ad
for many a day. It added much also to his satisfaction with the
experiment, that, instead of sleeping, as his custom was, after dinner,
he was able to read without drowsiness even. Perhaps Dorothy's
experience was not quite so satisfactory, for she looked weary when they
sat down to tea.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE PARLOR AGAIN.

Faber had never made any effort to believe in a divine order of
things--indeed he had never made strenuous effort to believe in any
thing. It had never at all occurred to him that it might be a duty to
believe. He was a kindly and not a repellent man, but when he doubted
another, he doubted him; it never occurred to him that perhaps he ought
to believe in that man. There must be a lack of something, where a man's
sense of duty urges him mainly to denial. His existence is a positive
thing--his main utterance ought to be positive. I would not forget that
the nature of a denial may be such as to involve a strong positive.

To Faber it seemed the true and therefore right thing, to deny the
existence of any such being as men call God. I heartily admit that such
denial may argue a nobler condition than that of the man who will reason
for the existence of what he calls a Deity, but omits to order his way
after what he professes to believe His will. At the same time, his
conclusion that he was not bound to believe in any God, seemed to lift a
certain weight off the heart of the doctor--the weight, namely, that
gathers partly from the knowledge of having done wrong things, partly
from the consciousness of not _being_ altogether right. It would be very
unfair, however, to leave the impression that this was the origin of all
the relief the doctor derived from the conclusion. For thereby he got
rid, in a great measure at least, of the notion--horrible in proportion
to the degree in which it is actually present to the mind, although, I
suspect, it is not, in a true sense, credible to any mind--of a cruel,
careless, unjust Being at the head of affairs. That such a notion should
exist at all, is mainly the fault of the mass of so-called religious
people, for they seem to believe in, and certainly proclaim such a God.
In their excuse it may be urged they tell the tale as it was told to
them; but the fault lies in this, that, with the gospel in their hands,
they have yet lived in such disregard of its precepts, that they have
never discovered their representation of the God of Truth to be such,
that the