“I’ll lecture them myself, and show them bogies, if my quarter-inch will do its work.  If they want seeing to believe, see they shall; I have half-a-dozen specimens of water already which will astonish them.  Let me lecture, you must preach.”

“You must know, that there is a feeling,—­you would call it a prejudice,—­against introducing such purely secular subjects into the pulpit.”

Tom gave a long whistle.

“Pardon me, Mr. Headley; you are a man of sense; and I can speak to you as one human being to another, which I have seldom been able to do with your respected cloth.”

“Say on; I shall not be frightened.”

“Well, don’t you put up the Ten Commandments in your Church?”

“Yes.”

“And don’t one of them run:  ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”

“Well?”

“And is not murder a moral offence—­what you call a sin?”

“Sans doute.”

“If you saw your parishioners in the habit of cutting each other’s throats, or their own, shouldn’t you think that a matter spiritual enough to be a fit subject for a little of the drum ecclesiastic?”

“Well?”

“Well?  Ill!  There are your parishioners about to commit wholesale murder and suicide, and is that a secular question?  If they don’t know the fact, is not that all the more reason for your telling them of it?  You pound away, as I warned you once, at the sins of which they are just as well aware as you; why on earth do you hold your tongue about the sins of which they are not aware?  You tell us every Sunday that we do Heaven only knows how many more wrong things than we dream of.  Tell it us again now.  Don’t strain at gnats like want of faith and resignation, and swallow such a camel as twenty or thirty deaths.  It’s no concern of mine; I’ve seen plenty of people murdered, and may again:  I am accustomed to it; but if it’s not your concern, what on earth you are here for is more than I can tell.”

“You are right—­you are right; but how to put it on religious grounds—­”

Tom whistled again.

“If your doctrines cannot be made to fit such plain matters as twenty deaths, tant pis pour eux.  If they have nothing to say on such scientific facts, why the facts must take care of themselves, and the doctrines may, for aught I care, go and—.  But I won’t be really rude.  Only think over the matter.  If you are God’s minister, you ought to have something to say about God’s view of a fact which certainly involves the lives of his creatures, not by twos and threes, but by tens of thousands.”

So Frank went home, and thought it through; and went once and again to Thurnall, and condescended to ask his opinion of what he had said, and whether he said ill or well.  What Thurnall answered was—­“Whether that’s sound Church doctrine is your business; but if it be, I’ll say with the man there in the Acts—­what was his name?—­’Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.’”