Spiritually you are more evolved than any
other person in this town and with you doubting I cannot get the others
to see. You are so gorgeous and so brilliant that you blind them all.
They have always followed your lead--up or down. There are a few like
Mother Spurlock who have gained their Christ knowledge through
suffering, but they are not of the calibre to help others to gain
theirs. With your hand in mine I can make this whole community see and
know; separated from you, you going one way and I another, I can do
nothing. You simply short-circuit my force and I am helpless without
you." He spoke very simply and directly down into my heart.

"That is not true; no one person is responsible for any spiritual
decision that another makes," I answered hotly with an awful sense of
having had a burden placed on my shoulders that they could not carry.

"The old 'brother's keeper' question will never be settled in any but
the right way," he answered me straight from the shoulder. "You are
responsible for the attitude of this whole town towards the cause I
represent and they'll have to wait for your eyes to be opened and for
you to make them see."

"You minimize yourself," I answered quickly, for in some curious way it
hurt me to see that great strong man sit at my feet baffled by a force
that he declared to be in me but which I did not acknowledge or
understand.

"They were listening to me--from a distance, as it were--and I might
have made them hear if you had not come home and thrown them back into
the old pleasant groove of non-action and non-belief. In a week you had
swept away all I had builded in six months." He spoke with simple
conviction and not a trace of the bitterness that might have been in the
arraignment.

"Everybody in this town adores you," were the words that gushed out of
my heart for his comforting before I could stop them. "That is one
reason I have acted as I have. I do not, I cannot believe that the
religion which is great enough to bring the redemption of the whole race
into a desirable immortality can be composed of nine-tenths emotion,
with which all of them were following your beautiful voice and beautiful
eyes and beautiful church and beautiful words. If I am to be saved it
will be by something sterner than that; it will be something that makes
me sweat drops of blood from my mind, take up a hard cross of duty and
work, work to make the fibre of my soul strong enough to enjoy the
robust kind