lapse, he loathed himself for it, asking by what gradual steps he had descended to be capable of such a moment of childish and churlish temper.  He was a product of modern culture, and had the devil who had overcome him been merely an unforgiving spirit, or the spirit of sarcastic wit or of self-satisfied indifference, he might hardly have noticed that he had fallen from the high estate of Christian manhood, even though the fiend jumped astride his back and ambled far on him; but when he found that he had been overcome by a natural impulse of passionate wrath he was appalled, and was philosopher enough to look for the cause of such weakness prior to the moment of failure.  Was it true, what Sophia had said, that he had sold his birthright for a little paltry prosperity?  He thought more highly of her discrimination than any one else would have done, because he loved her.  What had she seen in him to make her use that form of accusation?  And if it was true, was there for him no place of repentance?

Then he remembered the purer air of the dark mountaintop.  There he had seen many from his own little cure of souls who were shaken by the madman’s fervour as he had never been able to move them by precept or example.  There he, too, had seen, with sight borrowed from the eyes of the enthusiast, the enthusiast’s Lord, seen Him the more readily because there had been times in his life when he had not needed another to show him the loveliness that exceeds all other loveliness.  He was versed in the chronicle of the days when the power of God wrought wonders by devoted men, and he asked himself with whom this power had been working here of late—­with him, the priest, or with this wandering fool, out of whose lips it would seem that praise was ordained.  He looked back to divers hours when he had given himself wholly to the love of God, and to the long reaches of time between them, in which he had not cast away the muck-rake, but had trailed it after him with one hand as he walked forward, looking to the angel and the crown.  He seemed to see St. Peter pointing to the life all which he had professed to devote while he had kept back part; and St. Peter said, “Whiles it remained, was it not thine own?  Thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God.”

There was for him the choice that is given to every man in this sort of pain, the choice between dulling his mind to the pain, letting it pass from him as he holds on his way (and God knows it passes easily), or clasping it as the higher good.  Perhaps this man would not have been wiser than many other men in his choice had he not looked at the gathering of his muck-rake and in that found no comfort.  Since a woman had called this prosperity paltry, it seemed less substantial in his own eyes; but, paltry or worthy, he believed that it was in the power of his younger brother to reverse that prosperity, and he felt neither brave enough to face this misfortune nor bad enough to tamper with that brother’s crude ideals for