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“But think how long they’ve had the gospel,” he suggested, in a pensive self-derision which she would not share.

“Well, one thing, Clarence,” she summed up, “I’m not going to let you throw yourself away on them; and unless you see some of the university people in the congregation, I want you to use your old sermons from this out. They’ll never know the difference; and I’m going to make you take one of the old sermons along every Sunday, so as to be prepared.”

II.

One good trait of Mrs. Ewbert was that she never meant half she said–she could not; but in this case there was more meaning than usual in her saying. It really vexed her that the university families, who had all received them so nicely, and who appreciated her husband’s spiritual and intellectual quality as fully as even she could wish, came some of them so seldom, and some of them never, to hear him at the Rixonite church. They ought, she said, to have been just suited by his preaching, which inculcated with the peculiar grace of his gentle, poetic nature a refinement of the mystical theology of the founder. The Rev. Adoniram Rixon, who had seventy years before formulated his conception of the religious life as a patient waiting upon the divine will, with a constant reference of this world’s mysteries and problems to the world to come, had doubtless meant a more strenuous abeyance than Clarence Ewbert was now preaching to a third generation of his followers. He had doubtless meant them to be eager and alert in this patience, but the version of his gospel which his latest apostle gave taught a species of acquiescence which was foreign to the thoughts of the founder. He put as great stress as could be asked upon the importance of a realizing faith in the life to come, and an implicit trust 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.