ore to
me--far more, not less."

"In what way?" The preacher's voice was full of sympathy; but here, and
for the first time, Bart felt it was an unconscious trick. Sympathy was
assumed to help him to speak. The preacher could conceive of no divine
object of love that was not limited to the pattern he had learned to
dwell upon.

"I am not good at words," Toyner spoke humbly. "I took a long time to
write to you; I said it better than I could now, that God is far more
because He is a faithful Creator, responsible for us always, whatever we
do, to bring us to good. Now I do not need to keep dividing things and
people and thoughts into His and not-His. That was what it came to
before. You may say it didn't, but it did. And all we know about
Jesus--don't you see." (Bart raised his face with piteous, hunted
look)--"don't you see that what His life and death meant was--just what
I have told you? God doesn't hold back His robe, telling people what
they ought to do, and then judge them. He does not shrink from taking
sin on Himself to bring them through death to life. Doesn't your book
say so again and again and again?"

"God cannot sin!" cried the preacher, with the warmth of holy
indignation.

Toyner became calm with a momentary contempt of the other's lack of
understanding. "That goes without saying, or He would not be God."

"But that is what you have said in your letters."

There was silence in the room. The misery of his loneliness took hold of
Toyner till it almost felt like despair. Who was he, unlearned, very
sinful, even now shaken with the palsy of recent excess--who was he to
bandy words with a holy man? All words that came from his own lips that
hour seemed to him horribly profane. The new idea that possessed him was
what he lived by, and yet alone with it he did not gather strength from
it to walk upright.

"The father tempted the prodigal," he said, "when he gave him the
substance to waste with sinners. Did the father sin? The time had come
when nothing but temptation--yes, and sin too--could save. Most things,
sir, that you hold about God I can hold too. There are bad men, powerful
and seducing men, in the world; there may easily be unseen devils. There
is hell on earth, and I don't doubt but that there's the awfulest,
longest depth of the same kind of hell beyond. There's heaven on earth,
and all the love and pain of love we have tell us there's heaven beyond,
unspeakable and eternal; but, sir, when you