There were hours in which Bulstrode felt that his action was unrighteous; but how could he go back?  He had mental exercises, called himself nought laid hold on redemption, and went on in his course of instrumentality.  And after five years Death again came to widen his path, by taking away his wife.  He did gradually withdraw his capital, but he did not make the sacrifices requisite to put an end to the business, which was carried on for thirteen years afterwards before it finally collapsed.  Meanwhile Nicholas Bulstrode had used his hundred thousand discreetly, and was become provincially, solidly important—­a banker, a Churchman, a public benefactor; also a sleeping partner in trading concerns, in which his ability was directed to economy in the raw material, as in the case of the dyes which rotted Mr. Vincy’s silk.  And now, when this respectability had lasted undisturbed for nearly thirty years—­ when all that preceded it had long lain benumbed in the consciousness—­ that past had risen and immersed his thought as if with the terrible irruption of a new sense overburthening the feeble being.

Meanwhile, in his conversation with Raffles, he had learned something momentous, something which entered actively into the struggle of his longings and terrors.  There, he thought, lay an opening towards spiritual, perhaps towards material rescue.

The spiritual kind of rescue was a genuine need with him.  There may be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them.  He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs.  If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all, to whatever confession we belong, and whether we believe in the future perfection of our race or in the nearest date fixed for the end of the world; whether we regard the earth as a putrefying nidus for a saved remnant, including ourselves, or have a passionate belief in the solidarity of mankind.

The service he could do to the cause of religion had been through life the ground he alleged to himself for his choice of action:  it had been the motive which he had poured out in his prayers.  Who would use money and position better than he meant to use them?  Who could surpass him in self-abhorrence and exaltation of God’s cause?  And to Mr. Bulstrode God’s cause was something distinct from his own rectitude of conduct:  it enforced a discrimination of God’s enemies, who were to be used merely as instruments, and whom it would be as well if possible to keep out of money and consequent influence.  Also, profitable investments in trades where the power of the prince of this world showed its most active devices, became sanctified by a right application of the profits in the hands of God’s servant.