him up and clothe him and keep him in his right mind for a little while,
just to let him fall at the first opportunity? It was quite true that he
had deserved it, no doubt; he had done wrong, and he was going to do
wrong; but God, who had gone out of His way to mercifully convert him
and keep him straight for a while, could certainly have gone on keeping
him if He had chosen. His mind was a logical one. He had been taught to
praise God for some extraordinary favour towards him; he had been taught
that the grace which had changed his life for good was in no degree his
own; and why then was he to bear all the disgrace of his return to evil?

In the next hours he walked the streets of the town, and talked to other
men when need was, and did a little business on his own account in the
agency in which he was engaged, and went home and took supper, watching
the vagaries of his father's senile mania with more than common pity for
the old man. His own wretchedness gave him an aching heart of sympathy
for all the sorrow of others which came across his mind that day.

The whole day was a new revelation to him of what tenderness for others
could be and ought to be.

He did not hope to attain to any working out of this higher sympathy and
pity himself. The wonderful confidence which his new faith had so long
given him, that he was able in God's strength to perform the higher
rather than the lower law of his nature, had ebbed away. God's strength
was no longer with him; he was going to the devil; he could do nothing
for himself, little for others; but he sympathised as never before with
all poor lost souls. He was a little surprised, as the day wore to a
close, that he had been able to control his craving, that he had not
taken more rum. Still, he knew that he would soon be helpless. It was
his doom, for he could awake in himself no further feeling of repentance