“Not more proportionately to numbers. But I would not have them thinned out. The better we do Christ’s work, the more of uneducated, neglected, or debased mind will be drawn to try and serve Him with us. He sought out the lame, the halt, the blind, the stupid, the crotchety, the rough, as well as the equable, the intelligent, the refined. Untrained Christians in any sect will always have their eccentricities and their littlenesses, at which the silken judgment of high places, where the Carpenter’s Son would be a strange guest, will sneer. That never troubles me. It only raises the question in my mind whether cultivated Christians generally are sufficiently _cultivators_, scattering their golden gifts on wayside ground.” “Now take Deacon Quirk,” I suggested, when we had ridden along a little way under the low, green arches of the elms, “and put him into heaven as you proposed, just as he is, and what _is_ he going to do with himself? He can dig potatoes and sell them without cheating, and give generously of their proceeds to foreign missions; but take away his potatoes, and what would become of him? I don’t know a human being more incapacitated to live in such a heaven as he believes in.” “Very true, and a good, common-sense argument against such a heaven. I don’t profess to surmise what will be found for him to do, beyond this,--that it will be some very palpable work that he can understand. How do we know that he would not be appointed guardian of his poor son here, to whom I suspect he has not been all that father might be in this life, and that he would not have his body as well as his soul to look after, his farm as well as his prayers? to him might be committed the charge of the dews and the rains and the hundred unseen influences that are at work on this very potato-field.” “But when his son has gone in his turn, and we have all gone, and there are no more potato-fields? An Eternity remains.” “You don’t know that there wouldn’t be any potato-fields; there may be some kind of agricultural employments even then. To whomsoever a talent is given, it will be given him wherewith to use it. Besides, by that time the good Deacon will be immensely changed. I suppose that the simple transition of death, which rids him of sin and of grossness, will not only wonderfully refine him, but will have its effect upon his intellect.” “If a talent is given, use will be found for it? Tell me some more about that.”