“Keith, they don’t believe it! Nobody believes it! It is monstrous. If we really believed such things as practically taking place, we should all lose our reason. Our only escape from insanity, I believe, is that, while with our mouths and with our opinions we have declared such things, in our hearts and in our deeper conviction we have denied them, knowing that they would be treason to God. What misleads us all, Keith, I am beginning to believe, is that we have felt bound to accept a system which theologians have worked out, and which has involved a paring down of both God and man to make them fit into the narrow grooves they have assigned them in the hard logic of their formulas.”
“Well, let us make this question concrete; illustrate it from life,” said Keith, leaning back languidly in his arm-chair. “How is it with yourself? You have been taught, and have believed until very recently, this doctrine of universal condemnation of all heathen ‘out of Christ,’ and now, it seems, you have begun to question it. What is the effect on the missionary motive in your case? Would you feel as eager as ever to go as a missionary? Does the subject appeal to your conscience as powerfully as before?”
Anna looked at Keith for a moment in thoughtful silence, and then shook her head.
“No.”
“You see Dr. Durham was right,” said Keith, sadly. “If this is true of you, who have all your life been pledged to this work,—and I admit that it is true of myself,—what can be expected of the careless crowd, indifferent at best?”
Anna had been walking restlessly up and down the library. Now she came back to the heavy black oak table at which her husband was sitting, sat down, and, resting her elbows on the table, propped her chin in both hands, and so sat silently for many moments. Then she began to speak, but very slowly, rather as if thinking aloud:—
“I have been accustomed, and so have you, all our lives, to the stimulus, the spur, of a piercingly powerful motive, the most powerful possible, I should think.—To save somebody from immediate death when the means of rescue is in your hands is a motive to which every human being must respond, instinctively. Suppose this motive is shown to be, in some degree at least, based upon a misunderstanding, and we find that we are asked to alleviate suffering instead of to save life, why would it not be perfectly natural, almost inevitable, that at first there should be a reaction? Accustomed to the stronger stimulus, just at first our motives and purposes would languish, I think. Mine do. I can’t help owning it, Keith. But I can imagine that deeper knowledge of God, higher conceptions of human brotherhood, of what they call the solidarity of the race—things like that—which I only dimly realize yet, might reënforce our poor wills, and knit again the nerve if it has been cut. Don’t you think so?”
Keith watched his wife as she sat thus speaking, and a great tenderness was in his eyes.
“You are a very wonderful woman, Anna,” he said; “your thought always goes beyond mine.”
She did not seem to hear what he said, for she went on in the same musing tone:—