“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.”