Laicus.: 

—­Suppose you pass my case for the moment, and take the others.  Take farmer Faragon for example.  He has a farm of three hundred acres.  It keeps him busy all the week.  He works hard, out of doors, all day.  When evening comes he gets his newspaper, sits down by the fire and pretends to read.  But I have noticed that he rarely reads ten minutes before he drops asleep.  When he comes to church the same phenomenon occurs.  He cannot resist the soporific tendencies of the furnaces.  By the time Mr. Work gets fairly into secondly, Farmer Faragon is sound asleep.  So he does not even listen to the preaching.  Is he then a drone?  Suppose you make a calculation how many mouths he feeds indirectly by the products of his farm.  I cannot even guess.  But I know nothing ever goes from it that is not good.  The child is happy that drinks his milk, the butcher fortunate who buys his beef, the housewife well off who has his apples and potatoes in her cellar.  He never sends a doubtful article to market; never a short weight or a poor measure.  I think that almost every one who deals with him recognizes in him a Christian man.  He does not work in Sunday School, it is true, but he has brought more than one farm hand into it.  Christ fed five thousand by the sea of Galilee with five loaves and two small fishes.  Was that Christian?  Farmer Faragon, feeds, in his small way, by his industry, a few scores of hungry mortals.  Is he a drone?

Or take Mr. Typsel the printer.  He publishes the Newtown Chronicle.  He sends a weekly message to 10,000 readers, at least twenty times as many as Dr. Argure’s congregation.  I do not know how good a Christian he is; I do not know much about the Newtown Chronicle.  But I know that the press is exerting an incalculable influence over the people, for good or for ill and the man who devotes his energies to it, and really uses it to educate and elevate the community, is doing as much in his sphere for Christ as the minister in his.  He has no right to neglect the greater work God has given him to do for the lesser work of teaching a Sabbath School class.

Jennie.: 

—­That is if he cannot well do both.

Laicus.: 

—­Yes—­of course.  If he can do both, that is very well.

Dr. Argure.: 

—­That’s a very dangerous doctrine Mr. Laicus.

Laicus,:  [(warmly).]

—­If it is true it is not dangerous.  The truth is never dangerous.

Dr. Argure.: 

—­The truth is not to be spoken at all times.

Deacon Goodsole.: 

—­That’s a very unnecessary doctrine, Dr., to teach to a lawyer.

Dr. Argure,:  [(indifferent alike to the sally and to the laugh which follows it).]