"
Grace was silent.
"You are surprised to hear me quote Scripture, and well you may be:
but that same book of Ecclesiastes is a very old favourite with me;
for I am no Christian, but a worlding, if ever there was one. But it
does puzzle me why you, who are a Christian, should talk one half-hour
as you have been talking to that poor girl, and the next go
for information about the next life to poor old disappointed,
broken-hearted Solomon, with his three hundred and odd idolatrous
wives, who confesses fairly that this life is a failure, and that he
does not know whether there is any next life at all."
Whether Tom was altogether right or not, is not the question here; the
novelist's business is to represent the real thoughts of mankind, when
they are not absolutely unfit to be told; and certainly Tom spoke the
doubts of thousands when he spoke his own.
Grace was silent still.
"Well," he said, "beyond that I can't go, being no theologian. But
when a preacher tells people in one breath of a God who so loves men
that He gave His own Son to save them, and in the next, that the same
God so hates men that He will cast nine-tenths of them into hopeless
torture for ever,--(and if that is not hating, I don't know what
is),--unless he, the preacher, gets a chance of talking to them for a
few minutes--Why, I should like, Miss Harvey, to put that gentleman
upon a real fire for ten minutes, instead of his comfortable Sunday's
dinner, which stands ready frying for him, and which he was going home
to eat, as jolly as if all the world was not going to destruction; and
there let him feel what fire was like, and reconsider his statements.
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