This was the little party we got
up to hear him read. I do not think much of it was very new to the
Master or myself. At any rate, he said to me when we were alone, That is
the kind of talk the "natural man," as the theologians call him, is apt
to fall into.
--I thought it was the Apostle Paul, and not the theologians, that used
the term "natural man", I ventured to suggest.
--I should like to know where the Apostle Paul learned English?--said the
Master, with the look of one who does not mean to be tripped up if he can
help himself.---But at any rate,--he continued,--the "natural man," so
called, is worth listening to now and then, for he didn't make his
nature, and the Devil did n't make it; and if the Almighty made it, I
never saw or heard of anything he made that wasn't worth attending to.
The young man begged the Lady to pardon anything that might sound harshly
in these crude thoughts of his. He had been taught strange things, he
said, from old theologies, when he was a child, and had thought his way
out of many of his early superstitions. As for the Young Girl, our
Scheherezade, he said to her that she must have got dreadfully tired (at
which she colored up and said it was no such thing), and he promised
that, to pay for her goodness in listening, he would give her a lesson in
astronomy the next fair evening, if she would be his scholar, at which
she blushed deeper than before, and said something which certainly was
not No.
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