"But Christianity is a myth, a fable. You may imagine and pretend that it is true, but you can not know that it is."
"But I do know, sir, begging your pardon, as well as I know you are standing here and the sun is shining over yonder."
Alan smiled rather scornfully: how credulous were the lower classes, he thought in his pride of intellectual superiority. "I do not understand how you can know a thing that has never been proved," he said.
The giant turned and looked on his fragile frame with eyes full of a great pity. "You do not understand, you say, sir that's just it; and I am too foolish and ignorant to be able to explain things rightly to a gentleman like you; but the Lord will explain it to you when He thinks fit. You are young yet, sir, and the way stretches long before you, and the mysteries of God are hidden from your eyes. But when you have loved and cherished a woman as your own flesh, and when you have had little children clinging round your knees, you'll understand rightly enough then without needing any man to teach you."
"My good man, do you suppose a wife and children would teach me more than the collected wisdom of the ages?"
"A sight more, Mr. Tremaine—a sight more. Folks don't learn the best things from books, sir. Why, when the Lord Himself wrote the law on tables of stone, they got broken; but when He writes it on the fleshly tables of our hearts, it lives forever. And His Handwriting is the love we bear for our fellow-creatures, and—through them—for Him; at least, so it seems to me."
"That is pure imagination and sentiment, Bateson. Very pretty and poetic, no doubt; but it won't hold water."
Caleb smiled indulgently. "Wait till you've got a little lass of your own, like my Lucy Ellen, sir. Not that you'll ever have one quite as good as her, bless her! for her equal never has been seen in this world, and never will. But when you've got a little lass of your own, and know as you'd be tortured to death quite cheerful-like just to save her a minute's pain, you'll laugh at all the nonsense that's written in books, and feel you know a sight better than all of 'em put together."
"I don't quite see why."
"Well, you see, sir, it's like this. When the dove came back to the ark with the olive leaf in her mouth, Noah didn't begin sayin' how wonderful it was for a leaf to have grown out of nothing all of a sudden, as some folks are so fond of saying. Not he; he'd too much sense. He says to his sons, 'Look here: a leaf here means a tree somewhere, and the sooner we make for that tree the better!' And so it is with us. When we feel that all at onst there's somebody that matters more to us than ourselves, we know that this wonderful feelin' hasn't sprung out of the selfishness that filled our hearts before, but is just a leaf off a great Tree which is a shadow and resting-place for the whole world."