"I don't wonder. You have never seen a single shine of what they are;
and what most people think them is hardly the least like them. What I
want you to read is the life and death of the son of man, the master of
men."

"I can't read. I should only make myself twice as ill. I won't try."

"But I will read to you, if you will let me."

"How comes it you are such a theologian? A woman is not expected to
know about that sort of thing."

"I am no theologian. There just comes one of the cases in which those
who call themselves his followers do not believe what the Master said:
he said God hid these things from the wise and prudent, and revealed
them to babes. I had a father who was child enough to know them, and I
was child enough to believe him, and so grew able to understand them
for myself. The whole secret is to do the thing the Master tells you:
then you will understand what he tells you. The opinion of the wisest
man, if he does not do the things he reads, is not worth a rush. He may
be partly right, but you have no reason to trust him."

"Well, you shall be my chaplain. To-morrow, if I'm able to listen, you
shall see what you can make of the old sinner."

Mary did not waste words: where would have been the use of pulling up
the poor spiritual clodpole at every lumbering step, at any word
inconsistent with the holy manners of the high countries? Once get him
to court, and the power of the presence would subdue him, and make him
over again from the beginning, without which absolute renewal the best
observance of religious etiquette is worse than worthless. Many good
people are such sticklers for the proprieties! For myself, I take
joyous refuge with the grand, simple, every-day humanity of the man I
find in the story--the man with the heart like that of my father and my
mother and my brothers and sisters. If I may but see and help to show
him a little as he lived to show himself, and not as church talk and
church ways and church ceremonies and church theories and church plans
of salvation and church worldliness generally have obscured him for
hundreds of years, and will yet obscure him for hundreds more!

Toward evening, when she had just rendered him one of the many
attentions he required, and which there was no one that day but herself
to render, for he would scarcely allow Mewks to enter the room, he said
to her:

"Thank you; you are very good to me. I shall remember you. Not that I
think I'm going to die