ster's wife, they must
therefore be the disciples of the Jewish carpenter, the eternal Son
of the Father of us all. Had he had more of the wisdom of the
serpent, he would not have carried them the New Testament as an
ending of strife, the words of the Lord as an enlightening law; he
would perhaps have known that to try too hard to make people good,
is one way to make them worse; that the only way to make them good
is to be good--remembering well the beam and the mote; that the time
for speaking comes rarely, the time for being never departs.

But in talking thus to Gibbie, the minister but rippled the air:
Gibbie was all the time pondering with himself where he had met the
same kind of thing, the same sort of person before. Nothing he said
had the slightest effect upon him. He was too familiar with truth
to take the yeasty bunghole of a working barrel for a fountain of
its waters. The unseen Lord and his reported words were to Gibbie
realities, compared with which the very visible Mr. Sclater and his
assured utterance were as the merest seemings of a phantom mood. He
had never resolved to keep the words of the Lord: he just kept them;
but he knew amongst the rest the Lord's words about the keeping of
his words, and about being ashamed of him before men, and it was
with a pitiful indignation he heard the minister's wisdom drivel
past his ears. What he would have said, and withheld himself from
saying, had he been able to speak, I cannot tell; I only know that
in such circumstances the less said the better, for what can be more
unprofitable than a discussion where but one of the disputants
understands the question, and the other has all the knowledge? It
would have been the eloquence of the wise and the prudent against
the perfected praise of the suckling.

The effect of it all upon Gibbie was to send him to his room to his
prayers, more eager than ever to keep the commandments of him who
had said, If ye love me. Comforted then and strengthened, he came
down to go to Donal--not to tell him, for to none but Janet could he
have made such a communication. But in the middle of his descent he
remembered suddenly of what and whom Mr. Sclater had all along been
reminding him, and turned aside to Mrs. Sclater to ask her to lend
him the Pilgrim's Progress. This, as a matter almost of course, was
one of the few books in the cottage on Glashgar--a book beloved of
Janet's soul--and he had read it again and again. Mrs. S