“Have you stay, my friend?” said the Doctor, with a pleasant, friendly look,—­“have you stay?  Not a month, nor a week, nor a day, if I could help it.  You have got into the wrong pulpit, and I have known it from the first.  The sooner you go where you belong, the better.  And I’m very glad you don’t mean to stop half-way.  Don’t you know you’ve always come to me when you’ve been dyspeptic or sick anyhow, and wanted to put yourself wholly into my hands, so that I might order you like a child just what to do and what to take?  That ’s exactly what you want in religion.  I don’t blame you for it.  You never liked to take the responsibility of your own body; I don’t see why you should want to have the charge of your own soul.  But I’m glad you’re going to the Old Mother of all.  You wouldn’t have been contented short of that.”

The Reverend Mr. Fairweather breathed with more freedom.  The Doctor saw into his soul through those awful spectacles of his,—­into it and beyond it, as one sees through a thin fog.  But it was with a real human kindness, after all.  He felt like a child before a strong man; but the strong man looked on him with a father’s indulgence.  Many and many a time, when he had come desponding and bemoaning himself on account of some contemptible bodily infirmity, the old Doctor had looked at him through his spectacles, listened patiently while he told his ailments, and then, in his large parental way, given him a few words of wholesome advice, and cheered him up so that he went off with a light heart, thinking that the heaven he was so much afraid of was not so very near, after all.  It was the same thing now.  He felt, as feeble natures always do in the presence of strong ones, overmastered, circumscribed, shut in, humbled; but yet it seemed as if the old Doctor did not despise him any more for what he considered weakness of mind than he used to despise him when he complained of his nerves or his digestion.

Men who see into their neighbors are very apt to be contemptuous; but men who see through them find something lying behind every human soul which it is not for them to sit in judgment on, or to attempt to sneer out of the order of God’s manifold universe.

Little as the Doctor had said out of which comfort could be extracted, his genial manner had something grateful in it.  A film of gratitude came over the poor man’s cloudy, uncertain eye, and a look of tremulous relief and satisfaction played about his weak mouth.  He was gravitating to the majority, where he hoped to find “rest”; but he was dreadfully sensitive to the opinions of the minority he was on the point of leaving.

The old Doctor saw plainly enough what was going on in his mind.