not then the stronger?--Let us drop the word _noble_."

"In the case supposed, he would be the stronger--for a time at least,"
replied the curate. "But you must remember that to take from me the joy
and glory of my life, namely the belief that I am the child of God, an
heir of the Infinite, with the hope of being made perfectly righteous,
loving like God Himself, would be something more than merely reducing me
to the level of a man who had never loved God, or seen in the
possibility of Him any thing to draw him. I should have lost the mighty
dream of the universe; he would be what and where he chose to be, and
might well be the more capable. Were I to be convinced there is no God,
and to recover by the mere force of animal life from the prostration
into which the conviction cast me, I should, I hope, try to do what duty
was left me, for I too should be filled, for a time at least, with an
endless pity for my fellows; but all would be so dreary, that I should
be almost paralyzed for serving them, and should long for death to do
them and myself the only good service. The thought of the generations
doomed to be born into a sunless present, would almost make me join any
conspiracy to put a stop to the race. I should agree with Hamlet that
the whole thing had better come to an end. Would it necessarily indicate
a lower nature, or condition, or habit of thought, that, having
cherished such hopes, I should, when I lost them, be more troubled than
one who never had had them?"

"Still," said Faber, "I ask you to allow that a nature which can do
without help is greater than a nature which can not."

"If the thing done were the same, I should allow it," answered the
curate; "but the things done will prove altogether different. And
another thing to be noted is, that, while the need of help might