He threw up his head exactly as if I had hit him on the jaw:  “It’s weakness in me, I know,” he said.

“I should have rather called it weakness in them.  But suppose you are right, and that it’s weakness not to be able to desire promiscuous suffering for others, would you go further and say that it is Christian for those, who have not experienced a certain kind of suffering, to force that particular kind on others?”

He sat silent for a full minute, trying evidently to reach to the bottom of my thought.

“Surely not,” he said at last, “except as ministers of God’s laws.”

“You do not then think that it is Christian for the husband of such a woman to keep her in that state of suffering—­not being, of course, a minister of God?”

He began stammering at that:  “I—­I——­” he said.  “No; that is, I think not-not Christian.  No, certainly.”

“Then, such a marriage, if persisted in, makes of the wife indeed a Christian, but of the husband—­the reverse.”

“The answer to that is clear,” he said quietly:  “The husband must abstain.”

“Yes, that is, perhaps, coherently Christian, on your theory:  They would then both suffer.  But the marriage, of course, has become no marriage.  They are no longer one flesh.”

He looked at me, almost impatiently as if to say:  Do not compel me to enforce silence on you!

“But, suppose,” I went on, “and this, you know; is the more frequent case, the man refuses to abstain.  Would you then say it was more Christian to allow him to become daily less Christian through his unchristian conduct, than to relieve the woman of her suffering at the expense of the spiritual benefit she thence derives?  Why, in fact, do you favour one case more than the other?”

“All question of relief,” he replied, “is a matter for Caesar; it cannot concern me.”

There had come into his face a rigidity—­as if I might hit it with my questions till my tongue was tired, and it be no more moved than the bench on which we were sitting.

“One more question,” I said, “and I have done.  Since the Christian teaching is concerned with the spirit and not forms, and the thread in it which binds all together and makes it coherent, is that of suffering——­”

“Redemption by suffering,” he put in.

“If you will—­in one word, self-crucifixion—­I must ask you, and don’t take it personally, because of what you told me of yourself:  In life generally, one does not accept from people any teaching that is not the result of firsthand experience on their parts.  Do you believe that this Christian teaching of yours is valid from the mouths of those who have not themselves suffered—­who have not themselves, as it were, been crucified?”

He did not answer for a minute; then he said, with painful slowness:  “Christ laid hands on his apostles and sent them forth; and they in turn, and so on, to our day.”