when a man is tempted he must pray until he is given the
victory, and then, calm and steadfast, go out to face the world again.
If Toyner's had been a smaller soul, the need of his life would have
imperatively demanded then that just what he expected to happen to him
should happen, and in some mysterious way no doubt it would have
happened.

When we quietly observe religious life exactly as it is, without the
bias of any theory, there are two constantly recurring facts which,
taken together, excite deep astonishment: the fact that small minds
easily attain to a certainty of faith to which larger minds attain more
slowly and with much greater distress; and also the fact that the
happenings of life do actually come in exact accordance to a man's
faith--faith being not the mere expectation that a thing is going to
take place, but the inner eye that sees into the heart of things, and
knows that its desire must inevitably take place, and why. This sort of
faith, be it in a tiny or great nature, comes triumphantly in actual
fact to what it predicts; but the little heart comes to it easily and
produces trivial prayers, while the big heart, thinking to arrive with
the same ease at the same measure of triumph, is beaten back time and
time and again.

Probably the explanation is that the smaller mind has not the same
germinating power; there is not enough in it to cause the long, slow
growth of root and stem, and therefore it soon puts forth its little
blossom. These things all happen, of course, according to eternal law of
inward development; they are not altered by any force from without,
because nothing is without: the sun that makes the daisy to blossom is
just that amount of sun that it absorbs into itself, and so with the
acorn or the pine-cone. These latter, however, do not produce any bright
immediate blossom, though they ultimately change the face of all that
spot of earth by the spread of their roots and branches.

After praying a long time Bart Toyner relapsed into meditation,
endeavouring to contemplate those attributes of his God which might
bring him the strength which he had not yet attained, and just here came
to him the subtlest and strongest reinforcement to all those arguments
which were chiming together upon what appeared to him the side of evil.
The God in whom he had learned to trust was a God who, moved by pity,
had come out of His natural path to give a chance of salvation to wicked
men by the sacrific