"How can they do more good if what they say is not true?" "I did not say they did more good--about that I cannot tell; that may need centuries to determine. I said they moved their people more. And the fundamental element of what they say is most true, only the forms they express it in contain much that is false." "Will you then defend a man in speaking things that are not true?" "If he believes them, what is he to do but speak them? Let him speak them in God's name. I cannot speak them because I do not believe them. If I did believe them they would take from me the heart to preach." "Can it be," said Hester, "that falsehood is more powerful than truth--and for truth too?" "By no means. A falsehood has in itself no power but for evil. It is the spiritual truth clothed in the partially false form that is powerful. Clearer truth will follow in the wake of it, and cast the false forms out: they serve but to make a place of seeming understanding in ignorant minds, wherein the truths themselves may lie and work with their own might. But if what I teach be nearer the truth, let it be harder to get in, it will in the end work more truth. In the meantime I say God-speed to every man who honestly teaches what he honestly believes. Paul was grand when he said he would rejoice that Christ was preached, from whatever motive he might be preached. If you say those people, though contentious, may have preached good doctrine, I answer--Possibly; for they could not have preached much of what is called doctrine now-a-days. If they preached theories of their own, they were teachers of lies, for they were not true men, and the theories of an untrue man cannot be true. But they told something about Christ, and of that Paul was glad." Some may wonder that Hester, having got so far as she had, should need to be told such things; but she had never had occasion to think about them before, though the truth wrought out in her life had rendered her capable of seeing them the moment they were put before her. "You interest me much," she said. "--Would you mind telling me how you, whose profession has to do with the bodies of men, have come to do more for their souls?"