“That is true, minister; for it seems to me that whenever men are to be fishers, and fight the winds and waves, or to make a living out of bare moor or rocks, or to do any other of the hard work of life, they are born Calvinists.”
“Just so, David. Arminians can weave a piece of broadcloth, and Episcopals can till the rich, juicy fields of England; but God’s hard work–yes, David, and his hard fighting–has to be done by his Calvinists. They were the only fighting Protestants. But for Calvinists, Puritans, Huguenots, there would have been no Reformation. Philip and the Pope would have had their way, and we should all have been papists or atheists.”
“I know not. You say so, minister, and it is doubtless true.”
“It is true. You have been born to a noble creed; accept it with thankfulness and without demur. You are not called upon to understand it or to reason about it. It is faith that conquers.”
And after such an oration the young minister would go away with a proud sense of duty well performed, burning with his own evangel, and liking David well for being the invoker of his enthusiasm. But David, after his departure, was always silent and depressed; his intellect may have been quickened, but he was not comforted.
The sunshine that had brightened his life during the past year was gone, for he had found out that all his happiness was bound up in Nanna, and Nanna was on the verge of despair. Day by day she grew thinner and whiter, more melancholy and more silent. She did only work enough to supply the barest needs of life, and for the most part sat hour after hour with dropped hands and closed eyes; or she was seized with a restlessness that drove her to motion, and then she walked the small bounds of her room until physical exhaustion threw her into deep sleep.
David watched her with a sad patience. He had felt severely the loss of Vala, and he did not presume to measure Nanna’s sorrow by his own. He knew it was natural that for some weeks she should weep for a child so dear, whose little life had been so pitifully wronged, so bound to suffering, so cruelly cut short. But when this natural sorrow was not healed by time, when Nanna nursed her grief to despair and dwelt with it in the valley of the shadow of death, he thought it time to reason with her.
“You will kill yourself, Nanna,” he said.
“Well, then, David, I hate life.”
“Do you wish to die?”