For Frank already believed his doctrines, as an educated London parson
of course would; was shocked to hear that they were likely to become
fact so soon and so fearfully; offered to do all he could: but
confessed that he could do nothing.

"I have been hinting to them, ever since I came, improvements in
cleanliness, in ventilation, and so forth: but I have been utterly
unheeded: and bully me as you will, Doctor, about my cramming
doctrines down their throats, and roaring like a Pope's bull, I assure
you that, on sanitary reform, my roaring was as of a sucking dove, and
ought to have prevailed, if soft persuasion can."

"You were a dove where you ought to have been a bull, and a bull where
you ought to have been a dove. But roar now, if ever you roared, in
the pulpit and out. Why not preach to them on it next Sunday?"

"Well, I'd give a lecture gladly, if I could get any one to come and
hear it; but that you could do better than me."

"I'll lecture them myself, and show them bogies, if my quarter-inch
will do its work. If they want seeing to believe, see they shall; I
have half-a-dozen specimens of water already which will astonish them.
Let me lecture, you must preach."

"You must know, that there is a feeling,--you would call it a
prejudice,--against introducing such purely secular subjects into the
pulpit."

Tom gave a long whistle.

"Pardon me, Mr. Headley; you are a man of sense; and I can speak to
you as one human being to another, which I have seldom been able to do
with your respected cloth."

"Say on; I shall not be frightened."

"Well, don't you put up the Ten Commandments in your Church?"

"Yes."

"And don't one of them run: 'Thou shalt not kill.'"

"Well?"

"And is not murder a moral offence--what you call a sin?"

"_Sans doute_."

"If you saw your parishioners in the habit of cutting each other's
throats, or their own, shouldn't you think that a matter spiritual
enough to be a fit subject for a little of the drum ecclesiastic?"

"Well?"

"Well? Ill! There are your parishioners about to commit wholesale
murder and suicide, and is that a secular question? If they don't know
the fact, is not that all the more reason for your telling them of it?
You pound away, as I warned you once, at the sins of which they are
just as well aware as you; why on earth do you hold your tongue about
the sins of which they are not aware? You tell us every Sunday that we
do Heaven only knows how many more wro