The preacher sat beside him, and put his arm around him.  The preacher was a man whose embrace no man could shrink from, for the physical part of him was as nothing compared with the love and strength of its animating soul.

“Our Lord sends a message to you:  ’All things are possible to him that believeth.’” The preacher spoke with quiet strength. “You know, dear brother, that this word of His is certainly true.”

“Yes, yes, I know it.  By the hour in which I first saw you I know it; but I cannot take hold of it again in the same way.  My faith wavers.”

“Your faith wavers?” The preacher spoke questioningly.  “My brother, faith in itself is nothing; it is only the hand that takes; it is the Saviour in whom we believe who has the power.  You have turned away from Him.  It is not that your faith wavers, but that you are walking straight forward on the road of infidelity, and on that path you will never find a God to help, but only a devil to devour.”

Toyner shivered even within the clasp of the encircling arm.  “I had tried to tell you in writing that the Saviour you follow is more to me—­far more, not less.”

“In what way?” The preacher’s voice was full of sympathy; but here, and for the first time, Bart felt it was an unconscious trick.  Sympathy was assumed to help him to speak.  The preacher could conceive of no divine object of love that was not limited to the pattern he had learned to dwell upon.

“I am not good at words,” Toyner spoke humbly.  “I took a long time to write to you; I said it better than I could now, that God is far more because He is a faithful Creator, responsible for us always, whatever we do, to bring us to good.  Now I do not need to keep dividing things and people and thoughts into His and not-His.  That was what it came to before.  You may say it didn’t, but it did.  And all we know about Jesus—­don’t you see.” (Bart raised his face with piteous, hunted look)—­“don’t you see that what His life and death meant was—­just what I have told you?  God doesn’t hold back His robe, telling people what they ought to do, and then judge them.  He does not shrink from taking sin on Himself to bring them through death to life.  Doesn’t your book say so again and again and again?”

“God cannot sin!” cried the preacher, with the warmth of holy indignation.

Toyner became calm with a momentary contempt of the other’s lack of understanding.  “That goes without saying, or He would not be God.”

“But that is what you have said in your letters.”

There was silence in the room.  The misery of his loneliness took hold of Toyner till it almost felt like despair.  Who was he, unlearned, very sinful, even now shaken with the palsy of recent excess—­who was he to bandy words with a holy man?  All words that came from his own lips that hour seemed to him horribly profane.  The new idea that possessed him was what he lived by, and yet alone with it he did not gather strength from it to walk upright.