"Nothing makes any difference to them, but it makes a very great difference to me to be allowed to teach and practise w-what I believe to be necessary."
"If I were the Bishop," said Ferlie, "I shouldn't be able to help feeling that you must know best and that you mattered more than he did. He has so much to encourage him. Does your brain never bother you into believing the work useless and the source of all your inspiration a dream?"
He crossed his knees, displaying a badly cobbled rent in the trailing uniform he loved too proudly to lay aside more often than was absolutely essential. "Even my poor intellect questions sometimes. Doubts come and go, but nothing can take away one's past spiritual experiences."
"I don't know that a single unlooked-for spiritual experience can influence a mind which leans naturally towards agnosticism," put in Cyprian suddenly. "There is a work-a-day agnosticism which satisfies most men, supported by certain ethics, coloured with what for nearly the last two thousand years has been regarded as Christianity.... It is not my fault if I have not a temperament which can rest content on Faith. I did not make my brain."
"That is just the point," said Ferlie. "You are incapable of making a single thing about yourself. But you are able, if you wish, to insist that your brain, and all the attributes of your particular temperament shall serve instead of rule you. Faith is within the reach of all who reach out towards it. The Christ, whose ethics you adopt, explained that whenever He met educated doubting men."
"But sometimes," said Jellybrand, "one fears to presume."
Ferlie saw that he was thinking of that night in the forest when she had defied him to test his own faith for her sake, and she replied,
"Perhaps that should be considered an experience especially given to me."
Unexpectedly, he chuckled.
"W-would you like to spend a happy hour now torturing our prisoner? It might entertain the invalid. I have often w-wondered w-what I should have done if he had not confessed and you had proceeded to carry out your intention of making a second St. Sebastian of him w-with revolver bullets."