"The stage of to-day," he began, "as I know it from the newspapers and the billboards, never seemed so vulgar and damnable as it does now after your glorious idealization of it. I, as a preacher of righteousness, must judge of such an institution externally, by its effects. I have weighed the stage in the balance, John, and I have found it wanting."
This time there was something in the minister's calm tone, in the cool detachment of his point of view, that held John silent.
"Isn't it possible," the minister continued, in a kind of sweet reasonableness, "that there is something insidiously demoralizing or infectious about it? Take your own experience, John. You are a Christian man. You have been soaking yourself in the atmosphere of the stage for a couple of weeks. Examine your soul now, and answer me if you are as fine, as pure a man as you were before you went there. Are you?"
"Why, of course I am," ejaculated Hampstead impulsively.
"Think," commanded the minister, in low, compelling tones; for having controlled his emotions the better, he was just now the stronger of the two. "Are you—John?"
Hampstead opened his mouth eagerly, but the minister's repressing gesture would not let him speak. The young man was literally compelled to think, to question his own soul for a moment, and as he searched, a telltale flush came upon his cheek, and then his glance fell. There was an embarrassing moment of silence, during which this flush of mortification deepened perceptibly.
The minister was a wise man. He read the sign and asked no questions. He upbraided nothing, cackled no exultant, "I told you so."
"Let us pray, Brother John," he proposed after the interval, and knelt by his chair with a hand upon Hampstead's shoulder. The prayer was short.
"Oh, Lord," the man of God petitioned, "help us to know where the right stops and the wrong begins. Keep us back from the sin of presumption. Give thy servants wisdom to serve thy cause well and work no ill to it by over-zeal or over-confidence. Amen!"
Doctor Campbell might have been praying for himself. But John knew that this was only a part of his tact.