The subject of the sermon was “the fire God gave for other ends,” and he ventured to point out to Ephraim, in his plain, logical way, that it was wrong to waste on a woman that devotion which God intends only himself.

Ephraim smiled; it was a good-tempered, buoyant smile.  “Did it ever occur to you, Finney, to reflect that, with your opinions, had you been the Creator, you would never have made the world as it is made?  What time would you ever have thought it worth while to spend in developing the iridescence on a beetle’s wing, in adjusting man’s soul till it responds with storm or calm, gloom or glory, to outer influence, as the surface of the ocean to weather?”

Finney was puzzled, as he always was, by Ephraim’s bonhomie and his strange ideas.  “But what have you to advance against what I have already said, Ephraim?”

“Advance?  I advance nothing.  I even withdraw my painted insects and the storms of emotion by which I had perhaps thought that God did his best teaching; I withdraw also my exaltation of that strait gate of use without abuse for the making of which I had almost said Heaven hands us the most dangerous things.  I withdraw all that offends you, Finney, in order to thank you for having spoken her name.  No one else has spoken it in my hearing since they knew of my last parting with her, and I—­I am fool enough half the days to wish the clouds in their thunder-claps would name her.”

The voice of the whip-poor-will complained over the tops of the woodland in near and far cadence through the warm moonlit air.  Beside this and the throb of insect voices there was no sound.  “I came out this evening,” said Finney, “to tell you that last March in Ohio I saw her.”  His voice fell at the pronoun in sympathetic sorrow.

“Yes?”

“When I was about to return from Cincinnati I was advised to go northward to the Erie Canal, in order that I might pass through that part of the State which has been sorely infected by the cancer of that hypocrite’s teaching.”

There was no need in the district of Manchester for Finney to explain what hypocrite he meant.  In his own country Smith was commonly held to be the arch-hypocrite.

“The devil has surely espoused that cause in earnest, for the number of deluded souls in that part of Ohio and in southern Missouri, and scattered as missionaries up and down the country, is, I hear, between three and four thousand.”

“And always among those who worship the letter of the Scripture,” remarked Ephraim, “for their missionaries give chapter and verse for all they teach.”

“I was told that their customs were peculiarly evil.  Even among themselves they lie and steal and are violent and licentious; and they teach openly that it is a merit to steal from the Gentiles, as they call those not of themselves; and, furthermore, they aim at nothing less than setting up a government of their own in the west.”