appear to be in our day, a practical materialist and atheist. Present
life and surroundings, present profit and pleasure, were all in all.
He ceased to recognize the existence of a soul within himself having
distinct needs and interests. His thoughts centred wholly in the
comfort and pleasures of the day and in that which would advance his
ambitious schemes. His scepticism was not intellectual and in
reference to the Bible and its teachings, but practical and in
reference to humanity itself. He believed that with few exceptions men
and women lived for their own profit and pleasure, and that religion
and creeds were matters of custom and fashion, or an accident of
birth. Only the reverence in which religion had been held in his early
home kept him from sharing fully in the contempt which the gentlemen
he met abroad seemed to have for it. He could not altogether despise
his mother's faith, but he regarded her as a gentle enthusiast haunted
by sacred traditions. The companionships which he had formed led him
to believe that unless influenced by some interested motive a liberal-
minded man of the world must of necessity outgrow these things. With
the self-deception of his kind, he thought he was broad and liberal in
his views, when in reality he had lost all distinction between truth
and error, and was narrowing his mind down to things only. Jew or
Gentile, Christian or Pagan, it was becoming all one to him. Men
changed their creeds and religions with other fashions, but all looked
after what they believed to be the main chance, and he proposed to do
the same.

As time passed on, however, he began to admit to himself that it was
strange that in making all things bend to his pleasure he did not
secure more. He wearied of certain things. Stronger excitements were
needed to spur his jaded senses. His bets, his stakes at cards grew
heavier, his pleasures more gross, till a delicate organization so