energies I may or may not have, I know one thing for certain, that I
could not devote them to anything else I should think entirely worth
doing. Indeed nothing else seems interesting enough--nothing to
repay the labour, but the telling of my fellow-men about the one man
who is the truth, and to know whom is the life. Even if there be no
hereafter, I would live my time believing in a grand thing that
ought to be true if it is not. No facts can take the place of
truths, and if these be not truths, then is the loftiest part of our
nature a waste. Let me hold by the better than the actual, and fall
into nothingness off the same precipice with Jesus and John and Paul
and a thousand more, who were lovely in their lives, and with their
death make even the nothingness into which they have passed like the
garden of the Lord. I will go further, Polwarth, and say, I would
rather die for evermore believing as Jesus believed, than live for
evermore believing as those that deny him. If there be no God, I
feel assured that existence is and could be but a chaos of
contradictions, whence can emerge nothing worthy to be called a
truth, nothing worth living for.--No, I will not give up my curacy.
I will teach that which IS good, even if there should be no God to
make a fact of it, and I will spend my life on it, in the growing
hope, which MAY become assurance, that there is indeed a perfect
God, worthy of being the Father of Jesus Christ, and that it was
BECAUSE they are true, that these things were lovely to me and to so
many men and women, of whom some have died for them, and some would
be yet ready to die."

"I thank my God to hear you say so. Nor will you stand still there,"
said Polwarth. "But here comes Mr. Drew!"