"Why?" I asked with a simple directness that the situation demanded and with no trace of the coquetry the question might have held. "Shall I tell you all of the reason with no reservations?" the parson asked, as he swung around on his mat and faced me, with his eyes looking straight into mine. "All," I answered. "In every community there is one soul which holds the real leadership of the souls of those surrounding them. God seems to appoint captains of the regiments of His people to lead them along the way, Christ the captain of all the hosts. Spiritually you are more evolved than any other person in this town and with you doubting I cannot get the others to see. You are so gorgeous and so brilliant that you blind them all. They have always followed your lead--up or down. There are a few like Mother Spurlock who have gained their Christ knowledge through suffering, but they are not of the calibre to help others to gain theirs. With your hand in mine I can make this whole community see and know; separated from you, you going one way and I another, I can do nothing. You simply short-circuit my force and I am helpless without you." He spoke very simply and directly down into my heart. "That is not true; no one person is responsible for any spiritual decision that another makes," I answered hotly with an awful sense of having had a burden placed on my shoulders that they could not carry. "The old 'brother's keeper' question will never be settled in any but the right way," he answered me straight from the shoulder. "You are responsible for the attitude of this whole town towards the cause I represent and they'll have to wait for your eyes to be opened and for you to make them see." "You minimize yourself," I answered quickly, for in some curious way it hurt me to see that great strong man sit at my feet baffled by a force that he declared to be in me but which I did not acknowledge or understand. "They were listening to me--from a distance, as it were--and I might have made them hear if you had not come home and thrown them back into the old pleasant groove of non-action and non-belief. In a week you had swept away all I had builded in six months." He spoke with simple conviction and not a trace of the bitterness that might have been in the arraignment.