of professing Christians; more quick to detect their mistakes and
failures; more willing to admit the half-uttered thought that this
entire matter might be a smooth-sounding fable. Sadie was the child
of many prayers, and her father's much-used Bible lay on her
dressing-table, speaking for him, now that his tongue was silent in
the grave; so she did not _quite_ yield to the enemy--but she was
walking in the way of temptation--and the Christian tongues around
her, which the grave had _not_ silenced, yet remained as mute as
though their lips were already sealed; and so the path in which Sadie
walked grew daily broader and more dangerous.

Then there was Dr. Douglass--not by any means the worst man that the
world can produce. He was, or fancied himself to be, a skeptic. Like
many a young man, wise in his own conceit, he had no very distinct
idea of what he was skeptical about, nor to what hights of illogical
nonsense his own supposed views, carried out, would lead him;
like many another, too, he had studied rhetoric, and logic, and
mathematics, and medicine, thoroughly and well; he would have
hesitated long, and studied hard, and pondered deeply, before he had
ventured to dispute an established point in surgery. And yet, with
the inconsistent folly of the age, he had absurdly set his seal to the
falsity of the Bible, after giving it, at most, but a careless reading
here and there, and without having ever once honestly made use of
the means by which God has promised to enlighten the seekers after
knowledge. And yet, his eyes being blinded, he did not realize how
absurd and unreasonable, how utterly foolish, was his conduct. He
thought himself sincere; he had no desire to lead Sadie astray from
her early education, and, like most skeptical natures, he quite
prided himself upon the care with which he guarded his peculiar views,
although I could never see why that was being any other than miserably
selfish or inconsistent; for it is saying, in effect, one of two
things, either: "My belief is sacred to myself alone, and nobody else
shall have the benefit of it, if I can help it;" or else: "I am very
much ashamed of my position as a skeptic, and I shall keep it to
myself as much as possible." Be that as it may, Dr. Douglass so
thought, and was sincere in his intentions to do Sadie no harm; yet,
as the days came and went, he was continually doing her injury. They
were much in each other's society, and the subject which he meant