"Nonsense," replied the father, angrily. "Have not I taught all my
life, preached twice a Sunday these thirty years without perplexing
myself with your questionings? Be off to your shooting, and your
golf, and let me have no more of this morbid fuss."

No more was said; but Luke Raeburn, with his doubts and questions
shut thus into himself, drifted rapidly from skepticism to the most
positive form of unbelief. When he next came home for the long
vacation, his father was at length awakened to the fact that the
son, upon whom all his ambition was set, was hopelessly lost to the
Church; and with this consciousness a most bitter sense of
disappointment rose in his heart. His pride, the only side of
fatherhood which he possessed, was deeply wounded, and his dreams
of honorable distinction were laid low. His wrath was great. Luke
found the home made almost unbearable to him. His college career
was of course at an end, for his father would not hear of providing
him with the necessary funds now that he had actually confessed his
atheism. He was hardly allowed to speak to his sisters, every
request for money to start him in some profession met with a sharp
refusal, and matters were becoming so desperate that he would
probably have left the place of his own accord before long, had not
Mr. Raeburn himself put an end to a state of things which had grown
insufferable.

With some lurking hope, perhaps, of convincing his son, he resolved
upon trying a course of argument. To do him justice he really
tried to prepare himself for it, dragged down volumes of dusty
divines, and got up with much pains Paley's "watch" argument.
There was some honesty, even perhaps a very little love, in his