"Might as well ease him of this," he said; "he will do somebody a hurt when he awakens."
Opening the door, he stepped into the barroom, and, reeling up to a table near the door, called for another drink. Kavasji once more turned his back, and with the noiseless rapidity of a cat the robber vanished into the street, which was already beginning to awaken.
He dashed down a small alley, and only stopped after he had run for about half an hour. "I guess," said he, "Steve Lamport, you are born again." Then turning down a broad street, he walked slowly forward in the direction of the nearest railway station.
CHAPTER VIII.
[CAST OUT FROM THE FOLD.]
A council, of which Galbraith was ex-officio president, controlled the affairs of the tabernacle, and adjudicated on all offences committed by members of the congregation against the rules of the body.
As far as he was able the pastor tempered the decrees of the council with mercy, and there was yet another thing which made this body weak in comparison with similar institutions in the West. This was the natural shallowness of the East Indian, and his inability to feel or think deeply. In this manner the gloomy tenets of a religious sect, which called themselves the elect of heaven, and condemned all others to eternal torment, were softened.
The instances were rare in which those terrible mental struggles so often described in the annals of Methodism took place. At the same time the belief in the direct interposition of the Creator in the smallest matters was intensified almost beyond imagination, and meanings were often assigned to the most ordinary actions of everyday life which, if they were not sad, would be laughable to contemplate.
Galbraith was an unconscious doubter, and he was perhaps the only man there whose faith, unknown to himself, was tottering on its foundations. In a dim sort of way he was conscious that there was something wrong with himself, and the impulse to throw off the chains of the cheerless belief to which he was bound was at times almost greater than he could endure. It was his hourly duty to exhort his flock to find Christ. Many of them asserted that they had made the discovery, and looked with complacent satisfaction on the certainty of future salvation.
But while John Galbraith was raising his voice and preaching to his people, there was that within him that told him that he himself was unable to find the haven of rest, and a longing for a warmer belief, one full of love and charity, would come upon him.