“I am glad of that,” he returned. “Our Lord was a layman. My experience with most of society’s clergy has resulted in mere and simple contempt. I have another master.”

“But if anybody and everybody should be at liberty to preach, how are we to have any assurance what kind of doctrine will be preached?”

“We must go without it.—I am aware that there are many uneducated preachers who move the classes the clergy cannot touch. Their preaching has far more visible effect, I know, than mine.”

“Why do you not then preach like them?”

“I would not if I could, and could not if I would. I do not believe one half the things either the clergy or these lay-preachers say.”

“But you imply they are doing more good. How can they do good if what they say is not true?”

“I did not say they did good—about that I cannot tell. That may need centuries to determine. I said they moved people more than many of the clergy. The fundamental element of what they say is mostly true, only the forms they express it in contain much that is false, which is true of all preachers in all churches, lay and clergy. For myself, I cannot preach many of the accepted doctrines because I do not believe them. If I did believe them they would take from me the heart to preach.”

“Can it be,” said Hester, “that falsehood is more powerful than truth—and for truth too?”

“By no means, though it may move people more visibly. Many false doctrines work powerfully on the emotions. . But a falsehood has in itself no power but for evil. It is the spiritual truth clothed in the partially false form that is powerful. Clearer truth will follow in the wake of it, and cast the false forms out—they serve but to make a place of seeming understanding in ignorant minds, wherein the truths themselves may lie and work with their own might. But if what I teach be nearer the truth, even if it be harder to get in, it will in the end work more truth. In the meantime I say God-speed to every man who honestly teaches what he honestly believes. Paul was grand when he said he would rejoice that Christ was preached, from whatever motive he might be preached. If you say those people, though contentious, may have preached good doctrine, I answer—Possibly, for they could not have preached much of what is called doctrine now-a-days. If they preached theories of their own, they were teachers of lies, for they were not true men, and the theories of an untrue man cannot be true. But they told something about Christ, and of that Paul was glad.”

Some may wonder that Hester, having got so far as she had, should need to be told such things. But she had never had occasion to think about them before, though the truth wrought out in her life had rendered her capable of seeing them the moment they were put before her.