After a pause, in which his thought followed out the word of suggestion into a swift dream of possible fulfillment, he said to his companion,—
"I believe there was nothing in that old Jewish economy, Vireo, that was not given as a 'pattern of things' that should be. That whole Old Testament is a type and prophecy of the kingdom coming. Only it was but the first Adam. It was given right into the very conditions that illustrated its need. It would have meant nothing, given into a society of angels. Yet because men were not angels, but very mortal and sinful men, we of to-day must fling contempt upon the Myth of the Salvation of God! It will stand, for all that,—that history of God's intimacy with men. It was lived, not told as a vision, that it might stand! It was lived, to show how near, in spite of sin, God came, and stayed. The second coming shall be without sin unto salvation."
"I'm not sure, Kirkbright, but you ought to be a minister."
"Not to stand in a pulpit. God helping me, I mean to be a minister. Wouldn't a preacher be satisfied to have studied a week upon a sermon, if he knew that on Sunday, preaching it, he had sent it, live, into one living soul? Fifty-two souls a year, to reach and save,—would not that be enough? Well, then, every day a man might be giving the Lord's word out somewhere, in some fashion, I think. He needn't wait for the Sundays. Everybody has a congregation in the course of the week. I don't doubt the week-day service is often you preachers' best."
"I know it is," Hilary Vireo replied.
"Come down into the cabin with me," said Mr. Kirkbright. "I want to look up that old pattern. It will tell me something."
Down in the cabin they seated themselves together where they had had many a talk before, at a corner table near Mr. Kirkbright's state-room door. Out of the state-room he had brought his Bible.
He got hold of one word in that old ordination,—"unawares."
"'He that doeth it unawares," he repeated, holding the Bible with his finger between the half-shut leaves, at that thirty-fifth chapter of Numbers. "How that reminds of, and connects with, the Atoning Prayer,—'Forgive them, for they know not what they do!' 'Sins, negligences, ignorances;' how they shade and change into each other! If all the mistakes could be forgiven and set right, how much evil, virulent and unmixed, would there be left in the world, do you suppose?"
"Not more than there was before the mistakes began," replied Vireo. "Like the Arabian genie, the monster would be drawn down from its horrible expansion to a point again,—the point of a possibility; the serpent suggestion of evil choice. When God has done his work of forgiving, there is where it will be, I think; and the Son of the woman shall set his heel upon its head."