Besides, though they had themselves joined in such conversation before, they did not love it, and on the contrary, felt ashamed of yielding to it.

Now, Eric, now or never!  Life and death, ruin and salvation, corruption and purity, are perhaps in the balance together, and the scale of your destiny may hang on a single word of yours.  Speak out, boy!  Tell these fellows that unseemly words wound your conscience; tell them that they are ruinous, sinful, damnable; speak out and save yourself and the rest.  Virtue is strong and beautiful, Eric, and vice is downcast in her awful presence.  Lose your purity of heart, Eric, and you have lost a jewel which the whole world, if it were “one entire and perfect chrysolite,” cannot replace.

Good spirits guard that young boy, and give him grace in this his hour of trial!  Open his eyes that he may see the fiery horses and the fiery chariots of the angels who would defend him, and the dark array of spiritual foes who throng around his bed.  Point a pitying finger to the yawning abyss of shame, ruin, and despair that even now perhaps is being cleft under his feet.  Show him the garlands of the present and the past, withering at the touch of the Erinnys in the future.  In pity, in pity show him the canker which he is introducing into the sap of the tree of life, which shall cause its root to be hereafter as bitterness, and its blossom to go up as dust.

But the sense of sin was on Eric’s mind.  How could he speak? was not his own language sometimes profane?  How—­how could he profess to reprove another boy on the ground of morality, when he himself said did things less ruinous perhaps, but equally forbidden?

For half an hour, in an agony of struggle with himself, Eric lay silent.  Since Bull’s last words nobody had spoken.  They were going to sleep.  It was too late to speak now, Eric thought.  The moment passed by for ever; Eric had listened without objection to foul words, and the irreparable harm was done.

How easy it would have been to speak!  With the temptation, God had provided also a way to escape.  Next time it came, it was far harder to resist, and it soon became, to men, impossible.

Ah Eric, Eric! how little we know the moments which decide the destinies of life.  We live on as usual.  The day is a common day, the hour a common hour.  We never thought twice about the change of intention, which by one of the accidents—­(accidents!)—­of life determined for good or for evil, for happiness or misery, the color of our remaining years.  The stroke of the pen was done in a moment which led unconsciously to our ruin; the word was uttered quite heedlessly, on which turned for ever the decision of our weal or woe.

Eric lay silent.  The darkness was not broken by the flashing of an angel’s wing, the stillness was not syllabled by the sound of an angel’s voice; but to his dying day Eric never forgot the moments which passed, until, weary and self-reproachful, he fell asleep.