He could not at once answer. "Oh, what is the matter?" she pleaded. "You!" he laughed. "You, too!" To control himself he unfolded and looked at the leaflet that he had picked up in the church doorway, and had been heedlessly folding and unfolding ever since. His mirth stopped. "Listen to this," he ordered. "By Jove, it’s not Nicholson alone; it’s the whole bunch, and speaking officially, too! Listen to this. It’s a printed statement issued by the General Executive Committee of the whole church—not St. Athanasius alone, but the entire denomination—and it’s worse than Nicholson’s sermon." His eyes ran from line to line. "’We call upon the prayers of the faithful,’" he read as well as the motion of the car permitted.... "’He has not buried his talent nor hidden his candle under a bushel.... So far as a man’s life can, his life exemplified Law and Order, realized the truth uttered by Richard Hooker: "Of Law there can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is in the bosom of God, the harmony of the world."’" Betty had been listening attentively. "Well?" she asked. "’Well?’" repeated Luke. "’Well?’ Don’t you see? The whole Church is standing up for him. And not our Church alone: all churches. He’d bought them—bought them!" "Luke! How can you?" "Yes, he has. One way or another. He or his kind: for I’m beginning to see at last he wasn’t alone—never was and never will be. And seeing that, I’m not blaming him so much—any of the _hims_. I don’t say, any more, he was worse than the rest of us; he was only stronger. Maybe he was only the average man in extraordinary circumstances. He didn’t make them—I’m beginning to believe that, too,—they made him. But the Church! The churches! They’ve sinned against the light. They’re liars. They’re—why, they must be founded on a lie: their light must be darkness!" The girl had edged away from him, her brown eyes big with horror at his blasphemy. The motor was drawing up before the door of the Forbes house; it was drawing up in a quiet Brooklyn street. And there, in that Sunday stillness, and among those surroundings of commonplace respectability, suddenly the Marvel came to him.