"The Lord won't be angry with you, my lass; don't you fear. He made women and He understands 'em, and He ain't the one to blame 'em for being as He Himself made 'em. Remember the Book says, 'as one whom his mother comforteth'; and I hold that means as He understands women and their troubles better than the kindest father ever could. And He won't let His children give up things for His sake without paying them back some thirty, some sixty, and some an hundred fold; and don't you ever get thinking that He will." "As Jemima says, yours is a comfortable doctrine, Bateson, but I am afraid you have no real foundation for your consoling belief," exclaimed Alan Tremaine, coming up and interrupting the conversation. "Eh! but I have, sir, saving your presence; I know in Whom I have believed; and what a man has once known for certain, he can never not know again as long as he lives." "But Christianity is a myth, a fable. You may imagine and pretend that it is true, but you can not know that it is." "But I do know, sir, begging your pardon, as well as I know you are standing here and the sun is shining over yonder." Alan smiled rather scornfully: how credulous were the lower classes, he thought in his pride of intellectual superiority. "I do not understand how you can know a thing that has never been proved," he said. The giant turned and looked on his fragile frame with eyes full of a great pity. "You do not understand, you say, sir that's just it; and I am too foolish and ignorant to be able to explain things rightly to a gentleman like you; but the Lord will explain it to you when He thinks fit. You are young yet, sir, and the way stretches long before you, and the mysteries of God are hidden from your eyes. But when you have loved and cherished a woman as your own flesh, and when you have had little children clinging round your knees, you'll understand rightly enough then without needing any man to teach you." "My good man, do you suppose a wife and children would teach me more than the collected wisdom of the ages?" "A sight more, Mr. Tremaine--a sight more. Folks don't learn the best things from books, sir. Why, when the Lord Himself wrote the law on tables of stone, they got broken; but when He writes it on the fleshly tables of our hearts, it lives forever. And His Handwriting is the love we bear for our fellow-creatures, and--through them--for Him; at least, so it seems to me." "That is pure imagination and sentiment, Bateson. Very pretty and poetic, no doubt; but it won't hold water."