“Don’t puff an’ fret, my dear. He’m gone now, an’ ’tis very bad for you to be so hot at your age. He’ll get his proper payment. For that matter, he have got it.”
“I say us have no right to believe that God have took this man’s soul to Hisself. It ban’t justice, an’ I won’t stomach it. Nice company for the bettermost in heaven! The like of Amos Thorn—! Tchut! I can’t onderstand it.”
“’Tis a very difficult question, and best left alone,” said the blacksmith, uneasily. “It be quite enough to know there is such a place. I never much like to think about it.”
“Us have more right to commit his soul to the Dowl, an’ a lot more reason, too,” said the angry ancient. “Do ’e think I’ve read an’ pondered the Scriptures fifty years for nothing? The wages of sin be death; that’s a cast-iron, black-an’-white fact; and I’ll back the Bible against the Prayer-book any day of the week for money. If Bible’s true, he’m lost.”
“The punishment do fall on his wife an’ child, come to think of it. He was cut off so sudden, an’ left no provision for ’em at all.”
“That’s the law and the prophets,” declared Mr. Lethbridge. “Sins of the fathers be visited on the children—also pretty often on the widows, though they ban’t named by name.”
“Where’s the justice of that, then? Got you there!” cried the blacksmith, triumphantly.
“If you’ve got anybody, you’ve got the Old Testament,” answered the other, grimly, “an’ I’d advise you to call home your words again, an’ not flout the Book o’ Life in a graveyard. ’Twon’t be for your good. An’ such things will turn the scale at Judgement. The man was cut off, an’ ’tis the quality of punishment not to stop at the sinner, but to catch the innocent folk all around him—like measles or a fever do.”
“As a husband, it be generally granted he was a very good an’ proper man,” ventured Mr. Chugg.
“You can’t be a good husband and a bad man.”