'I will, my son; but I wouldn't mind trusting him for that.' Everybody in the village was in Carbis Chapel to hear Seaward Lackland's first sermon. He was not afraid of them; he had something to say, and he was to speak for God; he said quietly all that was in his mind to say. After the sermon, while he was walking across to the cottage with his father and mother, both very happy, and saying nothing at all, one or two of the older people stayed behind to discuss the sermon. 'Do you think he is quite orthodox?' said one of them, dubiously. 'I don't know,' said another; 'there were some ideas, sure enough, I never heard before; but I wouldn't say for that they weren't orthodox.' 'We must be careful,' said a third; 'these young people think too much.' 'A great deal too much,' said the first, 'once you begin to think for yourself, what's to stop you?' * * * * * From the time of his first sermon Seaward Lackland looked upon his dedication to God as not only complete, but, in a sense, accepted. He had offered himself as an interpreter of the will of God to men, and power was put into his hand. Now, he said to himself, if I should prove a backslider, that would be a calamity for God also. The thought of his sins, which he believed God to have pardoned, came back to him again and again; he saw them still existing, like atoms which refused to go out into nothingness; even if pardoned, not literally extinct. What if his soul were one day to reinherit them, to slip back into their midst, having let go of the hand of God, which needed at all times to hold him up out of that deadly gulf? And now that he, who needed help so much, had taken it upon him to try to help others, could he be sure that he was rightly helping them? Could he, in all obedience, be sure that he was interpreting the divine will aright? He had never found help in any book but the Bible. Once or twice he had borrowed a commentary from the minister at St. Ives, but he could not read these dry and barren discourses, which seemed to tell you so many unnecessary things, but never the things that you wanted to know. He put them aside, and the conviction came to him that with prayer and thought everything would explain itself to him. Did not the Holy Ghost still descend into men's minds, illuminating that patient darkness? He waited more and more expectantly on that divine light, and it seemed to come to him with a more punctual answer. At night, on the water, while the other men lay across the seats, smoking their pipes in silence, he would withdraw into his own mind until visible things no longer existed, and he was alone in a darkness which began to glow with soft light. Only then did he seem to see quite clearly, and what he saw was not always what he had reasoned out for himself; but it was a solution, and it came irresistibly.