"That is not true; no one person is responsible for any spiritual

decision that another makes," I answered hotly with an awful sense of

having had a burden placed on my shoulders that they could not carry.

"The old 'brother's keeper' question will never be settled in any but

the right way," he answered me straight from the shoulder. "You are

responsible for the attitude of this whole town towards the cause I

represent and they'll have to wait for your eyes to be opened and for

you to make them see."

"You minimize yourself," I answered quickly, for in some curious way it

hurt me to see that great strong man sit at my feet baffled by a force

that he declared to be in me but which I did not acknowledge or

understand.

"They were listening to me--from a distance, as it were--and I might

have made them hear if you had not come home and thrown them back into

the old pleasant groove of non-action and non-belief. In a week you had

swept away all I had builded in six months." He spoke with simple

conviction and not a trace of the bitterness that might have been in the

arraignment.

"Everybody in this town adores you," were the words that gushed out of

my heart for his comforting before I could stop them. "That is one

reason I have acted as I have. I do not, I cannot believe that the

religion which is great enough to bring the redemption of the whole race

into a desirable immortality can be composed of nine-tenths emotion,

with which all of them were following your beautiful voice and beautiful

eyes and beautiful church and beautiful words. If I am to be saved it

will be by something sterner than that; it will be something that makes

me sweat drops of blood from my mind, take up a hard cross of duty and

work, work to make the fibre of my soul strong enough to enjoy the

robust kind of immortality that alone seems worth while to me. Your Son

of Man walked from town to town in the hot sun and taught the people,

healed the multitude and yet had not where to lay his head to rest. His

church has lost His vigor. Your whole scheme hasn't enough action in it.

Your organization is too easy and too full of surface observances. It is

conducted with slipshod business methods and there is no force in it to

help me. If I join any church ever it will have to be a new one that can

compare with modern business in its efficiency. Your scheme of

redemption to immortality through an efficient mediation is perfectly

sound, but you don't back it up."

"The Church of Christ has stood, endured and done business for almost

two thousand years," he answered quietly. "It is in some ways all you

say of it, but it has at least proved its vitality. Why seek to found a

new organization with a new head and a new scheme of immortality if you

recognize this scheme as good? The place to reorganize a business is

from the inside, not the outside. These people must get their vision

now. Will you come and help me?" As he spoke he looked again down into

the depths from which I had been trying to translate some of the

hieroglyphics to him and he held out his long powerful hand to me in an

entreaty that shook my very foundations.




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