“Oh, no; oh, no. I didn't mean to imply that,” the Squire explained. “He was a cunning rascal in his way, and he had the sort of brain that has served the purpose of the imposter in all ages. He had a plan of belief, as you may call it, which he must have thought out before he came here, if he hadn't begged, borrowed, or stolen it from somebody else. At first he called himself a humble teacher of Christianity, but it wasn't a great while before he pretended to be Jesus Christ who died on Calvary. That didn't satisfy him long, though. When he had convinced some that he was Christ, he began to teach that the Christ who was crucified, though he was a _real_ Messiah, was not a _perfect_ Messiah, because he had died and been buried, and death had had power over him just as it has over any mortal. But the real Messiah would never taste death, and he was that Messiah. Dylks would never taste death, and as the real Messiah, he would be one with God, and in fact he was the one and only God. These were the steps, and the way to belief in the godhead was clear to the meanest understanding. The meaner the understanding, the clearer,” the Squire summed up, with another tattoo on his pipe-stem. “You see,” he resumed after a moment, “life is hard in a new country, and anybody that promises salvation on easy terms has got a strong hold at the very start. People will accept anything from him. Somewhere, tucked away in us, is the longing to know whether we'll live again, and the hope that we'll live happy. I've got fun out of that fact in a community where I've had the reputation of an infidel for fifty years; but all along I've felt it in myself. We want to be good, and we want to be safe, even if we are not good; and the first fellow that comes along and tells us to have faith in him, and he'll make it all right, why we have faith in him, that's all.” “Well, then,” the stranger said, holding him to the logic of the facts, as he leaned toward him from his side of the fireplace, and fixed him with an eager eye, “I can't see why he didn't establish his superstition in universal acceptance, as, say, Mahomet did.”