ng things than we dream of.
Tell it us again now. Don't strain at gnats like want of faith and
resignation, and swallow such a camel as twenty or thirty deaths.
It's no concern of mine; I've seen plenty of people murdered, and may
again: I am accustomed to it; but if it's not your concern, what on
earth you are here for is more than I can tell."

"You are right--you are right; but how to put it on religious
grounds--"

Tom whistled again.

"If your doctrines cannot be made to fit such plain matters as twenty
deaths, _tant pis pour eux_. If they have nothing to say on such
scientific facts, why the facts must take care of themselves, and the
doctrines may, for aught I care, go and--. But I won't be really rude.
Only think over the matter. If you are God's minister, you ought to
have something to say about God's view of a fact which certainly
involves the lives of his creatures, not by twos and threes, but by
tens of thousands."

So Frank went home, and thought it through; and went once and again to
Thurnall, and condescended to ask his opinion of what he had said,
and whether he said ill or well. What Thurnall answered was--"Whether
that's sound Church doctrine is your business; but if it be, I'll
say with the man there in the Acts--what was his name?--'Almost thou
persuadest me to be a Christian.'"

"Would God that you were one! for you would make a right good one."

"Humph! at least you see what you can do, if you'll only face fact as
it stands, and talk about the realities of life. I'll puff your sermon
beforehand, I assure you, and bring all I can to hear it."

So Frank preached a noble sermon, most rational, and most spiritual
withal; but he, too, like his tutor, took little by his motion.

All the present fruit upon which he had to congratulate himself was,
that the Brianite preacher denounced him in chapel next Sunday as a
German Rationalist, who impiously pretended to explain away the Lord's
visitation into a carnal matter of drains, and pipes, and gases, and
such like; and that his rival of another denomination, who was a
fanatic on the teetotal question, denounced him as bitterly for
supporting the cause of drunkenness, by attributing cholera to want of
cleanliness, while all rational people knew that its true source was
intemperance. Poor Frank! he had preached against drunkenness many
a time and oft: but because he would not add a Mohammedan eleventh
commandment to those ten which men already find d