“Yes; for I do not think an honest man, as you seem to me to be, would be able to doubt without any room whatever.  That would be only for a fool.  But it is just possible, as we are not perfectly good ourselves—­you’ll allow that, won’t you?”

“That I will, sir; God knows.”

“Well, I say—­as we’re not quite good ourselves, it’s just possible that things may be too good for us to do them the justice of believing in them.”

“But there are things, you must allow, so plainly wrong!”

“So much so, both in the world and in myself, that it would be to me torturing despair to believe that God did not make the world; for then, how would it ever be put right?  Therefore I prefer the theory that He has not done making it yet.”

“But wouldn’t you say, sir, that God might have managed it without so many slips in the making as your way would suppose?  I should think myself a bad workman if I worked after that fashion.”

“I do not believe that there are any slips.  You know you are making a coffin; but are you sure you know what God is making of the world?”

“That I can’t tell, of course, nor anybody else.”

“Then you can’t say that what looks like a slip is really a slip, either in the design or in the workmanship.  You do not know what end He has in view; and you may find some day that those slips were just the straight road to that very end.”

“Ah! maybe.  But you can’t be sure of it, you see.”

“Perhaps not, in the way you mean; but sure enough, for all that, to try it upon life—­to order my way by it, and so find that it works well.  And I find that it explains everything that comes near it.  You know that no engineer would be satisfied with his engine on paper, nor with any proof whatever except seeing how it will go.”

He made no reply.

It is a principle of mine never to push anything over the edge.  When I am successful, in any argument, my one dread is of humiliating my opponent.  Indeed I cannot bear it.  It humiliates me.  And if you want him to think about anything, you must leave him room, and not give him such associations with the question that the very idea of it will be painful and irritating to him.  Let him have a hand in the convincing of himself.  I have been surprised sometimes to see my own arguments come up fresh and green, when I thought the fowls of the air had devoured them up.  When a man reasons for victory and not for the truth in the other soul, he is sure of just one ally, the same that Faust had in fighting Gretchen’s brother—­that is, the Devil.  But God and good men are against him.  So I never follow up a victory of that kind, for, as I said, the defeat of the intellect is not the object in fighting with the sword of the Spirit, but the acceptance of the heart.  In this case, therefore, I drew back.

“May I ask for whom you are making that coffin?”

“For a sister of my own, sir.”