a judge of men. No
man who was not a dunce could have studied Opdyke, through all those
weeks, and come out from the study to deny the inherent cleanliness and
uprightness of his life. Then, wherefore the chastisement? Study the
case as he would through the lens of his ecclesiasticism, Scott Brenton
could not discover any especial need of sanctification for the virile,
clever engineer.

"And yet," he burst out to Doctor Keltridge over a cigar, one day; "we
are bound by all our articles of indenture, we preachers, to prate
about the hand of the Lord and special Providences, when all the time
we know the trouble came out of somebody's running up against simple,
scientific law. It's theology, not science, we poor beggars are set up
to preach, even in funeral sermons of men like Opdyke, although it's
not theology, but just plain science, or the lack of it, that's killed
them."

"Well?" the doctor queried.

"Well." Brenton uncrossed his legs and, with a sudden snap, crossed
them the other way. "What I want to know is this: what in the world is
going to become of us fellows who go on preaching one thing, while we
believe another?"

"According to the Book of Revelation, you'll become a sulphate," the
doctor told him grimly.

Brenton tossed aside his cigar, thrust his fists into his pockets and
rose to pace the floor.

"Don't joke, doctor," he said impatiently. "For once, I'm past it, past
its doing me any good, I mean. A baby, frightened at the dark and
howling for its nurse, isn't going to be diverted with a phosphorescent
jumping jack. Now you see here. It isn't only the case of Opdyke,
though God knows that is a flagrant instance of exactly what I mean.
All week long, I am coming into contact with just such cases, cases
where the physical cause and effect and the moral one can't possibly be
stretched until they coincide. Somebody breaks one of the eternal laws,
the laws laid down in Genesis and provable in any twentieth-century
laboratory. He gets off scot free, and neither realizes what he's done,
nor pays the penalty. The flying pieces, though, fall on some other man
who is trudging along the trail of another law and keeping it at every
point. He gets killed, or worse; and the first man never knows what he
has accomplished. That sort of thing is happening all the time,
somewhere or other. As a rule, too, the victim is a long way a better
man than the original sinner who brought the ruin on him. Week days, we
go t