What will you look like then?”

“Is that the way you are going to be measured, too?”

“I thank God, no. Christ our Lord will be measured for me, and He has fulfilled the whole Law.”

“And why not for me?” said Haimet fiercely. “Am I not a baptised Christian, just as much as you?”

“Friend, you will not be asked in that day whether you were a baptised Christian, but whether you were a believing Christian. Sins that are laid on Christ are gone—they exist no longer. But sins that are not so destroyed have to be borne by the sinner himself.”

“Well, I call that cowardice,” said Haimet, drawing a red herring across the track, “to want to burden somebody else with your sins. Why not have the manliness to bear them yourself?”

“If you are so manly,” answered Gerhardt with another of his quiet smiles, “will you oblige me, Haimet, by taking up the Castle, and setting it down on Presthey?”

“What are you talking about now? How could I?”

“Much more easily than you could atone for one sin. What do you call a man who proposes to do the impossible?”

“A fool.”

“And what would you call the bondman whose master had generously paid his debt, and who refused to accept that generosity, but insisted on working it out himself, though the debt was more than he could discharge by the work of a thousand years?”

“Call him what you like,” said Haimet, not wishing to go too deeply into the question.

“I will leave you to choose the correct epithet,” said Gerhardt, and went on with his carving in silence.

The carving was beginning to bring in what Isel called “a pretty penny.” Gerhardt’s skill soon became known, and the Countess of Oxford employed him to make coffers, and once sent for him to the Castle to carve wreaths on a set of oak panels. He took the work as it came, and in the intervals, or on the summer evenings, he preached on the village greens in the neighbourhood. His audiences were often small, but his doctrines spread quietly and beneath the surface. Not one came forward to join him openly, but many went away with thoughts that they had never had before. Looked on from the outside, Gerhardt’s work seemed of no value, and blessed with no success. Yet it is possible that its inward progress was not little. There may have been silent souls that lived saintly lives in that long past century, who owed their first awakening or their gradual edification to some word of his; it may be that the sturdy resistance of England to Papal aggression in the subsequent century had received its impetus from his unseen hand. Who shall say that he achieved nothing? The world wrote “unsuccessful” upon his work: did God write “blessed”? One thing at least I think he must have written—“Thou hast been faithful in a few things.” And while the measure of faithfulness is not that of success, it is that of the ultimate reward, in that Land where many that were first shall be last, and the last first. “They that are with” the Conqueror in the last great battle, are not the successful upon earth, but the “called and chosen and faithful.”

“If any man serve Me, let him follow Me,”—and what work ever had less the appearance of success than that which seemed to close on Calvary?

Note 1. “William, son of the fat priest,” occurs on the Pipe Roll for 1176, Unless “Grossus” is to be taken as a Christian name.

Note 2. Servant or slave of Michael. The Scottish gillie comes from the same root.

Note 3. These are the tenets of the ancient Waldensian Church, with which, so far as they are known, those of the German mission agreed. (They are exactly those of the Church of England, set forth in her Sixth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, Seventeenth, Nineteenth, Twentieth, Twenty-Second, Twenty-Fifth, and Thirty-First Articles of Religion.) She accepted two of our three Creeds, excluding the Nicene.

Note 4. Ecclesiasticus nineteen 1, and thirty-two 21. The Waldensian Church regarded the Apocrypha as the Church of England does—not as inspired Scripture, but as a good book to be read “for example of life and instruction of manners.”