to us for righteousness.  We must find a higher meaning still in the text.  Are we not, each one of us, starving for heavenly food?—­spiritually exhausted with thirst?—­naked, sick, in prison?  Are we eating, daily, of the bread of life?—­drinking at the wells of God’s truth?—­putting on the garments of righteousness?—­finding balm for our sick souls in Gilead?—­breaking the bonds of evil?—­turning from strange lands, and coming back to our father’s house.  If not, I warn you, men and brethren, that you are not in the right way;—­that, taking the significance of God’s word, which is truth itself, there is no reasonable ground of hope for your salvation.”

It was not with Mr. Braxton as with his friend.  He could not let considerations like these enter one ear and go out at the other.  From earliest childhood he had received careful instruction.  Parents, teachers and preachers, had all shared in the work of storing his mind with the precepts of religion, and now, in manhood, his conscience rested on these and upon the states wrought therefrom in the impressible substance of his mind.  Try as he would, he found the effort to push aside early convictions and early impressions a simple impossibility; and, notwithstanding these had been laid on the foundation of a far more literal interpretation of Scripture than the one to which he had just been listening, his maturer reason accepted the preacher’s clear application of the law; and conscience, like an angel, went down into his heart, and troubled the waters which had been at peace.

Mr. Braxton was a man of thrift.  He had started in life with a purpose, and that purpose he was steadily attaining.  To the god of this world he offered daily sacrifice; and in his heart really desired no higher good than seemed attainable through outward things.  Wealth, position, honor, among men—­these bounded his real aspirations.  But prior things in his mind were continually reaching down and affecting his present states.  He could not forget that life was short, and earthly possessions and honors but the things of a day.  That as he brought nothing into this world, so he could take nothing out.  That, without a religious life, he must not hope for heaven.  In order to get free from the disturbing influence of these prior things, and to lay the foundations of a future hope, Mr. Braxton became a church member, and, so far as all Sabbath observances were concerned, a devout worshiper.  Thus he made a truce with conscience, and conscience having gained so much, accepted for a period the truce, and left Mr. Braxton in good odor with himself.