t in it for the solution of the
problems and perplexities of this life; but so far from wishing his
hearers to be constantly taking stock, as it were, of their spiritual
condition, and interrogating Providence as to its will concerning them,
he besought them to rest in confidence of the divine mindfulness, secure
that while they fulfilled all their plain, simple duties toward one
another, God would inspire them to act according to his purposes in the
more psychological crises and emergencies, if these should ever be part
of their experience.

In maintaining, on a certain Sunday evening, that his ideas were much
more adapted to the spiritual nourishment of the president, the dean,
and the several professors of Hilbrook University than to that of the
hereditary Rixonites who nodded in a slumbrous acceptance of them, Mrs.
Ewbert failed as usual to rouse her husband to a due sense of his
grievance with the university people.

"Well," he said, "you know I can't _make_ them come, my dear."

"Of course not. And I would be the last to have you lift a finger. But I
know that you feel about it just as I do."

"Perhaps; but I hope not so much as you _think_ you feel. Of course, I'm
very grateful for your indignation. But I know you don't undervalue the
good I may do to my poor sheep--they're _not_ an intellectual flock--in
trying to lead them in the ways of spiritual modesty and
unconsciousness. How do we know but they profit more by my preaching
than the faculty would? Perhaps our university friends are spiritually
unconscious enough already, if not modest."

"I see what you mean," said Mrs. Ewbert, provisionally suspending her
sense of the whimsical quality in his suggestion. "But you need never
tell me that they wouldn't appreciate you more."

"More than old Ransom Hilbrook?" he asked.

"Oh, I hope _he_ isn't coming here to-night, again!" she implored, with
a nervous leap from the point in question. "If he's coming here every
Sunday night"--

As he knew she wished, her husband represented that Hilbrook's having
come the last Sunday night was no proof that he was going to make a
habit of it.

"But he _stayed_ so late!" she insisted from the safety of her real
belief that he was not coming.

"He came very early, though," said Ewbert, with a gentle sigh, in which
her sympathetic penetration detected a retrospective exhaustion.

"I shall tell him you're not well," she went on: "I shall tell him you
are lying down. You