“If you tell me so, I must run away again.  I shall leave the room.  Remember!  I am terribly serious now.”

“If you tell me, honestly and seriously, that you love me no longer and want me to go away, I will leave the room myself,” answered Hazard.

“I won’t say that unless you force me to it, but I expect you from this time to help me in carrying out what you know is my duty.”

“I will promise, on condition that you prove to me first what your duty is.”

To come back again to their starting point was not encouraging, and they felt it, but this time Esther was determined to be obeyed even if it cost her a lover as well as a husband.  She did not flinch.

“What more proof do you need?  I am not fit to be a clergyman’s wife.  I should be a scandal in the church, and you would have to choose between it and me.”

“I know you better,” said Hazard calmly.  “You will find all your fears vanish if you once boldly face them.”

“I have tried,” said Esther.  “I tried desperately and failed utterly.”

“Try once more!  Do not turn from all that has been the hope and comfort of men, until you have fairly learned what it is!”

“Is it not enough to know myself?” asked Esther.  “Some people are made with faith.  I am made without it.”

Hazard broke in here in a warmer tone:  “I know you better than you know yourself!  Do you think that I, whose business it is to witness every day of my life the power of my faith, am going to hesitate before a trifle like your common, daily, matter-of-course fears and doubts, such as have risen and been laid in every mind that was worth being called one, ever since minds existed?”

“Have they always been laid?” asked Esther gravely.

“Always!” answered Hazard firmly; “provided the doubter wanted to lay them.  It is a simple matter of will!”

“Would you have gone into the ministry if you had been tormented by them as I am?” she asked.

“I am not afraid to lay bare my conscience to you,” he replied becoming cool again, and willing perhaps to stretch his own points of conscience in the effort to control hers.  “I suppose the clergyman hardly exists who has not been tormented by doubts.  As for myself, if I could have removed my doubts by so simple a step as that of becoming an atheist, I should have done it, no matter what scandal or punishment had followed.  I studied the subject thoroughly, and found that for one doubt removed, another was raised, only to reach at last a result more inconceivable than that reached by the church, and infinitely more hopeless besides.  What do you gain by getting rid of one incomprehensible only to put a greater one in its place, and throw away your only hope besides?  The atheists offer no sort of bargain for one’s soul.  Their scheme is all loss and no gain.  At last both they and I come back to a confession of ignorance; the only difference between us is that my ignorance is joined with a faith and hope.”