Paul Faber, Surgeon | Page 7

your opinion of me--and I have no right to complain of it in my own person--I should just like to ask you one question about another," said Mr. Drake: "Do you in your heart believe that Jesus Christ was an impostor?"
"I believe, if the story about him be true, that he was a well-meaning man, enormously self-deceived."
"Your judgment seems to me enormously illogical. That any ordinarily good man should so deceive himself, appears to my mind altogether impossible and incredible."
"Ah! but he was an extraordinarily good man."
"Therefore the more likely to think too much of himself?"
"Why not? I see the same thing in his followers all about me."
"Doubtless the servant shall be as his master," said the minister, and closed his mouth, resolved to speak no more. But his conscience woke, and goaded him with the truth that had come from the mouth of its enemy--the reproach his disciples brought upon their master, for, in the judgment of the world, the master is as his disciples.
"You Christians," the doctor went on, "seem to me to make yourselves, most unnecessarily, the slaves of a fancied ideal. I have no such ideal to contemplate; yet I am not aware that you do better by each other than I am ready to do for any man. I can't pretend to love every body, but I do my best for those I can help. Mr. Drake, I would gladly serve you."
The old man said nothing. His mood was stormy. Would he accept life itself from the hand of him who denied his Master?--seek to the powers of darkness for cure?--kneel to Antichrist for favor, as if he and not Jesus were lord of life and death? Would he pray a man to whom the Bible was no better than a book of ballads, to come betwixt him and the evils of growing age and disappointment, to lighten for him the grasshopper, and stay the mourners as they went about his streets! He had half turned, and was on the point of walking silent into the house, when he bethought himself of the impression it would make on the unbeliever, if he were thus to meet the offer of his kindness. Half turned, he stood hesitating.
"I have a passion for therapeutics," persisted the doctor; "and if I can do any thing to ease the yoke upon the shoulders of my fellows--"
Mr. Drake did not hear the end of the sentence: he heard instead, somewhere in his soul, a voice saying, "My yoke is easy, and my burden is light." He could not let Faber help him.
"Doctor, you have the great gift of a kind heart," he began, still half turned from him.
"My heart is like other people's," interrupted Faber. "If a man wants help, and I've got it, what more natural than that we should come together?"
There was in the doctor an opposition to every thing that had if it were but the odor of religion about it, which might well have suggested doubt of his own doubt, and weakness buttressing itself with assertion But the case was not so. What untruth there was in him was of another and more subtle kind. Neither must it be supposed that he was a propagandist, a proselytizer. Say nothing, and the doctor said nothing. Fire but a saloon pistol, however, and off went a great gun in answer--with no bravado, for the doctor was a gentleman.
"Mr. Faber," said the minister, now turning toward him, and looking him full in the face, "if you had a friend whom you loved with all your heart, would you be under obligation to a man who counted your friendship a folly?"
"The cases are not parallel. Say the man merely did not believe your friend was alive, and there could be no insult to either."
"If the denial of his being in life, opened the door to the greatest wrongs that could be done him--and if that denial seemed to me to have its source in some element of moral antagonism to him--could I accept--I put it to yourself, Mr. Faber--could I accept assistance from that man? Do not take it ill. You prize honesty; so do I: ten times rather would I cease to live than accept life at the hand of an enemy to my Lord and Master."
"I am very sorry, Mr. Drake," said the doctor; "but from your point of view I suppose you are right. Good morning."
He turned Ruber from the minister's door, went off quickly, and entered his own stable-yard just as the rector's carriage appeared at the further end of the street.

CHAPTER III
.
THE MANOR HOUSE.
Mr. Bevis drove up to the inn, threw the reins to his coachman, got down, and helped his wife out of the carriage. Then they parted, she to take her gift of flowers