We were silent. At last I said: "Yes, that makes much which was dark quite clear to me."
"Oh?" he asked.
I answered slowly: "Not many men, you know, even in your profession, have really suffered. That is why they do not feel the difficulty which you feel in desiring suffering for others."
He threw up his head exactly as if I had hit him on the jaw: "It's weakness in me, I know," he said.
"I should have rather called it weakness in them. But suppose you are right, and that it's weakness not to be able to desire promiscuous suffering for others, would you go further and say that it is Christian for those, who have not experienced a certain kind of suffering, to force that particular kind on others?"
He sat silent for a full minute, trying evidently to reach to the bottom of my thought.
"Surely not," he said at last, "except as ministers of God's laws."
"You do not then think that it is Christian for the husband of such a woman to keep her in that state of suffering—not being, of course, a minister of God?"
He began stammering at that: "I—I——" he said. "No; that is, I think not-not Christian. No, certainly."
"Then, such a marriage, if persisted in, makes of the wife indeed a
Christian, but of the husband—the reverse."