“I have, I may say--and under the circumstances I shall not be suspected of conceit--made pretty much the complete circuit of unsolved problems. They class exactly as those questions do which we habitually reckon as solved: under the three subjects to which they relate--God, the intelligent creation, the unintelligent creation. Now, I have selected my questions accordingly--one for each of those divisions. Whether I have succeeded in satisfying the conditions necessary will appear quickly. But you see that I have not stooped to any quibbling, or begging either. I have sought to protect myself by the honourable use of a masculine reason.” “Your observations interest me greatly,” remarked the audience. “Not the less so, that they are so accurately coincident with my own habitual lines of thought--at least, so far as I can judge from what you have said. Indeed, suppose you had called upon me to help you prepare insoluble problems. I was bound, I suppose, to comply to the best of my ability; and, if I had done so, those statements of yours are thus far the very preface I supplied--I beg your pardon--should have supplied--you with. I fancy I could almost state the questions. Well?”-- All this was most kind and complimentary; but somehow it did not encourage the doctor in the least. He even fancied that he detected a sneer, as if his interlocutor had been saying, “Flutter away, old bird! That was _my bait_ that you have been feeding on: you’re safe enough; it is my net that holds you.” “_First Question_,” said Dr. Hicok, with steadiness: “Reconcile the foreknowledge and the fore-ordination of God with the free will of man?” “I thought so, of course,” remarked the other. Then he looked straight into the doctor’s keen little grey eyes with his deep melancholy black ones, and raised his slender fore-finger. “Most readily. The reconciliation is _your own conscience_, doctor! Do what you know to be right, and you will find that there is nothing to reconcile--that you and your Maker have no debates to settle!” The words were spoken with a weighty solemnity and conviction that were even awful. The doctor had a conscience, though he had found himself practically forced, for the sake of success, to use a good deal of constraint with it--in fact, to lock it up, as it were, in a private mad-house, on an unfounded charge of lunacy. But the obstinate thing would not die, and would not lose its wits; and now all of a sudden, and from the very last quarter where it was to be expected, came a summons before whose intensity of just requirement no bolts could stand. The doctor’s conscience walked out of her prison, and came straight up to the field of battle, and said-- “Give up the first question.” And he obeyed. “I confess it,” he said. “But how could I have expected a great basic truth both religiously and psychologically so, from--from _you_?”