ke in here in a warmer tone: "I know you better than you know
yourself! Do you think that I, whose business it is to witness every day
of my life the power of my faith, am going to hesitate before a trifle
like your common, daily, matter-of-course fears and doubts, such as have
risen and been laid in every mind that was worth being called one, ever
since minds existed?"

"Have they always been laid?" asked Esther gravely.

"Always!" answered Hazard firmly; "provided the doubter wanted to lay
them. It is a simple matter of will!"

"Would you have gone into the ministry if you had been tormented by them
as I am?" she asked.

"I am not afraid to lay bare my conscience to you," he replied becoming
cool again, and willing perhaps to stretch his own points of conscience
in the effort to control hers. "I suppose the clergyman hardly exists
who has not been tormented by doubts. As for myself, if I could have
removed my doubts by so simple a step as that of becoming an atheist, I
should have done it, no matter what scandal or punishment had followed.
I studied the subject thoroughly, and found that for one doubt removed,
another was raised, only to reach at last a result more inconceivable
than that reached by the church, and infinitely more hopeless besides.
What do you gain by getting rid of one incomprehensible only to put a
greater one in its place, and throw away your only hope besides? The
atheists offer no sort of bargain for one's soul. Their scheme is all
loss and no gain. At last both they and I come back to a confession of
ignorance; the only difference between us is that my ignorance is joined
with a faith and hope."

Esther was staggered by this view of the subject, and had to fall back
on her common-places: "But you make me say every Sunday that I believe
in things I don't believe at all."

"But I suppose you believe at last in something, do you not?" asked
Hazard. "Somewhere there must be common ground for us to stand on; and
our church makes very large--I think too large, allowances for
difference. For my own part, I accept tradition outright, because I
think it wiser to receive a mystery than to weaken faith; but no one
exacts such strictness from you. There are scores of clergymen to-day in
our pulpits who are in my eyes little better than open skeptics, yet I
am not allowed to refuse communion with them. Why should you refuse it
with me? You must at last trust in some mysterious and humanly
incomprehens