obedience, the former indifferent to, the
latter contentious for doctrine.

It may well seem strange that such a man should have gone into business
with such another as John Turnbull; but the latter had been growing
more and more common, while Marston had been growing more and more
refined. Still from the first it was an unequal yoking of believer with
unbeliever--just as certainly, although not with quite such wretched
results, as would have been the marriage of Mary Marston and George
Turnbull. And it had been a great trial: punishment had not been
spared--with best results in patience and purification; for so are our
false steps turned back to good by the evil to which they lead us.
Turnbull was ready to take every safe advantage to be gained from his
partner's comparative carelessness about money. He drew a larger
proportion of the profits than belonged to his share in the capital,
justifying himself on the ground that he had a much larger family, did
more of the business, and had to keep up the standing of the firm. He
made him pay more than was reasonable for the small part of the house
yielded from storage to the accommodation of him, his daughter, and
their servant, notwithstanding that, if they had not lived there, some
one must have been paid to do so. Far more than this, careless of his
partner's rights, and insensible to his interests, he had for some time
been risking the whole affair by private speculations. After all,
Marston was the safer man of business, even from the worldly point of
view. Alone, it is true, he would hardly have made money, but he would
have got through, and would have left his daughter the means of getting
through also; for he would have left her in possession of her own peace
and the confidence of her friends, which will always prove enough for
those who confess themselves to be strangers and pilgrims on the
earth--those who regard it as a grand staircase they have to climb, not
a plain on which to build their houses and plant their vineyards.

As to the peculiar doctrines of the sect to which he had joined
himself, right or wrong in themselves, Marston, after having complied
with what seemed to him the letter of the law concerning baptism, gave
himself no further trouble. He had for a long time known--for, by the
power of the life in him, he had gathered from the Scriptures the
finest of the wheat, where so many of every sect, great church and
little church, gather only the husks a