could have done so. He could not, do what he would; he saw his vision to
be true.

The thing had grown with his growth; he believed that a voice from
heaven had spoken it. Is not this the history of all revelation?

When I say that Toyner could not doubt his new conception of God and of
the human struggle, I mean that he could not in sincerest thought hold
the contrary to be true. I do not mean to say that daily and hourly,
when about his common avocations, his new inspiration did not seem a
mere will-o'-the-wisp of the mind. It took months and years to bring it
into any accustomed relation to every-day matters of thought and act;
and it is this habitual adjustment of our inward belief to our outward
environment that makes any creed _appear_ to be incontrovertible.

Oh the loneliness of it, to have a creed that no companion has! The
sheer sorrow of being compelled by the law of his mind to believe
concerning God what he did not know that any other man believed time and
time again obscured Bart Toyner's vision of the divine.

The power of the miracle wrought at his conversion was gone; he had
been taught that the miraculous power was only to be with him as long as
he yielded implicit obedience, but that implied a clear-cut knowledge of
right from wrong which Toyner did not now possess; many of the old rules
clashed with that one large new rule which had come to him--that any way
of life was wicked which made it appear that God was in some provinces
of life and not in others. "Whatever is not of faith is sin"; but while
an old and a new faith are warring in a man's soul the definition fails:
many a righteous act is born of doubt, not faith. This was one reason
why Toyner no longer possessed all-conquering strength. Another reason