“I am very interested,” she said. “Your profession has to do with the bodies of men, but you seem to care more for their souls.”

“I began to study medicine that I might have a good, ostensible reason for going about among the poor. It was not primarily from the desire to alleviate their sufferings, but in the hope of starting them on the way toward victory over all evil. I saw that the man who brought them physical help had a chance with them such as no clergyman ever would.

“I fear I have not done much. I say to myself that perhaps I may have done something. So I will try on, helping God as the children help the father.—You know that grand picture, on the ceiling of the pope’s chapel, of the making of Adam?”

“Michaelngelo’s?—Yes.”

“You must have noticed then how the Father is accompanied by a crowd of young ones—come to help him to make Adam, I always think. The poet has there, consciously or not, hit upon a great truth—it is the majesty of God’s great-heartedness, and the majesty of man’s destiny, that every man must be a fellow-worker with God. I want to help God with my poor brothers.”

“How well I understand you!” said Hester. “But would you mind telling me how you first began? I started thinking of these things because I saw how miserable so many people were, and longed to do something to make life better for them.”

“That was not quite the way with me,” replied Christopher. “In the first place, you may suppose I could not have followed my wishes if I did not have money. I did have a good deal—left me by my grandfather. My father died when I was a child, I am glad to say.”

“Glad to say!” repeated Hester in surprise.

“Yes. If he had lived, he may have followed in my grandfather’s footsteps. Not that my grandfather was considered a bad man. On the contrary, he stood high in the world’s opinion. When he died and left me his money, it was necessary that I look into his business affairs, for it was my mother’s wish that I should follow it. In the course of my investigation I came across things which I considered to be dishonest in the way the business had been run. And where there had been wrong, I felt there must be atonement, restitution. I could not look on the money that had been left me as mine, for part of it at least, I cannot say how much, ought not to be mine at all.

“Gradually it grew clearer to me that there could be no real good but oneness with the will of God—that man’s good lay in becoming what the inventor of him meant in the inventing of him—to speak after the fashion of man’s making. Continuing to think about it all, and reading my New Testament, I came to see that, if the story of Christ was true, the God that made me was inconceivably lovely, and that the perfection, the very flower of existence, must be to live the heir of all things, at home with the Father.