In Toyner’s former religious experience he had been much upheld by the knowledge that he was walking in step with a vast army of Christians.  Now he no longer believed himself in the ways of exclusive thought and practices in which the best men he knew were walking.  The only religious thinkers with whom he had come in contact gave up a large class of human activities and the majority of human souls to the almost exclusive dominion of the devil.  As far as Toyner knew he was alone in the world with his new idea.  He had none of that vanity and self-confidence which would have made it easy for him to hold to it.  It did not appear to him reasonable that he could be right and these others wrong.  He did not know that no man can think alone, that by some strange necessity of thought he could only think what other men were then thinking.  He felt homesick, sick for the support of those faithful ones which he had been wont to see in imagination with him:  their conscious communion with God was the only good life, the life which he must seek to attain and from which he feared above all things to fall short; and that being so, it would have been easier, far easier, to call his new belief folly, heresy, nay, blasphemy if that were needful, and to repent of it, if he could have done so.  He could not, do what he would; he saw his vision to be true.

The thing had grown with his growth; he believed that a voice from heaven had spoken it.  Is not this the history of all revelation?

When I say that Toyner could not doubt his new conception of God and of the human struggle, I mean that he could not in sincerest thought hold the contrary to be true.  I do not mean to say that daily and hourly, when about his common avocations, his new inspiration did not seem a mere will-o’-the-wisp of the mind.  It took months and years to bring it into any accustomed relation to every-day matters of thought and act; and it is this habitual adjustment of our inward belief to our outward environment that makes any creed appear to be incontrovertible.

Oh the loneliness of it, to have a creed that no companion has!  The sheer sorrow of being compelled by the law of his mind to believe concerning God what he did not know that any other man believed time and time again obscured Bart Toyner’s vision of the divine.

The power of the miracle wrought at his conversion was gone; he had been taught that the miraculous power was only to be with him as long as he yielded implicit obedience, but that implied a clear-cut knowledge of right from wrong which Toyner did not now possess; many of the old rules clashed with that one large new rule which had come to him—­that any way of life was wicked which made it appear that God was in some provinces of life and not in others.  “Whatever is not of faith is sin”; but while an old and a new faith are warring in a man’s soul the definition fails:  many a righteous act is born of doubt, not faith.  This was one reason why Toyner no longer possessed all-conquering strength.  Another reason there was which acted as powerfully to rob him—­the soul-bewildering difficulty of believing that the God of physical law can also be the God of promise, that He that is within us and beneath us can also be above us with power to lift us up.