moment outside to draw a deep, quivering breath, knocked, and being
told to come in, entered, closed the door behind him, and sat down
white and trembling in the nearest chair. About the middle of the
room were seated the professors of the Bible College and his
pastor. They rose, and calling him forward shook hands with him
kindly, sorrowfully, and pointed to a seat before them, resuming
their own.

Before them, then, sat the lad, facing the wintry light; and there
was a long silence. Every one knew beforehand what the result would
be. It was the best part of a year since that first interview in
the pastor's study; there had been other interviews--with the
pastor, with the professors. They had done what they could to check
him, to bring him back. They had long been counsellors; now in duty
they were authorities, sitting to hear him finally to the end, that
they might pronounce sentence: that would be the severance of his
connection with the university and his expulsion from the church.

Old, old scene in the history of Man--the trial of his Doubt by
his Faith: strange day of judgment, when one half of the human
spirit arraigns and condemns the other half. Only five persons sat
in that room--four men and a boy. The room was of four bare walls
and a blackboard, with perhaps a map or two of Palestine, Egypt,
and the Roman Empire in the time of Paul. The era was the winter of
the year 1868, the place was an old town of the Anglo-Saxon
backwoodsmen, on the blue-grass highlands of Kentucky. But in how
many other places has that scene been enacted, before what other
audiences of the accusing and the accused, under what laws of
trial, with what degrees and rigors of judgment! Behind David,
sitting solitary there in the flesh, the imagination beheld a