“You shake your head, and mutter that I am mad.  Well, perhaps I am mad—­mad with the horror of my unbelief; but why should it not be as I say?  When God made man He made a creature to whom it was given to choose for himself between good and evil.  But God knew that some of those He had thus made would deliberately choose evil, that some few would indeed sin away all trace of their Divine origin.  God did not will it so, for He made us men, not machines, and the evil we do is of our own choosing; but God fore-knew it, and, foreknowing that, God owed it to Himself not to call into being a creature the result of whose creation would be that creature’s eternal misery.  Hence it was that He decreed that those for whom there could be no hope of heaven should die out at their deaths like the brutes.  Our life is from God, and may not God take His own again?  And could anything better happen to many people whom you and I have known on earth than that they should be allowed to die out, and the very memory of them to pass away for ever?”

I was convinced that he was mad—­mad, as he had himself hinted, with the horror of his unbelief.

“And I am one of them,” he exclaimed.  “I am of the dead who die!  I have bartered away life, faith, and happiness for Dead Sea fruit; I, who once was young, and not altogether as I now am, a soulless creature of clay!  For I can remember the time when flowers, pictures, beautiful faces, and music set stirring emotions within me, in which it seemed that I saw hidden away in the depths of my own heart the shining form of a white-robed soul-maiden, who cried out to me:  ’Ah, cannot you make your life as pure and beautiful as the flowers and the music, that so you may set me free?’

“But I chose the ignoble part, and gave myself up, body and soul, to evil and unbelief.  And often in the hour when I was tempted to some shameful action I seemed to see the white arms of the soul-maiden uplifted in piteous entreaty to heaven, but at last the time came when her voice was silent, and when I knew that I had thrust her down into a darkness whence she would never again come forth!

“And now the very soul of me is dead, and I know not but that at any moment I may flicker out like a spent taper, and become as one of the dead who die!”

IV.—­On the Brink of the Pit

At last there came a time, even in hell, when the burden of my sin lay so heavily upon me that I felt, if succour there was none, the very soul of me must die.

Of myself, save for the continual crying out of my soul after its lost purity, I scarcely cared to think.  It was for Dorothy that I never ceased to sorrow, and—­sinner though I was—­to pray.  I saw then, pictured forth in all their horror, the inevitable consequences of the wrong I had done her.  I saw her, with the sense of her sin as yet but fresh upon her, shrinking from every glance, and fancying that she read the knowledge of her guilt in every eye.  I saw her not knowing where to turn for refuge from swiftly advancing shame and understanding no more of this life of ours than a foolish lost lamb, wandering farther and farther in the nightfall.