greater part of the Sunday, and would gladly leave his wife in such good
quarters; the curate would walk out to his preaching in the evening, and
drive home with Helen after it, taking Juliet, if she should be able to
accompany them.

After dinner, when the ladies had left them, between the two clergymen
and the doctor arose the conversation of which I will now give the
substance, leaving the commencement, and taking it up at an advanced
point.

"Now tell me," said Faber, in the tone of one satisfied he must be
allowed in the right, "which is the nobler--to serve your neighbor in
the hope of a future, believing in a God who will reward you, or to
serve him in the dark, obeying your conscience, with no other hope than
that those who come after you will be the better for you?"

"I allow most heartily," answered Wingfold, "and with all admiration,
that it is indeed grand in one hopeless for himself to live well for the
sake of generations to come, which he will never see, and which will
never hear of him. But I will not allow that there is any thing grand in
being hopeless for one's self, or in serving the Unseen rather than
those about you, seeing it is easier to work for those who can not
oppose you, than to endure the contradiction of sinners. But I know you
agree with me that the best way to assist posterity is to be true to
your contemporaries, so there I need say no more--except that the
hopeless man can do the least for his fellows, being unable to give them
any thing that should render them other than hopeless themselves; and
if, for the grandeur of it, a man were to cast away his purse in order
to have the praise of parting with the two mites left in his pocket, you
would simply say the man was a fool. This much seems to me clear, that,