“She’s always up to such tricks!” Helen informed Bruce. “Paper dolls are only one item of Millie’s good works.”
“Be careful!” Millicent admonished. “I could tell some stories on you that might embarrass you terribly.” She turned to Bruce with a lifting of the brows that implied their hostess’s many shameless excursions in philanthropy.
“How grand it would be if we could all talk about serious things—life, religion and things like that—as Millie does,” remarked Helen. “Most people talk of religion as though it were something disgraceful.”
“Or they take the professional tone of the undertaker telling a late pallbearer where to sit,” Bruce added, “and the pallbearer is always deaf and insists on getting into the wrong place and sitting on someone’s hat.”
“How jolly! Anything to cheer up a funeral,” said Helen. “Go on, Millie, and talk some more. You’re a lot more comforting than Doctor Lindley.”
“The Doctor’s fine,” said Millicent spiritedly. “I don’t go to church because half of me is heathen, I suppose.” She paused as though a little startled by the confession. “There are things about churches—some of the hymns, the creed, the attempts to explain the Scriptures—that don’t need explaining—that rub me the wrong way. But it isn’t fair to criticize Doctor Lindley or any other minister who’s doing the best he can to help the world when the times are against him. No one has a harder job than a Christian minister of his training and traditions who really knows what’s the trouble with the world and the church but is in danger of being burned as a heretic if he says what he thinks.”
“People can’t believe any more, can they, what their grandfathers believed? It’s impossible—with science and everything,” suggested Helen vaguely.
“Why should they?” asked Millicent. “I liked to believe that God moves forward with the world. He has outgrown His own churches; it’s their misfortune that they don’t realize it. And Jesus, the Beautiful One, walks through the modern world weighted down with a heavier cross than the one he died on—bigotry, intolerance, hatred—what a cruel thing that men should hate one another in His name! I’ve wondered sometimes what Jesus must think of all the books that have been written to explain Him—mountains of books! Jesus is the only teacher the world ever had who got His whole story into one word—a universal word, an easy word to say, and the word that has inspired all the finest deeds of man. He rested His case on that, thinking that anything so simple would never be misunderstood. At the hospital one day I heard a mother say to her child, a pitiful little scrap who was doomed to die, ‘I love you so!’ and the wise, understanding little baby said, ‘Me know you do.’ I think that’s an answer to the charge that Christianity is passing out. It can’t, you see, because it’s founded on the one thing in the world that can never die.”
The room was very still. The maid, who had been arrested in the serving of the dinner by a gesture from Helen, furtively made the sign of the cross. The candle flames bent to some imperceptible stirring of the quiet air. Bruce experienced a sense of vastness, of the immeasurable horizons of Millicent’s God and a world through which the Beautiful One wandered still, symbolizing the ineffable word of His gospel that was not for one people, or one sect, not to be bound up into one creed, but written into the hearts of all men as their guide to happiness. It seemed to him that the girl’s words were part of some rite of purification that had cleansed and blessed the world.
“I hadn’t thought of it in quite that way,” said Bruce thoughtfully.