Thomas Bradly, nothing daunted, sat him down very deliberately on a large smooth stone on the opposite side of the doorway, and remarked quietly, "As to the Bible's being a failure, I suppose that depends very much on experience. I've got an eight-day clock in our house. I bought it for a very good one, and gave a very good price for it, just before I set up housekeeping. A young fellow calls the other day, when I happened to be in, and he wants me to buy a new-fashioned sort of clock of him. `Well, if I do,' says I, `what'll you allow me for my old clock, then, as part payment?' So he goes over and looks at it, and turns up his nose at it, and says, `'Tain't worth the trouble of taking away: you shall have one of the right sort cheap; that clumsy, old- fashioned thing'll never do you no good.'--`Well,' says I, `that's just as people find. That old clock has served me well, and kept the best of time these five and twenty years, and it don't show any signs of being worse for wear yet. So I'll stick to the old clock still, if you please, and take my time by it as I've been used to do.' And the old- fashioned Bible's just like my old clock. You tell me as it's proved to be a failure. I tell _you_ it isn't a failure, for I've tried it, and proved it for more years than I've tried my clock, and it never yet failed _me_." "Perhaps not, Tommy," said Foster; "that's what you call your experience; but for all that, it has proved a failure generally." "How do you make out that, William? I can find you a score of families in Crossbourne as the Bible hasn't failed, and their neighbours know it too." "Ah! Very likely; but what I mean is this: it has proved a failure when its power and truth have come to be tested in other parts of the world-- that's the general and almost universal experience, in fact." "Well, now, that's strange," replied Bradly, "to hear a man talk in that way in our days, when there's scarce a language in the known world that the Bible hasn't been turned into, so that all the wide world own it has been bringing light and peace into thousands of hearts and homes-- there's no contradicting that; and that's a strange sort of failure-- summat like old John Wrigley's failure that folks were talking about; he failed by dying worth just half a million." "Well, but when we men of science and observation say that the Bible is a failure, we mean that it hasn't accomplished what it should have done supposing it to be a revelation from the Supreme Being." "Ah, you are right there, William! I quite agree with you." "Do you hear him, mates?" cried Foster triumphantly. "He owns he's beaten." "Not a bit of it," cried Bradly. "What I grant you is this, and no more: the Bible hasn't done all it should have done, and would have done. But why? Just because men wouldn't let it: as our Saviour said when he was upon earth, `Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life.' That's man's fault, not the Bible's."