headline. If you can’t give ’em a simple formula to cure all human ills and explain creation, they say you don’t know your business.”
“Ah!” said Perry, with a twinkle of the eye, “but if the Church gives them a set of formulae for the same purpose, they say they don’t want formulae or dogmas, but just a loving wistfulness.”
“You’re not up-to-date enough,” said Waters. “They like their formulae to be red-hot, up-to-the-minute discoveries.”
“Why, so they are,” said Perry. “Look at Stingo here. He tells them that if two unfit people marry, their unfitness will be visited on their children unto the third and fourth generation, after which they will probably die out through mere degeneration. We’ve been telling them that for three or four thousand years, and Matthews has only just caught up to us. As a matter of fact, you people are on our side. If you tell them the things, they may perhaps come to believe in them.”
“And possibly act on them, you think?” said Matthews. “But we have to do all the work for them, just as you have to do the godly living.”
“That’s not altogether true,” said Perry.
“Near enough. But we do get on a bit faster, because we can give reasons for things. Show me a germ, and I’ll tell you how to get rid of plague or cholera. Call it Heaven’s judgment for sin, and all you can do is to sit down under it.”
“But surely,” struck in the curate, “we are expressly warned in Scripture against calling things judgments for sin. How about those eighteen on whom the Tower of Siloam fell?”
“If it was anybody’s sin,” said Perry, “it was probably the carelessness of the people who built the tower.”