and
that's why we've got it."

"But the mean dishonesty of it all!" Theron broke forth. He moved about
again, his bowed face drawn as with bodily suffering. "The low-born
tricks, the hypocrisies! I feel as if I could never so much as look at
these people here again without disgust."

"Oh, now that's where you make your mistake," Sister Soulsby put in
placidly. "These people of yours are not a whit worse than other people.
They've got their good streaks and their bad streaks, just like the rest
of us. Take them by and large, they're quite on a par with other folks
the whole country through."

"I don't believe there's another congregation in the Conference
where--where this sort of thing would have been needed, or, I might say,
tolerated," insisted Theron.

"Perhaps you're right," the other assented; "but that only shows that
your people here are different from the others--not that they're worse.
You don't seem to realize: Octavius, so far as the Methodists are
concerned, is twenty or thirty years behind the times. Now that has its
advantages and its disadvantages. The church here is tough and coarse,
and full of grit, like a grindstone; and it does ministers from other
more niminy-piminy places all sorts of good to come here once in a while
and rub themselves up against it. It scours the rust and mildew off from
their piety, and they go back singing and shouting. But of course
it's had a different effect with you. You're razor-steel instead of
scythe-steel, and the grinding's been too rough and violent for you.
But you see what I mean. These people here really take their primitive
Methodism seriously. To them the profession of entire sanctification is
truly a genuine thing. Well, don't you see, when people just know that
they're saved, it doesn't seem to them to matter so much what they
do. They feel that ordinary rules may well be bent and twisted in the
interest of people so supernaturally good as they are. That's pure human
nature. It's always been like that."

Theron paused in his walk to look absently at her. "That thought,"
he said, in a vague, slow way, "seems to be springing up in my path,
whichever way I turn. It oppresses me, and yet it fascinates me--this
idea that the dead men have known more than we know, done more than we
do; that there is nothing new anywhere; that--"

"Never mind the dead men," interposed Sister Soulsby. "Just you come
and sit down here. I hate to have you straddling about the roo