and is
always poking fun at us who do. The professor is a full-fledged German
Darwinist, and believes in nothing that I know of, unless it is himself.
Esther took to society, and I'm told by my young people that she was one
of the best waltzers in town until she gave it up for painting and
dinners. Her set never bothered their heads about the church. Of the
whole family, Mrs. Murray is the only one who has any weight in the
parish, and she has a good deal, but if I know her, she won't approve
the match any more than the rest, and you must expect to get the
reputation of being unorthodox. Only yesterday old Tarbox told me he
thought you were rather weak on the Pentateuch, and the best I could say
was that now-a-days we must choose between weak doctrines and weak
brains, and of the two, I preferred to let up on the Pentateuch."

All this was the more annoying to Mr. Hazard because his orthodoxy was
his strong point. Like most vigorous-minded men, seeing that there was
no stopping-place between dogma and negation, he preferred to accept
dogma. Of all weaknesses he most disliked timid and half-hearted faith.
He would rather have jumped at once to Strong's pure denial, than yield
an inch to the argument that a mystery was to be paltered with because
it could not be explained. The idea that these gossiping parishioners of
his should undertake to question his orthodoxy, tried his temper. He
knew that they disliked his intimacy with artists and scientific people,
but he was not afraid of his parish, and meant that his parish should be
a little afraid of him. He preferred to give them some cause of
fault-finding in order to keep them awake. His greatest annoyance came
from another side. If such gossip should reach Esther's ears, it would
go far towards driving her beyond his control, and he knew that even
without this additional alarm, it was with the greatest difficulty he
could quiet and restrain her. The threatened disaster was terrible
enough when looked at as a mere question of love, but it went much
deeper. He was ready to override criticism and trample on remonstrance
if he could but succeed in drawing her into the fold, because his
lifelong faith, that all human energies belonged to the church, was on
trial, and, if it broke down in a test so supreme as that of marriage,
the blow would go far to prostrate him forever. What was his religious
energy worth if it did not carry him successfully through such stress,
when the