“No, surely, sir! for you know best what I am able for.”
“Suppose you said, ‘I daresay it is all as good as you say, but I don’t care to take so much trouble about it,’—what would that be?”
“Not to believe in you, sir. You would not want me to learn a thing that was not worth my trouble, or a thing I should not be glad of knowing when I did know it.”
“Suppose you said, ‘Sir, I don’t doubt what you say, but I am so tired, I don’t mean to do anything more you tell me,’—would you then be believing in me?”
“No. That might be to believe your word, but it would not be to trust you. It would be to think my thinks better than your thinks, and that would be no faith at all.”
Davie had at times an oddly childish way of putting things.
“Suppose you were to say nothing, but go away and do nothing of what I told you—what would that be?”
“Worse and worse; it would be sneaking.”
“One question more: what is faith—the big faith I mean—not the little faith between equals—the big faith we put in one above us?”
“It is to go at once and do the thing he tells us to do.”