“First Question,” said Dr. Hicok, with steadiness: “Reconcile the foreknowledge and the fore-ordination of God with the free will of man?”
“I thought so, of course,” remarked the other. Then he looked straight into the doctor’s keen little grey eyes with his deep melancholy black ones, and raised his slender fore-finger. “Most readily. The reconciliation is your own conscience, doctor! Do what you know to be right, and you will find that there is nothing to reconcile—that you and your Maker have no debates to settle!”
The words were spoken with a weighty solemnity and conviction that were even awful. The doctor had a conscience, though he had found himself practically forced, for the sake of success, to use a good deal of constraint with it—in fact, to lock it up, as it were, in a private mad-house, on an unfounded charge of lunacy. But the obstinate thing would not die, and would not lose its wits; and now all of a sudden, and from the very last quarter where it was to be expected, came a summons before whose intensity of just requirement no bolts could stand. The doctor’s conscience walked out of her prison, and came straight up to the field of battle, and said—
“Give up the first question.”
And he obeyed.
“I confess it,” he said. “But how could I have expected a great basic truth both religiously and psychologically so, from—from you?”
“Ah! my dear sir,” was the reply, “you have erred in that line of thought, exactly as many others have. The truth is one and the same, to God, man, and devil.”
“Second Question,” said Dr. Hicok. “Reconcile the development theory, connection of natural selection and sexual relation, with the responsible immortality of the soul.”
“Unquestionably,” assented the other, as if to say, “Just as I expected.”
“No theory of creation has any logical connection with any doctrine of immortality. What was the motive of creation?—that would be a question! If you had asked me that! But the question, ‘Where did men come from?’ has no bearing on the question, ‘Have they any duties now that they are here?’ The two are reconciled, because they do not differ. You can’t state any inconsistency between a yard measure and a fifty-six pound weight.”