Or, again, after a long period of apparently rational talk, the unfortunate young man would break out with, “And how childish its wonder-tales were, of iron made to swim, of a rod turned to a serpent, of a coin found in a fish’s mouth, of devils asking to go into swine, of a fig-tree cursed to death because it did not bear fruit out of season—­how childish that tale of a virgin mother, who conceived ‘without sin,’ as it is somewhere naively put—­an ideal of absolutely flawless falsity.  Even the great old painters were helpless before it.  They were driven to make mindless Madonnas, stupid bits of fleshy animality.  It’s not easy to idealise mere physical motherhood.  You see, that was the wrong, perverted idea of motherhood—­’conceiving without sin.’  It’s an unclean dogma in its implications.  I knew somewhere once a man named Milo Barrus—­a sort of cheap village atheist, I remember, but one thing I recall hearing him say seems now to have a certain crude truth in it.  He said:  ’There’s my old mother, seventy-eight this spring, bent, gray, and wasted with the work of raising us seven children; she’s slaved so hard for fifty years that she’s worn her wedding-ring to a fine thread, and her hands look as if they had a thousand knuckles and joints in them.  But she smiles like a girl of sixteen, she was never cross or bitter to one of us hounds, and I believe she never even wanted to complain in all her days.  And there’s a look of noble capacity in her face, of soul dignity, that you never saw in any Madonna’s.  I tell you no “virgin mother” could be as beautiful as my mother, who bore seven children for love of my father and for love of the thought of us.’  Isn’t it queer, sir, that I remember that—­for it seemed only grotesque at the time I heard it.”

It was after this extraordinary speech, uttered with every sign of physical soundness, that young Dr. Merritt confided to the old man when they had left the study: 

“He’s coming on fine, Mr. Delcher.  He’ll eat himself into shape now in no time; but—­I don’t know—­seems to me you stand a lot better show of making a preacher out of his brother.  Of course, I may be mistaken—­we doctors often are.”  Then the young physician became loftily humble:  “But it doesn’t strike me he’ll ever get his ideas exactly into Presbyterian shape again!”

“But, man, he’ll surely be rid of these devil’s hallucinations?”

“Well, well—­perhaps, but I’m almost afraid they’re what we doctors call ‘fixed delusions.’”

“But I set my heart so long ago on his preaching the Word.  Oh, I’ve looked forward to it so long—­and so hard!”

“Well, all you can do now is to feed him and not excite him.  We often have these cases.”