’Do not think I am speaking in passion, and using unwarrantable strength of words.  If the written Word is not absolutely authoritative, what do we know of God?  What more than we can infer, that is, guess,—­as the thoughtful heathens guessed,—­ Plato, Socrates, Cicero,—­from dim and mute surrounding phenomena?  What do we know of Eternity?  Of our relations to God?  Especially of the relations of a sinner to God?  What of reconciliation?  What of the capital question—­How can a God of perfect spotless rectitude deal with me, a corrupt sinner, who have trampled on those of His laws which were even written on my conscience?...

’This dreadful conduct of yours I had intended, after much prayer, to pass by in entire silence; but your apparently sincere inquiries after the cause of my sorrow have led me to go to the root of the matter, and I could not stop short of the development contained in this letter.  It is with pain, not in anger, that I send it; hoping that you may be induced to review the whole course, of which this is only a stage, before God.  If this grace were granted to you, oh! how joyfully should I bury all the past, and again have sweet and tender fellowship with my beloved Son, as of old.’

The reader who has done me the favour to follow this record of the clash of two temperaments will not fail to perceive the crowning importance of the letter from which I have just made a long quotation.  It sums up, with the closest logic, the whole history of the situation, and I may leave it to form the epigraph of this little book.

All that I need further say is to point out that when such defiance is offered to the intelligence of a thoughtful and honest young man with the normal impulses of his twenty-one years, there are but two alternatives.  Either he must cease to think for himself; or his individualism must be instantly confirmed, and the necessity of religious independence must be emphasized.

No compromise, it is seen, was offered; no proposal of a truce would have been acceptable.  It was a case of ’Everything or Nothing’; and thus desperately challenged, the young man’s conscience threw off once for all the yoke of his ‘dedication’, and, as respectfully as he could, without parade or remonstrance, he took a human being’s privilege to fashion his inner life for himself.