His own age contained him as a green
field might hold a rock. Not that this kind, faithful, helpful soul was
a lifeless stone; but that he was as unresponsive to the movements of
his time as a boulder is to the energies of a field. Alive in his own
sublime way he was, and inextricably rooted in one ever-living book
alone--the Bible.

This middle-aged, childlike man, settled near David as his neighbor,
was forever a reminder to him of the faith he once had had--the faith
of his earliest youth, the faith of his father and mother. Sometimes
when the day's work was done and the sober, still twilights came on,
this reverent soul, sitting with his family gathered about him near the
threshold of his single homeless room,--his oldest boy standing beside
his chair, his wife holding in her lap the sleeping babe she had just
nursed,--would begin to sing. The son's voice joined the father's; the
wife's followed the son's, in their usual hymn:--

"How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your faith in His excellent word."

Up in his room, a few hundred yards away, the lad that moment might be
trimming his lamp for a little more reading. More than once he waited,
listening in the darkness, to the reliant music of the stalwart, stern
old poem. How devotedly he too had been used to sing it!

That summer through, then, he kept on at the work of trying to settle
things before college reopened--things which involved a great duty.
Where the new thought of the age attacked dogma, Revelation,
Christianity most, there most he read. He was not the only reader. He
was one of a multitude which no man could know or number; for many read
in secret. Ministers of the Gospel read in secret in their libraries,
and locked the books away when their church officers called
unexpectedly. On Sunday, mounting their pulpits, they preached
impassioned sermons concerning faith--addressed to the doubts, ravaging
their own convictions and consciences.

Elders and deacons read and kept the matter hid from their pastors.
Physicians and lawyers read and spoke not a word to their wives and
children. In the church, from highest ecclesiastic and layman, wherever
in the professions a religious, scientific, scholarly mind, there was
felt the central intellectual commotion of those years--the Battle of
the Great Three.

And now summer was gone, the students flocking in, the session
beginning. David reentered his classes. Inwardly he drew b