“Well, sir, Bobby Hunt, as he were usually called, though he preferred to be spoken to as Mr. Hunt, had a cottage on the hills. He were a man as always talked very big. He’d once been a gentleman’s butler, and had seen how the gentlefolks went on. So he liked to make things about him seem bigger than they really was. One day, in the back end of the year, he met me in the town, and asked me why I’d never been over to see his conservatory and flower-garden. I said I’d come over some day, and so I did.—‘I’m come to see your flower-garden,’ says I.—‘Come along,’ says he; ‘only, you mustn’t expect too much.’—‘’Tain’t likely,’ says I; but I weren’t exactly prepared for what I did see, or rather didn’t see. At the back of his cottage was a little bit of ground, with a few potatoes and stumps of cabbages in it, all very untidy; and he takes me to the end of this, and says, ‘There’s my flower-garden.’—‘Where?’ says I.—‘There,’ says he.—‘I can see lots of weeds,’ says I, ‘but scarce anything else.’—‘Oh,’ he says, ‘it only wants the weeds clearing off, and you’ll find more flowers than you think for.’—It were pretty much the same with the gent’s lecture. He showed us plenty of infidel weeds; but as for the Scripture flowers, they was so smothered by the sceptical objections, it’d take a sharp eye to notice ’em at all.”
“You don’t think, then, my friend,” asked the doctor, “that this apologetic style—this parade of candour in stating the views and objections of the sceptical—is of much use among the people of Crossbourne?”
“No use at all, sir, here or anywhere else, you may depend upon it. We don’t want such candour as that. The sceptics and, their creeds and their objections can take care of themselves. We want just to have the simple truth set before us.”
“I quite agree with you,” said the doctor: “timid defence is more damaging to the cause of truth than open attack.”
“I believe you, sir. Suppose I were to ask you to employ one of my mates, and you was to ask me if I could give him a good character; what would you think of him if I were to say, ‘Well, I’ve a good opinion of him myself, and he’s honest and all right, for anything that I know to the contrary; but I should like you to know that John Styles don’t think him over honest, and Anthony Birks told me the other day as he wouldn’t trust him further than he could see him; and though Styles and Birks aren’t no friends of mine, still they’re very respectable men, and highly thought of by some. But, for all that, I hope you’ll employ my mate, for I’ve a very high opinion of him myself on the whole’? If I were to give you such a character of my mate, would it dispose you to engage him? I fancy not. But this is just how some of these gents recommends the Scriptures in their lectures and their books. It’s my honest conviction, doctor, they’re not loyal believers in God’s truth themselves, or they’d never defend it in this left-handed way.”
“I’m afraid what you say is too true,” said Dr Prosser; “and I shall not forget our conversation on this subject.—What a lovely day!” he continued, turning to Mr Maltby. “What a contrast to the day on which I last passed through Crossbourne.”
“When was that?” asked his friend; “I did not know that you had been in this neighbourhood before.”
“Oh, I was only passing through by rail on my way to town. Let me see; I was coming from the north, and passed your station late at night on the 23rd of last December.”
“Ah, Thomas!” said the vicar, “that is a night we cannot forget.—Poor Joe Wright! His was a terrible end indeed.”
“What! A man killed on the line that night near Crossbourne?” said the doctor. “I remember having my attention drawn to it more particularly, because it must have happened a few minutes after I passed over the very same spot; so I gathered from the account of the accident in the Times.”