We Two | Page 9

small and unexacting congregation on Sundays, he could do pretty
much as he pleased. But for his son he was ambitious. Ever since his
sixteenth year--when, at a public meeting the boy had, to the

astonishment of every one, suddenly sprung to his feet and contradicted
a false statement made by a great landowner as to the condition of the
cottages on his estate--the father had foreseen future triumphs for his
son. For the speech, though unpremeditated, was marvelously clever,
and there was a power in it not to be accounted for by a certain ring of
indignation; it was the speech of a future orator.
Then, too, Luke had by this time shown signs of religious zeal, a zeal
which his father, though far from attempting to copy, could not but
admire. His Sunday services over, he relapsed into the comfortable,
easy-going life of a country gentleman for the rest of the week; but his
son was indefatigable, and, though little more than a boy himself,
gathered round him the roughest lads of the village, and by his
eloquence, and a certain peculiar personal fascination which he retained
all his life, absolutely forced them to listen to him. The father augured
great things for him, and invariably prophesied that he would "live to
see him a bishop yet."
It was a settled thing that he should take Holy Orders, and for some
time Raeburn was only too happy to carry out his father's plans. In his
very first term at Cambridge, however, he began to feel doubts, and,
becoming convinced that he could never again accept the doctrines in
which he had been educated, he told his father that he must give up all
thought of taking Orders.
Now, unfortunately, Mr. Raeburn was the very last man to understand
or sympathize with any phase of life through which he had not himself
passed. He had never been troubled with religious doubts; skepticism
seemed to him monstrous and unnatural. He met the confession, which
his son had made in pain and diffidence, with a most deplorable want
of tact. In answer to the perplexing questions which were put to him, he
merely replied testily that Luke had been overworking himself, and that
he had no business to trouble his head with matters which were beyond
him, and would fain have dismissed the whole affair at once.
"But," urged the son, "how is it possible for me to turn my back on
these matters when I am preparing to teach them?"
"Nonsense," replied the father, angrily. "Have not I taught all my life,
preached twice a Sunday these thirty years without perplexing myself
with your questionings? Be off to your shooting, and your golf, and let
me have no more of this morbid fuss."

No more was said; but Luke Raeburn, with his doubts and questions
shut thus into himself, drifted rapidly from skepticism to the most
positive form of unbelief. When he next came home for the long
vacation, his father was at length awakened to the fact that the son,
upon whom all his ambition was set, was hopelessly lost to the Church;
and with this consciousness a most bitter sense of disappointment rose
in his heart. His pride, the only side of fatherhood which he possessed,
was deeply wounded, and his dreams of honorable distinction were laid
low. His wrath was great. Luke found the home made almost
unbearable to him. His college career was of course at an end, for his
father would not hear of providing him with the necessary funds now
that he had actually confessed his atheism. He was hardly allowed to
speak to his sisters, every request for money to start him in some
profession met with a sharp refusal, and matters were becoming so
desperate that he would probably have left the place of his own accord
before long, had not Mr. Raeburn himself put an end to a state of things
which had grown insufferable.
With some lurking hope, perhaps, of convincing his son, he resolved
upon trying a course of argument. To do him justice he really tried to
prepare himself for it, dragged down volumes of dusty divines, and got
up with much pains Paley's "watch" argument. There was some honesty,
even perhaps a very little love, in his mistaken endeavors; but he did
not recognize that while he himself was unforgiving, unloving, harsh,
and self-indulgent, all his arguments for Christianity were of necessity
null and void. He argued for the existence of a perfectly loving, good
God, all the while treating his son with injustice and tyranny. Of course
there could be only one result from a debate between the two. Luke
Raeburn with his honesty, his great abilities, his gift of reasoning,
above all his thorough earnestness, had the