"We believe in the essentials; and they are few."
"How shall we prove them?"
"As the Catholic Church proves them. She holds the whole truth tangled in the midst of her errors, like a fly in a spider's web."
Mr. Southard sat a moment, looking steadily, almost sternly, at his companion.
"Then you and I have no mission," he said. "We are not divinely called."
"Whithersoever a man goes, there is he called," said the doctor, sighing faintly. "We among the rest. We have a mission, too, and a noble one. We make people keep the Sabbath, which, without us, would fall into disuse; we remind them of their duties; we check immorality; we keep before the eyes of worldlings the fact that there is another world than this. In short, we spend our breath in keeping alive the sacred fire on the desecrated altar of the human soul. Is that nothing?"
In speaking, the doctor lifted his head, and drew up his stately form. His voice trembled with feeling, and his eyes were full of indignant tears. His look was proud, almost defiant; yet seemed directed less against his companion, than combating some voice in his own soul. All the enthusiastic dreams of his youth, though they had long since been subdued, as he thought, by common sense and necessity, stirred in their graves at sound of the imperious questioning, at sight of the clear, searching eyes of this young visionary who fancied that in the troubled spirit of man the full orb of truth was to be reflected unblurred.
"In short," Mr. Southard said, rising to go, "you believe that the spirit of evil can propose a problem which the Holy Spirit cannot solve."
"Not so!" was the reply; "but the spirit of evil may propose a problem which the Holy Spirit may not choose to solve for us till the end of time."