"Leonard! Leonard! We dare not be husband and wife."
He stared at her in amazement. "What do you mean?" he said.
"I mean this," she answered, producing "Dr. Burley's True Meaning." "Oh, Leonard! How could the same man write that book and be a father?"
CHAPTER XXXI.
HE CLASPED HER LITHE BODY WITH A CLUTCH OF FURY.
Mrs. Joe had not obeyed Dr. Stanley's injunction, to burn the "Call to the Careless," but had studied that delectable composition sufficiently to compel her to exonerate the doctor from her suspicion, that he had invented much of the matter, which he had, in fact, read from the text before him.
Her researches had not been without an object. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to point out that this lady's conscience was sufficiently elastic for ordinary purposes, even for ordinary political purposes, and it might have with stood the assaults made upon it by her investigation, had she been of the usual sex of politicians. She could go far in the interests of her son, but long ago she had borne another child, whose smile as it faded in death had ever been, at odd moments, before her, and constantly before her during her wanderings in fields theological, and she had but recently seen a woman crazed by contemplation of her baby in hell. When she had learned, by means of her studies, that a great ecclesiastical body still dooms the vast majority of those born of woman to everlasting woe, it came upon her like a blow in the face that, in order to see her son in the legislature, she had aided in promulgating the diabolical creed which, in the face of nineteen centuries of Christianity, is still waved aloft as the Standard of a Christian Church.
Upon the first shock of this knowledge she followed the inevitable course of the conscience-stricken, and proceeded to argue with the inward monitor. "Nobody believes that now," she insisted; "the actual belief has been modified to accord with common sense. No Christian can admit that God is a demon, and no Christian can teach impossible falsehood." In answer to which, Conscience pointed to the title-page, which proclaimed the Confession to be the "Standard of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America.'" She resolved to seek enlightenment at the acknowledged head of human wisdom in Hampton, and called for the purpose on the great Dr. Burley himself. Him she encountered as he was emerging from his front door. "Does Hampton actually uphold the Westminster Confession?" she asked.
"Certainly, my dear madam, so does Brigston."