ll. What was there in
that to break the spring of life like this? He stood still, heavily
trying to understand himself.

Then gradually it became clear to him. A month ago, every word of that
hectic young pleader for Christ and the Christian certainties would have
roused in him a leaping passionate sympathy--the heart's yearning
assent, even when the intellect was most perplexed. Now that inmost
strand had given way. Suddenly the disintegrating force he had been so
pitifully, so blindly, holding at bay had penetrated once for all into
the sanctuary! What had happened to him had been the first real failure
of _feeling_, the first treachery of the _heart_. Wishart's hopes and
hatreds, and sublime defiances of man's petty faculties, had aroused in
him no echo, no response. His soul had been dead within him.

As he gained the shelter of the wooded lane beyond the gate it seemed to
Robert that he was going through, once more, that old fierce temptation
of Bunyan's,--

'For after the Lord had in this manner thus graciously delivered me, and
had set me down so sweetly in the faith of His Holy Gospel, and had
given me such strong consolation and blessed evidence from heaven,
touching my interest in His love through Christ, the tempter came upon
me again, and that with a more grievous and dreadful temptation than
before. And that was, "To sell and part with this most blessed Christ;
to exchange Him for the things of life, for anything!" The temptation
lay upon me for the space of a year, and did follow me so continually
that I was not rid of it one day in a month: no, not sometimes one hour
in many days together, for it did always, in almost whatever I thought,
intermix itself therewith, in such sort that I could neither eat my
food, stoop for a pin, chop a stick, or cast mine eyes to look on this
or that, but still the temptation would come: "Sell Christ for this, or
sell Christ for that, sell Him, sell Him!"'

Was this what lay before the minister of God now in this _selva oscura_
of life? The selling of the Master, of 'the love so sweet, the unction
spiritual,' for an intellectual satisfaction, the ravaging of all the
fair places of the heart by an intellectual need!

And still through all the despair, all the revolt, all the pain, which
made the summer air a darkness, and closed every sense in him to the
evening beauty, he felt the irresistible march and pressure of the new
instincts, the new forces, which life and thou