“Well, I don’t say that Toyner doesn’t hold up a certain standard of morality among the young men of the place, but it’s a pretty low one; and he has them all under his influence.  There isn’t a young fellow that walks these streets, whether the son of clergyman or beggar, who is not free to go to that man’s house every evening and have the run of his rooms and his books.  And Toyner and his wife will sit down and play cards with them; or they’ll get in a lot of girls, and have a dance, or theatricals,—­the thin end of the wedge, you know, the thin end of the wedge!  And all the young men go to his house, except a few that we’ve got in our Christian Association.”

The speaker was stricter in his views than I saw cause to be; but then, I knew something of his life; he was giving it day by day to save the men of whom he was talking.  He had a better right than I to know what was best for them.

“When you have a thorough-going man of the world,” he said, “every one knows what that means, and there’s not so much harm done.  But this Mr. Toyner is always talking about God, and using his influence to make people pray to God.  Such men are not ready to pray until they are prepared to give up the world!  The God that he tells them of is a fiction of his imagination; indeed, I might say a mere creature of his fancy, who is going to save all men in the end, whatever they do!”

“A Universalist!”

“Oh, worse than that—­at least, I have read the books of Universalists who, though their error was great, did not appear to me so far astray.  I cannot understand it!  I cannot understand it!” he went on; “I cannot understand the influence that he has obtained over our more educated class; for twenty years ago he was himself a low, besotted drunkard, and his wife is the daughter of a murderer!  Still less do I understand how such people can claim to be religious at all, and yet not see to what awful evil the small beginnings of vice must lead.  I tell you, if a man is allowed by Providence to lead an easy life, and remains unfaithful, he may still have some good metal in him which adversity might refine; but when people have gone through all that Toyner and his wife have been through—­not a child that has been born to them but has died at the breast—­I say, when they have been through all that, and still lead a worldly, unsatisfactory life, you may be sure that there is nothing in them that has the true ring of manhood or womanhood.”

I was left alone to enter Mr. Toyner’s gates.  I found myself in a large pleasure-ground, where Nature had been guided, not curtailed, in her work.  I was walking upon a winding drive, walled on either side by a wild irregular line of shrubs, where the delicate forms of acacias and crab-apples lifted themselves high in comparison to the lower lilac and elderberry-bushes.  I watched the sunlit acacias as they fluttered, spreading their delicate leaves and golden pods against the blue above me.  I made my way leisurely in the direction of music which I heard at some distance.  I had not advanced far before another person came into my path.