ld like to know, Satan
warring with the new man, and sometimes getting the better of it? And if
he was, as Thompson had hinted, rayther partial to the creature, and
liked good living, what was this to the purpose? it was an infirmity
that might happen to the best Christian living. Nobody could say that he
wasn't a renewed man, and a chosen vessel, and faithful to his call. A
man isn't a backslider because he's carnally weak, and a man isn't a
saint because he's moral and well-behaved. 'Good works,' Mr Clayton
said, 'was filthy rags,' and so they were. To be sure, between
themselves, there were one or two things said about Buster that she
couldn't approve of. For instance, she had been told--but _this_ was
quite in confidence, and really must _not_ go further--that he
was--that--that, in fact, he was overtaken now and then with liquor, and
then the house could hardly hold him, he got so furious, and, they did
say, used such horrid language. But, after all, what was this? If a
man's elected, he is not so much the worse. Besides, if one listened to
people, one might never leave off. She had actually heard, she wouldn't
say from whom, that Buster very often kept out late at night--sometimes
didn't come home at all, and sometimes did at two o'clock in the
morning, very hungry and ill-tempered, and then forced his poor wife out
of bed, and made the delicate and shivering creature light a fire, cook
beefsteaks, go into the yard for beer, and wait upon him till he had
even eat every morsel up. She for one would never believe all this,
though Mrs Buster herself had told her every word with tears in her
eyes, and in the greatest confidence; so she trusted I wouldn't repeat
it, as it wouldn't look well in her to be found out telling other
people's secrets." Singular, perhaps, to say, the tale did not go
further. I kept the lady's secret, and at the same time declined to
approach Mr Jabez Buster in the character of a suppliant. If his
advocate and panegyrist had nothing more to say for him, it could not be
uncharitable to conclude that the pretended saint was as bold a sinner
as ever paid infamous courtship to religion, and as such was studiously
to be avoided. I turned my attention from him to Tomkins. There was no
grossness about him, no brutality, no abominable vice. In the hour of my
defeat and desertion, he had extended to me his sympathy, and, more in
sorrow than in anger, I am convinced he voted for my expulsion from the
chur