een overleaped by his
vaulting Quixotic fervor. Wearily he labors to bridge them across, with
over-much reading, there in the quiet study of the parsonage, of Newton
and Tillotson and Butler; and he takes a grim pleasure (that does not
help him) in following the amiable argumentation of Paley. It pains him
grievously to think what humiliation would possess the old Doctor, if he
but knew into what crazy currents his boy's thoughts were drifting over
the pages of his beloved teachers. But a man cannot live a deceit, even
for charity's sake, without its making outburst some day, and wrecking
all the fine preventive barriers which kept it in.

The outburst came at last in the quiet of the Ashfield study, Reuben had
been poring for hours--how wearily! how vainly!--over the turgid dogmas
of one of the elder divines, when he suddenly dashed the book upon the
floor.

"Confound the theologies! I'll have no more of them!"

The Doctor dropped his pen, and stared as if a serpent had stung him.

"My son! Reuben! Reuben!"

It was not so much the expression that had shocked him, as it was the
action and the defiance in his eye.

"I can't help it, father. It's the Evil One, perhaps. If it be, I'll
cheat him, by making a clean breast of it. I can't abide the stuff; I
can't see my way through it."

"My son, it is your sin that blinds you."

"Very likely," says Reuben.

"It was not thus with you three months ago, Reuben," continues the
Doctor, in a softened tone.

"No, father, there was a strange light around me in those days. It
seemed to me that the path lay clear and shining through all the maze.
If Death had caught me then, I think I could have sung hosannas with the
saints. It was a beautiful dream. It's faded dismally, father,--as if
the Devil had painted it."

The old man shuddered, and lifted his hands, as he was wont to do in his
most earnest pleas at the Throne of Grace.

"The muddle of the world and the theologies has come in since,"
continued Reuben, "and the base professions I see around me, and the
hypocrisies and the cant, have taken away the glow. It's all a weariness
and a confusion, and that's the solemn truth."

The Doctor said, measuredly, (as if the Book were before him,)--

"'_Some seeds fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth; and
forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth. And
when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root,
they withered aw