Paul Faber, Surgeon | Page 7

duty to our neighbor is half the law, and
there is some help in medicine, though I confess it is no science yet,
and we are but dabblers."
"But," said Mr. Drake, "I don't choose to accept the help of one who
looks upon all who think with me as a set of humbugs, and regards
those who deny every thing as the only honest men."
"By Jove! sir, I take you for an honest man, or I should never trouble
my head about you. What I say of such as you is, that, having inherited
a lot of humbug, you don't know it for such, and do the best you can

with it."
"If such is 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