“Never mind the church. She's not my mistress, though I am her servant. God is my master, and I tell you he is as good and fair as goodness and fairness can be goodness and fairness!” “What! Will you drive me mad! I wish he would serve you as he's done me--then we should hear another tune--rather! You call it good--you call it fair, to take from a poor creature he made himself, the one only thing she cared for?” “Which was the cause of a strife that made of a family in which he wanted to live, a very hell upon earth!” “You dare!” she cried, starting to her feet. Wingfold did not move. “Mrs. Wylder,” he said, “_dare_ is a word that needn't be used again between you and me. If you dare tell God that he is a devil, I may well dare tell you that you know nothing about him, and that I do!” “Say on your honour, then, if he had treated you as he has done me--taken from you the light of your eyes, would you count it fair? Speak like the man you are.” _“I know I should.”_ “I don't believe you. And I won't worship him.” “Why, who wants you to worship him? You must be a very different person before he will care much for your worship! You _can't_ worship him while you think him what you do. He is something quite different. You don't know him to love, and you don't know him to worship.” “Why, bless my soul! ain't it your business--ain't you always making people say their prayers?” “It is my business to help my brothers and sisters to know God, and worship him in spirit and in truth--because he is altogether and perfectly true and loving and fair. Do you think he would have you worship a being such as you take him to be. If your son is in good company in the other world, he must be greatly troubled at the way you treat God--at your unfairness to him. But your bad example may, for anything I know, have sent him where he has not yet begun to learn anything!” “God have mercy!--will the man tell me to my face that my boy is in hell?” “What would you have? Would you have him with the being you think so unjust that you hate him all the week, and openly insult him on Sunday?” “You are a bad man, a hard-hearted brute, a devil, to say such things about my blessed boy! Oh my God! to think that the very day he was taken ill, I struck him! Why did he let me do it? To think that that very day he killed him, when he ought to have killed me!--killed him that I might never be able to tell him I was sorry!” “If he had not taken him then, would you ever have been sorry you struck him!” She burst into outcry and weeping, mingled with such imprecation, that Wingfold thought it one of those cases of possession in which nothing but prayer is of use. But the soul and the demon were so united, so entirely of one mind, that there was no room for prayer to get between them. He sat quiet, lifted up his heart, and waited. By and by there came a lull, and the redeemable woman appeared, emerging from the smoke of the fury.