“Who?” he repeated, and the stillness grew more profound.  Then, slowly, impressively, almost sadly, he said: 

“I cannot hide the truth.  As God’s ambassador, I must give the message; and it is this:  If you, my brother, are not ministering to the wants of the hungry and thirsty, the stranger, the sick and in prison, you are of those who will have to go away.”

And the minister shut the Book, and sat down.  If, as we have intimated, the preacher had limited Christian duty to bodily needs, Mr. Braxton would not have been much exercised in mind.

He had found an easy way to dispose of these merely literal interpretations of Scripture.  Now, his life was brought to the judgment of a more interior law, as expounded that day.  It was in vain that he endeavored to reject the law; for the more he tried to do this, the clearer it was seen in the light of perceptive truth.

“God help me, if this be so!” he exclaimed, in a moment of more perfect realization of what was meant in the Divine Word.  “Who shall stand in the judgment?”

For awhile he endeavored to turn himself away from convictions that were grounding themselves deeper and deeper every moment,—­to shut his eyes in wilful blindness, and refuse to see in the purer light which had fallen around him.  But this effort only brought his mind into severer conflict, and consciously removed him to an almost fatal distance from the paths leading upward to the mountains of peace.

“This is the way, walk ye in it.”  A clear voice rose above the noise of strife in his soul, and his soul grew calm and listened.  He no longer wrought at the fruitless task of rejecting the higher truths which were illustrating his mind, but let them flow in, and by virtue thereof examined the state of his inner life.  Now it was that his eyes were in a degree opened, so that he could apprehend the profounder meanings of Scripture.  The parables were flooded with new light.  He understood, as he had never understood before, why the guest, unclothed with a wedding garment, was cast out from the feast; and why the door was shut upon the virgins who had no oil in their lamps.  He had always regarded these parables as involving a hidden meaning—­as intended to convey spiritual instruction under literal forms—­but, now, they spoke in a language that applied itself to his inward state, and warned him that without a marriage garment, woven in the loom of interior life, where motives rule, he could never be the King’s guest; warned him that without the light of divine truth in his understanding, and the oil of love to God and the neighbor in his heart, the door of the kingdom would be shut against him.  Ritual observances were, to these, but outward forms, dry husks, except when truly representative of that worship in the soul which subordinates natural affections to what is spiritual and divine.