'I do mean that; she is the best, the sweetest, the dearest woman in the world. Ah, if I were like her! But I am very, very different. What I say and what I think comes more often out of my head than out of my heart. Chris, it is impossible for an atheist to be a good man!'
I saw the pit we were walking into, but I had not the skill to lead Jessie away from it.
'A man who does not believe in God,' she exclaimed, 'cannot believe in anything good. No wonder that he is what he is. I am not satisfied--I am not satisfied! It is shocking--shocking to think of!' She shook her head at herself, and I listened to her words in no pleasant frame of mind. She was showing me an entirely new phase in her character. It was Jessie reasoning, and reasoning on the most solemn of subjects. 'Why,' she continued, 'God made everything that's good, and if uncle Bryan is an atheist, he is a bad man. And yet your mother loves him.'
'That she does, Jessie, with all her heart.'
'She couldn't love anything that's bad. If you were an atheist, Chris, I should hate you.'
'Thank God, I am not, Jessie; even if I were, you could make me different. But I don't like to hear you speak like this,' I said, reproaching myself bitterly for having been the cause of this conversation; for when I had told Jessie that uncle Bryan was an atheist I had spoken with a full measure of dislike towards him. 'Mother does not reason as you do. After all, I may be mistaken, Jessie, and we maybe doing him a great injustice. I know so much that is good of him--more than you possibly imagine.'
And then I told her what, from a false feeling of shame, I had hitherto withheld from her--the story of my mother's hard battle with the world when we came to London, and of uncle Bryan's noble behaviour to us when we were sunk in the bitterest poverty.
'All the time I have known him, Jessie, I have never known him to be guilty of an unjust action. He is as upright and honest a man as ever lived. Can such a man be a bad man?'
'Upright, honest, and just!' she repeated my words in a musing tone. 'It is an enigma.'
'He would die,' I continued warmly, 'rather than be guilty of a mean action. Now that we are speaking of him in this way, I am ashamed of myself for ever thinking ill of him. Mother was right, from the very first--she was right about him, as she always is about everything. If he were not so hard----But you don't know what trials he has gone through in his life.'