A singularly vivid painting represents one of the saints in the desert, and clinging to him, with their arms around his neck, are two figures of exquisite physical beauty.  Their charms are so near and perilous that the pale and haggard man in desperation has shut his eyes, and in this extremity, with his one free hand, is frantically clinging to a cross.  The artist has accurately depicted the condition in which the soul finds itself as it begins its growth;—­its chief enemies are those of its own household.

Happy indeed is it for all that none see at the first the obstacles in their way.  Faint and far shines the splendor of the goal; the hindrances are reached one by one, and each one, for the moment, seems to be the last.

But close and persistent as is the animal entail, it is not unconquerable.  Many a Sir Galahad, and many a woman fair and holy as his pure sister, have lived on this earth of ours.  They were not always so; and their beauty and holiness are but the outshining of spiritual victory.

Is this environment of evil necessary to the development of the soul?  We may not know; but we do know that it can be conquered, and some time and somehow will be conquered; and that then men, like ourselves, grown from the same stock, evolved from the lower levels, will constitute “the crowning race.”

    “No longer half akin to brute,
    For all we thought and loved and did,
    And hoped, and suffered, is but seed
    Of what in them is flower and fruit.”

These are a few samples of the hindrances which the soul must face in its progress through “the thicket of this world.”  But these are not all.  Hardly less serious is the ignorance which clothes it like a garment.  It comes it knows not whence; it journeys it knows not whither, and apparently is attended by no one wiser than itself.

Hugo’s awful picture of a man in the ocean with the vast and silent heavens above, the desolate waves around, the birds like dwellers from another world circling in the evening light, and the poor fellow trying to swim, he knows not where, is not so wide of the mark as some thoughtless readers might suppose.

The soul is ignorant and timid, in the vast and void night, with its environment of ignorance and of other souls also blindly struggling.  At the same time there is the consciousness of a duty to do something, of a voice calling it somewhere which ought to be heeded, and of having bitterly failed.

The solitariness of the soul is also one of the most mysterious and solemn of its characteristics.  The prophecy which is applied to Jesus might equally be applied to every human being:  He trod the wine-press alone.  In all its deepest experiences the soul is solitary.  Craving companionship, in the very times when it seeks it most it finds it denied.  Every crucial choice must at last be individual.  When sorrows are multiplied there are in them deeps into which no friendly eye can look.  When the