“You are right, sir. It is a thing I have been seeking for forty years.”
“And never found?”
“I will assist you,” he said gently, “that is, if you wish it. What will you have first?”
“Sleep, I think, first, then food. I have been through exciting scenes. I have a touch—a faint one—of what below we called exhaustion. Yet now I am conscious in advance of the rest which is sure to come. Already I feel it, like the ebbing of the wave that goes to form the flow of the next. How blessed to know that one can’t be ill!”
“How do you know that?” asked my companion.
“On the whole, I don’t know that I do,” I answered, with embarrassment, “I suppose it is a remnant of one’s old religious teaching: ‘The inhabitant shall not say I am sick.’ Surely there were such words.”
“And you trusted them?” asked the stranger.
“The Bible was a hard book to accept,” I said quickly, “I would not have you overestimate my faith. I tried to believe that it was God’s message. I think I did believe it. But the reason was clear to me. I could not get past that if I wished to.”
“What, then, was the reason,” inquired my friend, solemnly, “why you trusted the message called the Word of God, as received by the believing among His children on earth?”