That the bastard Malcolm, or the ignorant and indeed fallen fisher-girl Lizzy, should judge differently, nowise troubled him: what could they know about the rights and wrongs of business? The fact which Lizzy sought to bring to bear upon him, that our Lord would not have done such a thing, was to him no argument at all. He said to himself, with the superior smile of arrogated common sense, that "no mere man since the fall" could be expected to do like Him; that He was divine, and had not to fight for a living; that He set us an example that we might see what sinners we were; that religion was one thing, and a very proper thing, but business was another, and a very proper thing also--with customs, and indeed laws, of its own far more determinate, at least definite, than those of religion; and that to mingle the one with the other was not merely absurd--it was irreverent and wrong, and certainly never intended in the Bible, which must surely be common sense. It was _the Bible_ always with him--never _the will of Christ_. But although he could dispose of the question thus satisfactorily, yet, as he lay ill, supine, without any distracting occupation, the thing haunted him. Now, in his father's cottage had lain, much dabbled in of the children, a certain boardless copy of the _Pilgrim's Progress_, round in the face and hollow in the back, in which, amongst other pictures, was one of the Wicket-gate. This scripture of his childhood, given by inspiration of God, threw out, in one of his troubled and feverish nights, a dream-bud in the brain of the man. He saw the face of Jesus looking on him over the top of the Wicket-gate, at which he had been for some time knocking in vain, while the cruel dog barked loud from the enemy's yard. But that face, when at last it came, was full of sorrowful displeasure. And in his heart he knew that it was because of a certain transaction in horse-dealing wherein he had hitherto lauded his own cunning--adroitness, he considered it--and success. One word only he heard from the lips of the Man, "Worker of iniquity!" and woke with a great start. From that moment truths _began_ to be facts to him. The beginning of the change was indeed very small, but every beginning is small, and every beginning is a creation. Monad, molecule, protoplasm, whatever word may be attached to it when it becomes appreciable by men--being then, however, many stages, I believe, upon its journey--beginning is an irrepressible fact; and, however far from good or humble even after many days, the man here began to grow good and humble. His dull, unimaginative nature, a perfect lumber-room of the world and its rusting affairs, had received a gift in a dream--a truth from the lips of the Lord, remodeled in the brain and heart of the tinker of Elstow, and sent forth in his wondrous parable to be pictured and printed, and lie in old Hector Crathie's cottage, that it might enter and lie in young Hector