“Not so badly put; but what should I do in that case?  Go on quietly curing his neighbours, till he began to alter his mind as to my qualifications, and came in to be cured himself.  But here’s this difference between you and me.  I am not bound to attend to any one who don’t send for me; while you think that you are, and carry the notion a little too far, for I expect you to kill yourself by it some day.”

“Well?” said Frank, with something of that lazy Oxford tone, which is intended to save the speaker the trouble of giving his arguments, when he has already made up his mind, or thinks that he has so done.

“Well, if I thought myself bound to doctor the man, willy-nilly, as you do, I would certainly go to him, and show him, at least, that I understood his complaint.  That would be the first step towards his letting me cure him.  How else on earth do you fancy that Paul cured those Corinthians about whom I have been reading lately?”

“Are you, too, going to quote Scripture against me?  I am glad to find that your studies extend to St. Paul.”

“To tell you the truth, your sermon last Sunday puzzled me.  I could not comprehend (on your showing) how Paul got that wonderful influence over those pagans which he evidently had; and as how to get influence is a very favourite study of mine, I borrowed the book when I went home, and read for myself; and the matter at last seemed clear enough, on Paul’s own showing.”

“I don’t doubt that:  but I suspect your interpretation of the fact and mine would not agree.”

“Mine is simple enough.  He says that what proved him to be an apostle was his power.  He is continually appealing to his power; and what can he mean by that, but that he could do, and had done, what he professed to do?  He promised to make those poor heathen rascals of Greeks better, and wiser, and happier men; and, I suppose, he made them so; and then there was no doubt of his commission, or his authority, or anything else.  He says himself he did not require any credentials, for they were his credentials, read and known of every one; he had made good men of them out of bad ones, and that was proof enough whose apostle he was.”

“Well,” said Frank half sadly, “I might say a great deal, of course, on the other side of the question, but I prefer hearing what you laymen think about it all.”

“Will you be angry if I tell you honestly?”

“Did you ever find me angry at anything you said?”

“No.  I will do you the justice to say that.  Well, what we laymen say is this.  If the parsons have the authority of which they boast, why don’t they use it?  If they have commission to make bad people good, they must have power too; for He whose commission they claim, is not likely, I should suppose, to set a man to do what he cannot do.”

“And we can do it, if people would but submit to us.  It all comes round again to the same point.”