happens to be a description of what Christians look forward to as heaven? I tell you, Adam would have gone out of that garden from sheer boredom after a few days. The setting of the angel with the flaming sword to guard the gate shows that God still failed to understand the wonderful creature he had made."

She smiled, meditative, wondering.

"I dare say, for my part, I'd have eaten that apple if the serpent had been at all persuasive. Bernal, I wonder—and wonder—and wonder—I'm never done. And Aunt Bell says I'll never be a sweet and wholesome and stimulating companion to my husband, if I don't stop being so vague and fantastic."

"What does she call being vague and fantastic?"

"Not wanting any husband."

"Oh!"

"Bernal, it's like the time that you ran off when you were a wee thing—to be bad."

"And you cried because I wouldn't take you with me."

"I can feel the woe of it yet."

"You're dry-eyed now, Nance."

"Yes—and the pink parasol and the buff shoes I meant to take with me are also things of the past. Mercy! The idea of going off with an unbeliever to be bad and—everything! 'The happy couple are said to look forward to a life of joyous wickedness, several interesting crimes having been planned for the coming season. For their honeymoon infamy they will perpetrate a series of bank-robberies along the Maine coast.' There—how would that sound?"

"You're right, Nance—I wouldn't take you this time either, even if you cried. And your little speech is funny and all that—but Nance, I believe, these last years, we've both thought of things now and then—things, you know—things to think of and not talk of—and see here—The man was driven out of the garden—but not the woman. She isn't mentioned. She could stay there—"

"Until she got tired of it herself?"

"Until the man came back for her."

He thought her face was glowing duskily in the twilight.

"I wonder—wonder about so many things," she said softly.

"I believe you're a sleeping rebel yourself, Nance. If ever you do eat from that tree, there'll be no holding you. You won't wait to be driven forth!"

"And you are, a wicked young man—that kind never comes back in the stories."

"That may be no jest, Nance. I should surely be wicked, if I thought it brings the happiness it's said to. Under this big sky I am free from any moral law that doesn't come from right here inside me. Can you realize that? Do I seem bad for saying it? What they call the laws of God are nothing. I suspect them all, and I'll make every one of them find its authority in me before I obey it."

"It sounds—well—unpromising, Bernal."

"I told you it was serious, Nance. I see but one law clearly—I am bound to want happiness. Every man is bound always to want happiness, Nance. No man can possibly want anything else. That's the only thing under heaven I'm sure of at this moment—the one universal law under which we all make our mistakes—good people and bad alike?"

"But, Bernal, you wouldn't be bad—not really bad?"

"Well, Nance, I've a vague, loose sort of notion that one isn't really compelled to be bad in order to be happy right here on earth. I know the Church rather intimates this, but I suspect that vice is not the delicious thing the Church implies it to be."

"You make me afraid, Bernal—"

"But if I do come back, Nance, having toiled?"

"—and you make me wonder."

"I think that's all either of us can do, Nance, and I must go. I have to say good-bye to Clytie yet. The poor soul is convinced that I have become a Unitarian and that there's a conspiracy to keep the horrible truth from her. She says grandad evaded her questions about it. She doesn't dream there are depths below Unitarianism. I must try to convince her that I'm not that bad—that I may have a weak head and a defective heart, but not that. Nance—girl!"

He sat forward in the chair, reaching toward her. She turned her face away, but their hands trembled toward each other, faltering fearfully, tremulously, into a clasp that became at once firm and knowing when it felt itself—as if it opened their blind eyes to a world of life and light without end, a world in which they two were the first to live.

Lingeringly, with slow, regretting fingers, the hands fell apart, to tighten eagerly again into the clasp that made them one flesh.

When at last they were put asunder both arose. The girl patted from her skirts the hammock's little disarranging touches, while the youth again made the careful folds in his hat. Then they shook hands very stiffly, and went opposite ways out of a formal garden of farewell; the youth to sate that beautiful, crude young lust for living—too fierce to be tamed save by its own failures, hearing only the sagas of action, of form and colour and sound made one by heat—the song Nature sings unendingly—but heard only by young ears.

The girl went back to the Crealock piazza to hear of one better set in the grace of faith.

"That elder young Linford," began Aunt Bell, ceasing to rock, "has a future. You know I talked to him about the Episcopal Church, strongly advising him to enter it. For all my broad views"—Aunt Bell sighed here—"I really and truly believe, child, that no one not an Episcopalian is ever thoroughly at ease in this world."

Aunt Bell was beautifully, girlishly plump, with a sophisticated air of smartness—of coquetry, indeed—as to her exquisitely small hands and feet; and though a certain suggestion of melancholy in her tone harmonised with the carefully dressed gray hair and with her apparent years, she nevertheless breathed airs of perfect comfort.

"Of course this young chap could see at once," she went on, "what immensely better form it is than Calvinism. Dear me! Imagine one being a Presbyterian in this day!" It seemed here that the soul of Aunt Bell poised a disdainful lorgnette before its eyes, through which to survey in a fitting manner the unmodish spectacle of Calvinism.

"And he tells me that he has his grandfather's consent. Really, my dear, with his physique and voice and manner that fellow undoubtedly has a future in the Episcopal Church. I dare say he'll be wearing the lawn sleeves and rochet of a bishop before he's forty."

"Did it ever occur to you, Aunt Bell, that he is—well, just the least trifle—I was going to say, vain of his appearance—but I'll make it 'self-conscious'?"

"Child, don't you know that a young man, really beautiful without being effeminate, is bound to be conscious of it. But vain he is not. It mortifies him dreadfully, though he pretends to make light of it."

"But why speak of it so often? He was telling me to-day of an elderly Englishman who addressed him on the train, telling him what a striking resemblance he bore to the Prince of Wales when he was a youth."

"Quite so; and he told me yesterday of hearing a lady in the drug-store ask the clerk who 'that handsome stranger' was. But, my dear, he tells them as jokes on himself, and he's so sheepish about it. And he's such a splendid orator. I persuaded him to-day to read me one of his college papers. I don't seem to recall much of the substance, but it was full of the most beautiful expressions. One, I remember, begins, 'Oh, of all the flowers that swing their golden censers in the parterre of the human heart, none so rich, so rare as this one flower of—' you know I've forgotten what it was—Civilisation or Truth or something. Anyway, whatever it was, it had like a giant engine rolled the car of Civilisation out from the maze of antiquity, where she now waits to be freighted with the precious fruits of living genius, and so on."

"That seems impressive and—mixed, perhaps?"

"Of course I can't remember things in their order, but it was about the essential nature of man being gregarious, and truth is a potent factor in civilisation, and something would be a tear on the world's cold cheek to make it burn forever—isn't that striking? And Greece had her Athens and her Corinth, but where now is Greece with her proud cities? And Rome, Imperial Rome, with all her pomp and splendour. Of course I can't recall his words. There was a beautiful reference to America, I remember, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the lakes of the frozen North to the ever-tepid waters of the sunny South—and a perfectly splendid passage about the world is and ever has been illiberal. Witness the lonely lamp of Erasmus, the cell of Galileo, the dying bed of Pascal, the scaffold of Sidney—Sidney who, I wonder?"

"Has it taken you that way, Aunt Bell?"

"And France, the saddest example of a nation without a God, and succeeding generations will only add a new lustre to our present resplendent glory, bound together by the most sacred ties of goodwill; independent, yet acknowledging the sovereignty of Omnipotence, and it was fraught with vital interest to every thinking man—"

"Spare me, Aunt Bell—it's like Coney Island, with all those carrousels going around and five bands playing at once!"

"But his peroration! I can't pretend to give you any idea of its beauties—"

"Don't!"

"Get him to declaim it for you. It begins in the most impressive language about his standing on top of the Rocky Mountains one day and placing his feet upon a solid rock, he saw a tempest gathering in the valley far below. So he watches the storm—in his own language, of course—while all around him is sunshine. And such should be our aim in life, to plant our feet on the solid rock of—how provoking! I can't remember what the rock was—anyway, we are to bid those in the valley below to cease their bickerings and come up to the rock—I think it was Intellectual Greatness—No!—Unselfishness—that's it. And the title of the paper was a sermon in itself—'The Temporal Advantage of the Individual No Norm of Morality.' Isn't that a beautiful thought in itself? Nancy, that chap will waste himself until he has a city parish."

There was silence for a little time before Aunt Bell asked, as one having returned to baser matters:

"I wonder if the jacket of my gray suit came back from that clumsy tailor. I forgot to ask Ellen if an express package came."

And Nancy, whose look was bent far into the dusk, answered:

"Oh, I wonder if he will come back!"



BOOK THREE

The Age of Faith



CHAPTER I

THE PERVERSE BEHAVIOUR OF AN OLD MAN AND A YOUNG MAN

When old Allan Delcher slept with his fathers—being so found in the big chair, with the worn, leather-bound Bible open in his lap—the revived but still tender faith of Aunt Bell Hardwick was bitten as by frost. And this though the Bible had lain open at that psalm in which David is said to describe the corruption of a natural man—a psalm beginning, "The fool hath said in his heart, 'There is no God.'"

For it straightway appeared that the dead man had in life done a perverse and inexplicable thing, to the bitter amazement of those who had learned to trust him. On the day after he sent a blasphemous grandson from his door he had called for Squire Cumpston, announcing to the family his intention to make an entirely new will—a thing for which there seemed to be a certain sad necessity.

When he could no longer be reproached it transpired that he had left "to Allan Delcher Linford, son of one Clayton Linford," a beggarly pittance of five thousand dollars; and "to my beloved grandson, Bernal Linford, I give, devise and bequeath the residue of my estate, both real and personal."

Though the husband of her niece wore publicly a look of faith unimpaired, and was thereby an example to her, Aunt Bell declared herself to be once more on the verge of believing that the proofs of an overseeing Providence, all-wise and all-loving, were by no means overwhelming; that they were, indeed, of so frail a validity that she could not wonder at people falling away from the Church. It was a trying time for Aunt Bell. She felt that her return to the shadow of the cross was not being made enough of by the One above. After years of running after strange gods, the Episcopal service as administered by Allan had prevailed over her seasoned skepticism: through its fascinating leaven of romance—with faint and, as it seemed to her, wholly reverent hints of physical culture—the spirit may be said to have blandished her. And now this turpitude in a man of God came to disturb the first tender rootlings of her new faith.

The husband of her niece had loyally endeavoured to dissuade her from this too human reaction.

"God has chosen to try me for a purpose, Aunt Bell," he said very simply. "I ought to be proud of it—eager for any test—and I am. True, in these last years I had looked upon grandfather's fortune as mine—not only by implied promise, but by all standards of right—even of integrity. For surely a man could not more nearly forfeit his own rights, in every moral aspect, than poor Bernal has—though I meant always to stand by him. So you see, I must conclude that God means to distinguish me by a test. He may even subject me to others; but I shall not wince. I shall welcome His trials. He turned upon her the face of simple faith."

"Did you speak to that lawyer about the possibility of a contest—of proving unsound mind?"

"I did, but he saw no chance whatever."

Aunt Bell hereupon surveyed her beautifully dimpled knuckles minutely, with an affectionate pride—a pride not uncritical, yet wholly convinced.

"Of course," added Allan after a moment's reflection, "there's no sense in believing that every bit of one's hard luck is sent by God to test one. One must in all reverence take every precaution to prove that the disaster is not humanly remediable. And this, I may say, I have done with thoroughness—with great thoroughness."

"Bernal may be dead," suggested Aunt Bell, brightening now from an impartial admiring of the toes of her small, plump slippers.

"God forbid that he should be cut off in his unbelief—but then, God's will be done. If that be true, of course, the matter is different. Meantime we are advertising."

"I wish I had your superb faith, Allan. I wish Nancy had it...."

Her niece's husband turned his head and shoulders until she had the three-quarters view of his face.

"I have faith, Aunt Bell. God knows my unworthiness, even as you know it and I know it—but I have faith!"

The golden specks in his hazel eyes blazed with humility, and a flush of the same virtue mantled his perfect brow.

Such news of Bernal Linford as had come back to Edom, though meagre and fragmentary, was of a character to confirm the worst fears of those who loved him. The first report came within a year after his going, and caused a shaking of many heads.

An estimable farmer, one Caleb Webster, living on the outskirts of Edom, had, in a blameless spirit of adventure, toured the Far West, at excursion rates said to be astounding for cheapness. He had met the unfortunate young man in one of the newer mining towns along his exciting route.

"He was kind of nursin' a feller that had the consumption," ran the gossip of Mr. Webster, "some one he'd fell in with out in them parts, that had gone there to git cured. But, High Mighty! the way them two carried on at all hours wasn't goin' to cure no one of nothin'! Specially gamblin', which was done right in public, you might say, though the sharpers never skinned me none, I'll say that! But these two was at it every night, and finally they done just like I told the young fools they'd do—they lost all they had. They come into the Commercial House one night where I was settin' lookin' over a time-table, both seemin' down in the mouth. And all to once this sick young man—Mr. Hoover, his name was—bust out cryin'—him bein' weak or mebbe in liquor or somethin'.

"'Every cent lost!' he says, the tears runnin' down those yellow, sunk cheeks of his. But Bernal seems to git chipper again when he sees how Mr. Hoover is takin' it, so he says, 'Haven't you got a cent left, Hoover? Haven't you got anythin' at all left? Just think,' he says, 'what I stood to win on that last turn, if it'd come my way—at four to one,' he says, or somethin' like that; them gamblin' terms is too much for me. 'Hain't you got nothin' at all left?' he says.

"Then this Hoover—still cryin', mind you—he says, 'Not a cent in the world except forty dollars in my trunk upstairs that I saved out to bury me with—and they won't send me another cent,' he says, 'because I tried 'em.'

"It sounded awful to hear him talkin' like that about his own buryin', but it didn't phase Bernal none.

"'Forty dollars!' he says, kind of sniffy like. 'Why, man, what could you do for forty dollars? Don't you know such things are very outrageous in price here? Forty dollars—why,' he says, 'the very best you could do would be one of these plain pine things with black cloth tacked on to it, and pewter trimmin's if any,' he says. 'Think of pewter trimmin's!'

"'Say,' he says, when Hoover begun to look up at him, 'you run and dig up your old forty and I'll go back right now and win you out a full satin-lined, silver-trimmed one, polished mahogany and gold name-plate, and there'll be enough for a clock of immortelles with the hands stopped at just the hour it happens,' he says. 'And you want to hurry,' he says, 'it ought to be done right away—with that cough of yours.'

"Me? Gosh, I felt awful—I wanted to drop right through the floor, but this Hoover, he says all at once, still snufflin', mind you: 'Say, that's all right,' he says. 'If I'm goin' to do it at all, I ought to do it right for the credit of my folks. I ought to give this town a flash of the right thing,' he says.

"Then he goes upstairs, leaning on the balusters, and gets his four ten-dollar bills that had been folded away all neat at the bottom of his trunk, and before I could think of anythin' wholesome to say—I was that scandalised—they was goin' off across the street to the Horseshoe Gamin' Parlour, this feller Hoover seemin' very sanguine and asking Bernal whether he was sure they was a party in town could do it up right after they'd went and won the money for it.

"Well, sir, I jest set there thinkin' how this boy Bernal Linford was brought up for a preacher, and 'Jest look at him now!' I says to myself—and I guess it was mebbe an hour later I seen 'em comin' out of the swingin' blinds in the door of this place, and a laffin' fit to kill themselves. 'High Mighty! they done it!' I says, watchin' 'em laff and slap each other on the back till Hoover had to stop in the middle of the street to cough. Well, they come into the Commercial office where I am and I says, 'Well, boys, how much did you fellers win?' and Hoover says, 'Not a cent! We lost our roll,' he says. 'It's the blamedest funniest thing I ever heard of,' he says, just like that, laffin' again fit to choke.

"'I don't see anythin' to laff at,' I says. 'How you goin' to live?'

"'How's he goin' to die?' says Bernal, 'without a cent to do it on?'

"'That's the funny part of it,' says Hoover. 'Linford thought of it first. How can I die now? It wouldn't be square,' he says—'me without a cent!'

"Then they both began to laugh—but me, I couldn't see nothin' funny about it.

"Wal, I left early next mornin', not wantin' to have to refuse 'em a loan."



CHAPTER II

HOW A BROTHER WAS DIFFERENT

In contrast with this regrettable performance of Bernal's, which, alas! bore internal evidence of being a type of many, was the flawless career of Allan, the dutiful and earnest. Not only did he complete his course at the General Theological Seminary with great honour, but he was ordained into the Episcopal ministry under circumstances entirely auspicious. Aunt Bell confided to Nancy that his superior presence quite dwarfed the bishop who ordained him.

His ordination sermon, moreover, which his grandfather had been persuaded into journeying to hear, was held by many to be a triumph of pulpit oratory no less than an able yet not unpoetic handling of his text, which was from John—"The Truth shall make you free."

Truth, he declared, was the crowning glory in the diadem of man's attributes, and a subject fraught with vital interest to every thinking man. The essential nature of man being gregarious, how important that the leader of men should hold Truth to be like a diamond, made only the brighter by friction. The world is and ever has been illiberal. Witness the lonely lamp of Erasmus, the cell of Galileo, the dying bed of Pascal, the scaffold of Sidney—all fighters for truth against the masses who cannot think for themselves.

Truth was, indeed, a potent factor in civilisation. If only all truth-lovers could feel bound together by the sacred ties of fraternal good-will, independent yet acknowledging the sovereignty of Omnipotence, succeeding ages could but add a new lustre to their present resplendent glory.

Truth, triumphant out of oppression, is a tear falling on the world's cold cheek to make it burn forever. Why fear the revelation of truth? Greece had her Athens and her Corinth, but where is Greece to-day? Rome, too, Imperial Rome, with all her pomp and polish! They were, but they are not—for want of Truth. But might not we hope for a land where Truth would reign—from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the lakes of the frozen North to the ever-tepid waters of the sunny South?

Truth is the grand motor-power which, like a giant engine, has rolled the car of civilisation out from the maze of antiquity where it now waits to be freighted with the precious fruits of living genius.

The young man's final flight was observed by Aunt Bell to impress visibly even the bishop—a personage whom she had begun to suspect was the least bit cynical, perhaps from having listened to many first sermons.

"Standing one day," it began, "near the summit of one of the grand old Rocky Mountains that in primeval ages was elevated from ocean's depths and now towers its snow-capped peak heavenward touching the azure blue, I witnessed a scene which, for beauty of illustration of the thought in hand, the world cannot surpass. Placing my feet upon a solid rock, I saw, far down in the valley below, the tempest gathering. Soon the low-muttered thunder and vivid flashes of lightning gave token of increasing turbulence with Nature's elements. Thus the storm raged far below while all around me and above glittered the pure sunlight of heaven, where I mingled in the blue serene; until at last the thought came electric-like, as half-divine, here is exemplified in Nature's own impressive language the simple grandeurs of Truth. While we are in the valley below, we have ebullitions of discontent and murmurings of strife; but as we near the summit of Truth our thought becomes elevated. Then placing our feet on the solid Rock of Ages, we call to those in the valley below to cease their bickerings and come up higher.

"Truth! Oh, of all the flowers that swing their golden censers in the parterre of the human heart, none so rich, so rare, as this one flower of Truth. Other flowers there may be that yield as rich perfume, but they must be crushed in order that their fragrance become perceptible. But the soul of this flower courses its way down the garden walk, out through the deep, dark dell, over the burning plain, up the mountain-side, up and ever UP it rises into the beautiful blue; all along the cloudy corridors of the day, up along the misty pathway to the skies, till it touches the beautiful shore and mingles with the breath of angels!"

Yet a perverse old man had sat stonily under this sermon—had, even after so effective a baptism, neglected to undo that which he should never have done. Moreover, even on the day of this notable sermon, he was known to have referred to the young man, within the hearing of a discreet housekeeper, as "the son of his father"—which was an invidious circumlocution, amounting almost to an epithet. And he had most weakly continued to grieve for the wayward lost son of his daughter—the godless boy whom he had driven from his door.

Not even the other bit of news that came a little later had sufficed to make him repair his injustice; and this, though the report came by the Reverend Arthur Pelham Gridley, incumbent of the Presbyterian pulpit at Edom, who could preach sermons the old man liked.

Mr. Gridley, returning from a certain gathering of the brethren at Denver, had brought this news: That Bernal Linford had been last seen walking south from Denver, like a common tramp, in the company of a poor half-witted creature who had aroused some local excitement by declaring himself to be the son of God, speaking familiarly of the Deity as "Father."

As this impious person had been of a very simple mind and behaved inoffensively, rather shrinking from publicity than courting it, he had at first attracted little attention. It appeared, however, that he had presently begun an absurd pretence of healing the sick and the lame; and, like all charlatans, he so cunningly worked upon the imaginations of his dupes that a remarkable number of them believed that they actually had been healed by him. In fact, the nuisance of his operations had grown to an extent so alarming that thousands of people stood in line from early morning until dusk awaiting their turn to be blessed and "healed" by the impostor. Just as several of the clergy, said Mr. Gridley, were on the point of denouncing this creature as anti-Christ and thus exploding his pretensions; and when the city authorities, indeed, appealed to by the local physicians, were on the point of suppressing him for disorderly conduct, and a menace to the public health, since he was encouraging the people to forsake their family physicians; and just as the news came that a long train-load of the variously suffering was on its way from Omaha, the wretched impostor had himself solved the difficulty by quietly disappearing. As he had refused to take money from the thousands of his dupes who had pressed it upon him in their fancied relief from pain, it was known that he could not be far off, and some curiosity was at first felt as to his whereabouts—particularly by those superstitious ones who continued to believe he had healed them of their infirmities, not a few of whom, it appeared, were disposed to credit his blasphemous claim to have been sent by God.

According to the lookout thus kept for this person, it was reported that he had been seen to pass on foot through towns lying south of Denver, meanly dressed and accompanied by a young man named Linford. To all inquiries he answered that he was on his way to fast in the desert as his "Father" had commanded. His companion was even less communicative, saying somewhat irritably that his goings and comings were nobody's business but his own.

Some six months later the remains of the unfortunate person were found in a wild place far to the south, with his Bible and his blanket. It was supposed that he had starved. Of Linford no further trace had been discovered.

The most absurd tales were now told, said Mr. Gridley, of the miracles of healing wrought by this person—told, moreover, by persons of intelligence whom in ordinary matters one would not hesitate to trust. There had even been a story started, which was widely believed, that he had raised the dead; moreover, many of those who had been deluded into believing themselves healed, looked forward confidently to his own resurrection.

Mr. Gridley ventured the opinion that we should be thankful to the daily press which now disseminates the news of such things promptly, instead of allowing it to travel slowly by word of mouth, as it did in less advanced times—a process in which a little truth becomes very shortly a mighty untruth. Even between Denver and Omaha he had observed that the wonder-tales of this person grew apace, thus proving the inaccuracy of the human mind as a reporter of fact. Without the check of an unemotional daily press Mr. Gridley suspected that the poor creature's performances would have been magnified by credulous gossip until he became the founder of a new religion—a thing especially to be dreaded in a day when the people were crazed for any new thing—as Paul found them in Athens.

Mr. Gridley mentioned further that the person had suffered from what the alienists called "morbid delusions of grandeur"—believing, indeed, that but One other in the universe was greater than himself; that he would sit at the right hand of Power to judge all the world. His most puerile pretension, however, was that he meant to live, even if the work required a thousand years, until such time as he could save all persons into heaven, so that hell need have no occupants.

But this distressing tale did not move old Allan Delcher to reconsider his perverse decision, though there had been ample time for reparation. Placidly he dropped off one day, a little while after he had cautioned Clytie to keep the house ready for Bernal's coming; and to have always on hand one of those fig layer-cakes of which he was so fond, since as likely as not he would ask for this the first thing, just as he used to do. It must seem homelike to him when he did come.

Having betrayed the trust reposed in him by an unsuspecting grandson, it seemed fitting that he should fall asleep over that very psalm wherein David describeth the corruption of the natural man.



CHAPTER III

HOW EDOM WAS FAVOURED OF GOD AND MAMMON

In the years gone, the village of Edom had matured, even as little boys wax to manhood. Time was when all but two trains daily sped by it so fast that from their windows its name over the station door was naught but a blur. Now all was changed. Many trains stopped, and people of the city mien descended from or entered smart traps, yellow depot-wagons or immaculate victorias, drawn by short-tailed, sophisticated steeds managed by liveried persons whose scraped faces were at once impassive and alert.

In its outlying parts, moreover, stately villas now stood in the midst of grounds hedged, levelled, sprayed, shaven, trimmed and garnished—grounds cherished sacredly with a reverence like unto that once accorded the Front Room in this same village. Edom, indeed, had outgrown its villagehood as a country boy in the city will often outgrow his home ways. That is, it was still a village in its inmost heart; but outwardly, at its edges, the distinctions and graces of urban worldliness had come upon it.

All this from the happy circumstance that Edom lay in a dale of beauty not too far from the blessed centre of things requisite. First, one by one, then by families, then by groups of families, then by cliques, the invaders had come to promote Edom's importance; one being brought by the gracious falling of its little hills; one by its narrow valleys where the quick little waters come down; one by the clearness of its air; and one by the cheapness with which simple old farms might be bought and converted into the most city-like of country homes.

The old stock of Edom had early learned not to part with any massive claw-footed sideboard with glass knobs, or any mahogany four-poster, or tall clock, or high-boy, except after feigning a distressed reluctance. It had learned also to hide its consternation at the prices which this behaviour would eventually induce the newcomers to pay for such junk. Indeed, it learned very soon to be a shrewd valuer of old mahogany, pewter, and china; even to suspect that the buyers might perceive beauties in it that justified the prices they paid.

Old Edom, too, has its own opinion of the relative joys of master and servant, the latter being always debonair, their employers stiff, formal and concerned. It conceives that the employers, indeed, have but one pleasure: to stand beholding with anxious solemnity—quite as if it were the performance of a religious rite—the serious-visaged men who daily barber the lawns and hedges. It is suspected by old Edomites that the menials, finding themselves watched at this delicate task, strive to copy in face and demeanour the solemnity of the observing employer—clipping the box hedge one more fraction of an inch with the wariest caution—maintaining outwardly, in short, a most reverent seriousness which in their secret hearts they do not feel.

Let this be so or not. The point is that Edom had gone beyond its three churches of Calvin, Wesley and Luther—to say nothing of one poor little frame structure with a cross at the peak, where a handful of benighted Romanists had long been known to perform their idolatrous rites. Now, indeed, as became a smartened village, there was a perfect little Episcopal church of redstone, stained glass and painted shingles, with a macadam driveway leading under its dainty porte-cochere, and at the base of whose stern little tower an eager ivy already aspired; a toy-like, yet suggestively imposing edifice, quite in the manner of smart suburban churches—a manner that for want of accurate knowledge one might call confectioner's gothic.

It was here, in his old home, that the Reverend Allan Delcher Linford found his first pastorate. Here from the very beginning he rendered apparent those gifts that were to make him a power among men. It was with a lofty but trembling hope that the young novice began his first service that June morning, before a congregation known to be hypercritical, composed as it was of seasoned city communicants, hardened listeners and watchers, who would appraise his vestments, voice, manner, appearance, and sermon, in the light of a ripe experience.

Yet his success was instant. He knew it long before the service ended—felt it infallibly all at once in the midst of his sermon on Faith. From the reading of his text, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believed therein might not perish, but have everlasting life," the worldly people before him were held as by invisible wires running from him to each of them. He felt them sway in obedience to his tones; they warmed with him and cooled with him; aspired with him, questioned, agreed, and glowed with him. They were his—one with him. Their eyes saw a young man in the splendour of his early prime, of a faultless, but truly masculine beauty, delicate yet manfully rugged, square-chinned, straight-mouthed, with tawny hair and hazel eyes full of glittering golden points when his eloquence mounted; clear-skinned, brilliant, warm-voiced, yet always simple, direct, earnest; a storehouse of power, yet ornate; a source of refreshment both physical and spiritual to all within the field of his magnetism.

So agreed those who listened to that first sermon on Faith, in which that virtue was said be like the diamond, made only the brighter by friction. Motionless his listeners sat while he likened Faith to the giant engine that has rolled the car of Religion out from the maze of antiquity into the light of the present day, where it now waits to be freighted with the precious fruits of living genius, then to speed on to that hoped-for golden era when truth shall come forth as a new and blazing star to light the splendid pageantry of earth, bound together in one law of universal brotherhood, independent, yet acknowledging the sovereignty of Omnipotence.

Rapt were they when, with rare verbal felicity and unstudied eloquence, the young man pictured himself standing upon a lofty sunlit mountain, while a storm raged in the valley below, calling passionately to those far down in the ebullition to come up to him and mingle in the blue serene of Faith. Faith was, indeed, a tear dropped on the world's cold cheek of Doubt to make it burn forever.

Even those long since blase to pulpit oratory thrilled at the simple beauty of his peroration, which ran: "Faith! Oh, of all the flowers that swing their golden censers in the parterre of the human heart, none so rich, so rare, as this one flower of Faith. Other flowers there may be that yield as rich perfume, but they must be crushed in order that their fragrance become perceptible. But this flower—"

In spite of this triumph, it had taken him still another year to prevail over one of his hearers. True, she had met him after that first triumphant ordination sermon with her black lashes but half-veiling the admiration that shone warm in the gray of her eyes; and his low assurance, "Nance, you please me! Really you do!" as his yellow eyes lingered down her rounded slenderness from summer bonnet to hem of summer gown, rippled her face with a colour she had to laugh away.

Yet she had been obstinate and wondering. There had to be a year in which she knew that one she dreamed of would come back; another in which she believed he might; another in which she hoped he would—and yet another in which she realised that dreams and hopes alike were vain—vain, though there were times in which she seemed to feel again the tingling life of that last hand-clasp; times when he called to her; times when she had the absurd consciousness that his mind pressed upon hers. There had been so many years and so much wonder—and no one came. It had been foolish indeed. And then came a year of wondering at the other. The old wonder concerning this one, excited by a certain fashion of rendering his head in unison with his shoulders—as might the statue of Perfect Beauty turn upon its pedestal—with its baser residue of suspicion, had been happily allayed by a closer acquaintance with Allan. One must learn, it seemed, to distrust those lightning-strokes of prejudice that flash but once at the first contact between human clouds.

Yet in the last year there had come another wonder that excited a suspicion whose troubling-power was absurdly out of all true proportion.

It was in the matter of seeing things—that is, funny things.

Doubtless she had told him a few things more or less funny that had seemed to move him to doubt or perplexity, or to mere seriousness; but, indeed, they had seemed less funny to her after that. For example, she had told Aunt Bell the anecdote of the British lady of title who says to her curate, concerning a worthy relative by marriage lately passed away, toward whom she has felt kindly despite his inferior station: "Of course I couldn't know him here—but we shall meet in heaven." Aunt Bell had been edified by this, remarking earnestly that such differences would indeed be wiped out in heaven. Yet when Nancy went to Allan in a certain bubbling condition over the anecdote itself and Aunt Bell's comment thereon, he made her repeat it slowly, after the first hurried telling, and had laughed but awkwardly with her, rather as if it were expected of him—with an eye vacant of all but wonder—like a traveller not sure he had done right to take the left-hand turn at the last cross-roads.

Again, the bishop who ordained him had, in a relaxed and social moment after the ceremony, related that little classic of Bishop Meade, who, during the fight over a certain disestablishment measure, was asked by a lobbyist how he would vote. The dignified prelate had replied that he would vote for the bill, for he held that every man should have the right to choose his own way to heaven. None the less, he would continue to be certain that a gentleman would always take the Episcopal way. To Nancy Allan retold this, adding,

"You know, I'm going to use it in a sermon some time."

"Yes—it's very funny," she answered, a little uncertainly.

"Funny?"

"Yes."

"Do you think so?"

"Of course—I've heard the bishop tell it myself—and I know he thinks it funny."

"Well—then I'll use it as a funny story. Of course, it is funny—I only thought"—what it was he only thought Nancy never knew.

Small bits of things to wonder at, these were, and the wonder brought no illumination. She only knew there were times when they two seemed of different worlds, bereft of power to communicate; and at these times his superbly assured wooing left her slightly dazed.

But there were other times, and different—and slowly she became used to the idea of him—persuaded both by his own court and by the spirited encomiums that he evoked from Aunt Bell.

Aunt Bell was at that time only half persuaded by Allan to re-enter the church of her blameless infancy. She was still minded to seek a little longer outside the fold that rapport with the Universal Mind which she had never ceased to crave. In this process she had lately discarded Esoteric Buddhism for Subliminal Monitions induced by Psychic Breathing and correct breakfast-food. For all that, she felt competent to declare that Allan was the only possible husband for her niece, and her niece came to suspect that this might be so.

When at last she had wondered herself into a state of inward readiness—a state still governed by her outward habit of resistance, this last was beaten down by a letter from Mrs. Tednick, who had been a school friend as Clara Tremaine, and was now married, apparently with results not too desirable.

"Never, my dear," ran the letter to Nancy, "permit yourself to think of marrying a man who has not a sense of humour. Do I seem flippant? Don't think it. I am conveying to you the inestimable benefits of a trained observation. Humour saves a man from being impossible in any number of ways—from boring you to beating you. (You may live to realise that the tragedy of the first is not less poignant than that of the second.) Whisper, dear!—All men are equally vain—at least in their ways with a woman—but humour assuredly preserves many unto death from betraying it egregiously. Beware of him if he lack it. He has power to crucify you daily, and yet be in honest ignorance of your tortures. Don't think I am cynical—and indeed, my own husband is one of the best and dearest of souls in the world, the biggest heart—but be sure you marry no man without humour. Don't think a man has it merely because he tells funny stories; the humour I mean is a kind of sense of the fitness of things that keeps a man from forgetting himself. And if he hasn't humour, don't think he can make you happy, even if his vanity doesn't show. He can't—after the expiration of that brief period in which the vanity of each is a holy joy to the other. Remember now!"

Curiously enough this well-intended homily had the effect of arousing in Nancy an instant sense of loyalty to Allan. She suffered little flashes of resentment at the thought that Clara Tremaine should seem to depreciate one toward whom she felt herself turning with a sudden defensive tenderness. And this, though it was clear to the level eye of reason that Clara must have been generalising on observations made far from Edom. But her loyal spirit was not less eager to resent an affront because it might seem to have been aimless.

And thereafter, though never ceasing to wonder, Nancy was won. Her consent, at length, went to him in her own volume of Browning, a pink rose shut in upon "A Woman's Last Word"—its petals bruised against the verses:

"What so false as truth is, False to thee? Where the serpent's tooth is, Shun the tree.

"Where the apple reddens, Never pry— Lest we lose our Edens, Eve and I.

"Be a god and hold me With a charm! Be a man and fold me With thine arm!"

That was a moment of sweetness, of utter rest, of joyous peace—fighting no longer.

A little while and he was before her, proud as a conquerer may be—glad as a lover should.

"I always knew it, Nance—you had to give in."

Then as she drooped in his arms, a mere fragrant, pulsing, glad submission—

"You have always pleased me, Nancy. I know I shall never regret my choice."

And Nancy, scarce hearing, wondered happily on his breast.



CHAPTER IV

THE WINNING OF BROWETT

A thoughtful Pagan once reported dignity to consist not in possessing honours, but in the consciousness that we deserve them. It is a theory fit to console multitudes. Edom's young rector was not only consoled by it, he was stimulated. To his ardent nature, the consciousness of deserving honour was the first vital step toward gaining it. Those things that he believed himself to deserve he forthwith subjected to the magnetic rays of his desire: Knowing with the inborn certainty of the successful, that they must finally yield to such silent, coercing influence and soon or late gravitate toward him in obedience to the same law that draws the apple to the earth's lap. In this manner had the young man won his prizes for oratory; so had he won his wife; so had he won his first pastorate; so now would he win that prize he was conscious of meriting next—a city parish—a rectorate in the chief seat of his church in America, where was all wealth and power as well as the great among men, to be swayed by his eloquence and brought at last to the Master's feet. And here, again, would his future enlarge to prospects now but mistily surmised—prospects to be moved upon anon with triumphant tread. Infinite aspiration opening ever beyond itself—this was his. Meantime, step by step, with zealous care for the accuracy of each, with eyes always ahead, leaving nothing undone—he was forever fashioning the moulds into which the Spirit should materialise his benefits.

The first step was the winning of Browett—old Cyrus Browett, whose villa, in the fashion of an English manor-house, was a feature of remark even to the Edom summer dwellers—a villa whose wide grounds were so swept, garnished, trimly flowered, hedge-bordered and shrub-upholstered that, to old Edom, they were like stately parlours built foolishly out of doors.

Months had the rector of tiny St. Anne's waited for Browett to come to him, knowing that Browett must come in the end. One less instinctively wise would have made the mistake of going to Browett. Not this one, whose good spirit warned him that his puissance lay rather with groups of men than with individuals. From back of the chancel railing he could sway the crowd and make it all his own; whereas, taking that same crowd singly, and beyond his sacerdotal functions, he might be at the mercy of each man composing it. He knew, in short, that Cyrus Browett as one of his congregation on a Sabbath morning would be a mere atom in the plastic cosmos below him; whereas Browett by himself, with the granite hardness of his crag-like face, his cool little green eyes—unemotional as two algebraic x's—would be a matter fearfully different. Even his white moustache, close-clipped as his own hedges, and guarding a stiff, chilled mouth, was a thing grimly repressed, telling that the man was quite invulnerable to his own vanity. A human Browett would have permitted that moustache to mitigate its surroundings with some flowing grace. He was, indeed, no adversary to meet alone in the open field—for one who could make him in a crowd a mere string of many to his harp.