foundations of the soul, and the very being quivers and sways under the shock.  No life in the empty sky; no gleam in the blackness of the night; no voice to break the deadly silence; no hand outstretched to save.  Empty-brained triflers who have never tried to think, who take their creed as they take their fashions, speak of Atheism as the outcome of foul life and vicious desires.  In their shallow heartlessness and shallower thought they cannot even dimly imagine the anguish of entering the mere penumbra of the Eclipse of Faith, much less the horror of that great darkness in which the orphaned soul cries out into the infinite emptiness:  “Is it a Devil that has made the world?  Is the echo, ‘Children, ye have no Father,’ true?  Is all blind chance, is all the clash of unconscious forces, or are we the sentient toys of an Almighty Power that sports with our agony, whose peals of awful mockery of laughter ring back answer to the wailings of our despair?”

How true are the noble words of Mrs. Hamilton King:—­

  “For some may follow Truth from dawn to dark,
  As a child follows by his mother’s hand,
  Knowing no fear, rejoicing all the way;
  And unto some her face is as a Star
  Set through an avenue of thorns and fires,
  And waving branches black without a leaf;
  And still It draws them, though the feet must bleed,
  Though garments must be rent, and eyes be scorched: 
  And if the valley of the shadow of death
  Be passed, and to the level road they come,
  Still with their faces to the polar star,
  It is not with the same looks, the same limbs,
  But halt, and maimed, and of infirmity. 
  And for the rest of the way they have to go
  It is not day but night, and oftentimes
  A night of clouds wherein the stars are lost."[2]

Aye! but never lost is the Star of Truth to which the face is set, and while that shines all lesser lights may go.  It was the long months of suffering through which I had been passing, with the seemingly purposeless torturing of my little one as a climax, that struck the first stunning blow at my belief in God as a merciful Father of men.  I had been visiting the poor a good deal, and had marked the patient suffering of their lives; my idolised mother had been defrauded by a lawyer she had trusted, and was plunged into debt by his non-payment of the sums that should have passed through his hands to others; my own bright life had been enshrouded by pain and rendered to me degraded by an intolerable sense of bondage; and here was my helpless, sinless babe tortured for weeks and left frail and suffering.  The smooth brightness of my previous life made all the disillusionment more startling, and the sudden plunge into conditions so new and so unfavourable dazed and stunned me.  My religious past became the worst enemy of the suffering present.  All my personal belief in Christ, all my intense faith in His constant direction of affairs,