He remembered his first moments of shrinking. They were private, and were filled with arguments; some of these taking the form of prayer. The business was established and had old roots; is it not one thing to set up a new gin-palace and another to accept an investment in an old one? The profits made out of lost souls⁠—where can the line be drawn at which they begin in human transactions? Was it not even God’s way of saving His chosen? “Thou knowest,”⁠—the young Bulstrode had said then, as the older Bulstrode was saying now⁠—“Thou knowest how loose my soul sits from these things⁠—how I view them all as implements for tilling Thy garden rescued here and there from the wilderness.”