"I know nothing about less or more," answered Christopher. "--You would find it, I fear, a long story if I were to attempt telling it in full. I studied medicine from guile, not therefore the less carefully, that I might have a good ostensible reason for going about among the poor. I count myself bound to do all I can for their bodies; and pity itself would, I think, when I came to go among them, have driven me to the study, had I been ignorant. No one who has not been among them knows their sufferings--borne by some of them without complaint--for the sad reason that it is of no use. To be to such if only one to whom they can speak, is in some sort to mediate between them and a possible world of relief. But it was not primarily from the desire to alleviate their sufferings that I learned what I could of medicine, but in the hope to start them on the way towards victory over all evil. I saw that the man who brought them physical help had a chance with them such as no clergyman had--an advantage quite as needful with them as with the heathen--to whom we are not so _immediately_ debtors. It would have been a sad thing for the world if the Lord of it had not sought first the lost sheep of the house of Israel. One awful consequence of our making haste to pull out the mote out of our heathen brother's eye, while yet the beam is in our own, is that wherever our missionaries go, they are followed by a foul wave of our vices. "With all my guile I have not done much. But now after nearly two thousand years, such is the amount of faith I find in myself towards my Lord and his Father, that sometimes I ask myself whether in very truth I believe that that man did live and die as the story says: if it has taken all this time for such a poor result, I say to myself, perhaps I may have done something, for it must be too small to be seen; so I will try on, helping God as the children help the father.--You know that grand picture, on the ceiling of the pope's chapel, of the making of Adam?" "Michael Angelo's?--Yes." "You must have noticed then how the Father is accompanied by a crowd of young ones--come to help him to make Adam, I always think. The poet has there, consciously or not, hit upon a great truth: it is the majesty of God's great-heartedness, and the majesty of man's destiny, that every man must be a fellow-worker with God, nor can ever in less attain his end, and the conscious satisfaction of being. I want to help God with my poor brothers." "How well I understand you!" said Hester. "But would you mind telling me what made you think of the thing first? I began because I saw how miserable so many people were, and longed to do something to make life a better thing for them." "That was not quite the way with me," replied Christopher. "I see I must tell you something of my external, in order to explain my internal history."