ave what you desire at any price will lead
you in the future. It is just such a desire that distinguishes wicked
men from good."

I will not linger upon a scene the very remembrance of which is painful
to this day.... I went from my father's presence in disgrace, in an
agony of spirit that was overwhelming, to lock the door of my room and
drop face downward on the bed, to sob until my muscles twitched. For he
had, indeed, put into me an awful fear. The greatest horror of my
boyish imagination was a wicked man. Was I, as he had declared, utterly
depraved and doomed in spite of myself to be one?

There came a knock at my door--Ella with my supper. I refused to open,
and sent her away, to fall on my knees in the darkness and pray wildly
to a God whose attributes and character were sufficiently confused in my
mind. On the one hand was the stern, despotic Monarch of the Westminster
Catechism, whom I addressed out of habit, the Father who condemned a
portion of his children from the cradle. Was I one of those who he had
decreed before I was born must suffer the tortures of the flames of
hell? Putting two and two together, what I had learned in Sunday school
and gathered from parts of Dr. Pound's sermons, and the intimation of
my father that wickedness was within me, like an incurable disease,--was
not mine the logical conclusion? What, then, was the use of praying?...
My supplications ceased abruptly. And my ever ready imagination, stirred
to its depths, beheld that awful scene of the last day: the darkness,
such as sometimes creeps over the city in winter, when the jaundiced
smoke falls down and we read at noonday by gas-light. I beheld the
tortured faces of the wicked gathered on the one side, and my mother
on the other amongst the blessed, gazing across the gulf at me with
yearning and compassion. Strange that it did not strike me that the
sight of the condemned whom they had loved in life would have marred if
not destroyed the happiness of the chosen, about to receive their crowns
and harps! What a theology--that made the Creator and Preserver of all
mankind thus illogical!

III.

Although I was imaginative, I was not morbidly introspective, and by the
end of the first day of my incarceration my interest in that solution
had waned. At times, however, I actually yearned for someone in whom I
could confide, who could suggest a solution. I repeat, I would not for
worlds have asked my father or my mother or Dr. Poun