good under whatsoever external form it may wear, which is almost a
necessary adjunct of the author's true and large ideal of the Christian
life. She goes, it might almost seem, out of her way to select, from
that theological school with which her whole nature is most entirely at
dissonance, one of her most touching illustrations of a life struggling
on towards its highest through contempt, sorrow, and death. That
narrowest of all sectarianisms, which arrogates to itself the name
Evangelical, and which holds up as the first aim to every man the saving
of his own individual soul, has furnished to her Mr Tryan, whose life is
based on the principle laid down by the one great Evangelist, "He that
loveth his soul shall lose it; he that hateth his soul shall keep it unto
life eternal." {15}

Mr Tryan, as first represented to us, is not an engaging figure. Narrow
and sectarian, full of many uncharities, to a great extent vain and self-
conscious, glad to be flattered and idolised by men and women by no means
of large calibre or lofty standard--it might well seem impossible to
invest such a figure with one heroic element. Yet it is before this man
we are constrained to bow down in reverence, as before one truer,
greater, nobler than ourselves; and as we stand with Janet Dempster
beside the closing grave, we may well feel that one is gone from among us
whose mere presence made it less hard to fight our battle against "the
world, the flesh, and the devil." The explanation of the paradox is not
far to seek. The principle which animated the life now withdrawn from
sight--which raised it above all its littlenesses and made it a witness
for God and His Christ, constraining even the scoffers to feel the
presence of "Him who is invisible"--this principle was self-sacrifice. So
at least the imperfections of human speech lead us to call that which
stands in antagonism to self-pleasing; but before Him to whom all things
are open, what we so call is the purification and exaltation of that self