"Well, but we have plain facts to bring forward too," said Richard Gibbs, with anxious earnestness. "I ask you, Gladwish, what arguments you have to bring forward," repeated Maxfield, determinedly repressing any outward sign of having heard the presumptuous Gibbs. "If this be not Satan's doing, I have no knowledge of the words of the devil, and I suppose I shall hardly be told that, after regular attendance in a congregation of Wesleyan Methodists for fifty odd years, man and boy! But," continued the old man, after a short silence, which none of those present ventured to break, "there's no knowing, truly. These are new-fangled days. I cannot say but what I may live to hear it declared that I know nothing of Satan, nor cannot discern his works when I see them!" "Nay, father," said Seth Maxfield, speaking now for the first time, in deprecation of so serious a charge against the "new-fangled days," on which Whitford had fallen. "Nay, no man will say that, nor yet think it. But my notion is, that it may neither be Heaven nor t'other place that has much to do with these kind of fits and screechings. I believe it to be just as Dr. Evans said--and he a Welshman himself, you'll remember--when he first heard of these doings of David Powell in Wales. Says he, 'It's a epidemic,' says the doctor. 'A catching kind of nervous disease, neither more nor less. And you may any of you get it if you go to hear and see the others. Though forewarned is forearmed in such cases,' says the doctor. 'And the better you understand the real natur' of the disorder, the safer you'll be from it.'" Seth was of a materialistic and practical turn of mind, and he offered this hypothesis as an explanation which had approved itself to his own judgment (not because he thoroughly comprehended Dr. Evans's statements, but rather because of the inherent repugnance of his mind to accept a supernatural theory about any phenomenon, when a natural theory might be substituted for it), and also as a neutral ground of conciliation, whereon the opposing celestial and diabolic partisans might meet half way. But it speedily appeared that he had miscalculated in so doing. Neither the friends nor the opponents of David Powell would for an instant admit any such rationalistic suggestion. It was scouted on all hands. And Seth, who had no gift of controversy, speedily found himself reduced to silence. "Well," said he, quietly, when he and his father rose to go away, "think what you please, but I know that if one of my reapers was to fall down in the field that way, let him be praying or cursing, I should consider it a hospital case." "Good night, Gladwish," said old Max. "Good night, Mrs. Gladwish. I am glad, for the sake of all the decent, sober, godly members of the Society, as this firebrand had left it before things came to this pass. And I only wish you'd all had the gift of clear-sightedness to see through him long ago, and cut yourselves off from him as I did."