He was a sturdy and loyal Christian, and believed he was the best one in the land, and the only one whose Christianity was perfectly sound, healthy, full-charged with common sense, and had no decayed places in it.

People who had an ax to grind, or people who for any reason wanted wanted to get on the soft side of him, called him The Christian--a phrase whose delicate flattery was music to his ears, and whose capital T was such an enchanting and vivid object to him that he could SEE it when it fell out of a person's mouth even in the dark.

Many who were fond of him stood on their consciences with both feet and brazenly called him by that large title habitually, because it was a pleasure to them to do anything that would please him; and with eager and cordial malice his extensive and diligently cultivated crop of enemies gilded it, beflowered it, expanded it to "The ONLY Christian." Of these two titles, the latter had the wider currency; the enemy, being greatly in the majority, attended to that.

Whatever the doctor believed, he believed with all his heart, and would fight for it whenever he got the chance; and if the intervals between chances grew to be irksomely wide, he would invent ways of shortening them himself.

He was severely conscientious, according to his rather independent lights, and whatever he took to be a duty he performed, no matter whether the judgment of the professional moralists agreed with his own or not.