Instead of answering directly, Aunt Elsie asked, a moment after:
“Are you always well received,—you and your books?”
“Oh, yes; in this part of the country, always,—quite as well as other pedlars are, and sometimes far better, for my work’s sake. I have been in places where the reception I met with was something worse than cold. But I now and then met, even in those places, some that welcomed me so warmly for the work’s sake I was doing as to make me little heed the scoffs of the others.”
“You are sent out by a society, I think?” said Aunt Elsie. “It is mostly Bibles that you sell?”
“Yes; it’s mostly Bibles that I carry with me.”
There was a pause. The colporteur sat looking into the red embers, with the smile on his face which Christie had found so attractive. In a little while Aunt Elsie, not without some hesitation, said:
“And is all the time and trouble and money spent by this society worth their while?”
Aunt Elsie would have been shocked had any one expressed a doubt of her sincere respect for the Bible. Her respect was hereditary. Not one day in her childhood or womanhood had passed in which she had not heard or read some portion of the Holy Book. Nothing could have induced her to part with one of the several Bibles that had been in her possession for years. One had been hers when a girl at school, one had lain in her seat at the kirk for many a year, and a third had lain on her parlour-table and been used by her at family worship when she kept house for herself. It would have seemed to her like sacrilege to let them pass into other hands. That the superiority of the Scottish people over all other nations (in which superiority she firmly believed) was in some way owing to the influence of God’s Word, read and understood, she did not doubt. But her ideas of the matter were by no means satisfactory even to herself. That the Bible, read and understood, should ever change the mixed multitudes of her new and adopted country into a people grave and earnest and steadfast for the right, was altogether beyond her thought. The humble labours of this man, going about from house to house, to place perhaps in careless or unwilling hands the Bible (God’s Word though she acknowledged it to be), seemed a very small matter—a means very inadequate to the end desired. So it was a doubtful and hesitating assent that she yielded to the reply of Mr Craig in the form of a question.
“Is not God’s Word His appointed instrument for the salvation of men? And will He not bless it to that end? I do not doubt it,” continued Mr Craig. “How can I doubt it, in the face of the promise that His word shall not return unto Him void—that it shall prosper in that whereunto He sendeth it? I never let a Bible pass from my hands without asking from God that it may be made the means of a lasting blessing to at least one soul. And I have faith to believe that my prayer will be heard and granted.”
Aunt Elsie’s motions expressed some surprise.