quit the struggle.
His heart was lead in his breast, and he walked through the house to
his pipe organ, that had stood silent in the hall for nearly a year.
He stood hesitatingly before it for a second, and then wearily lay him
down to rest, on a couch beside it, where, when he had played the last
time, Jane lay and listened. He was tired past all telling, but his
soul was relaxed. He lay there for hours--until the tall clock above
his head chimed two. He could not sleep, but his consciousness was
inert and his mind seemed limp and empty, as one who has worked past
his limit. The hymn that the clock chimed through the quarter hours
repeated itself over and over again without meaning in his brain.
Something aroused him; he started up suddenly, and lying half on his
elbow and half on his side he stared about him, and was conscious of a
great light in the room: it was as though there was a fire near by and
he was alarmed, but he could not move. As he looked into space,
terrified by the paralysis that held him, he saw across the face of
the organ, "Righteousness exalteth a Nation, but sin is a reproach to
any people."

Quick as a flash his mind went back to the time that same motto stared
meaninglessly at him from above the pulpit in the chapel at West
Point, to which he had been appointed official visitor at Commencement
many years before. But that night as he gazed at the text its meaning
came rushing through his brain. It came so quickly that he could not
will it back nor reason it in. Righteousness, he knew, was not
piety--not wearing your Sunday clothes to church and praying and
singing psalms; it was living honestly and kindly and charitably and
dealing decently with every one in every transaction; and sin--that,
he knew--was the cheating, the deceiving, and the malicious greed
that had built up his company and scores of others like it all over
the land. That, he knew--that bribery and corruption and vicarious
stealing which he had learned to know as business--that was a
reproach to any people, and as it came to him that he was a miserable
offender and that the other life, the decent life, was the right life,
he was filled with a joy that he could not express, and he let the
light fail about him unheeded, and lay for a time in a transport of
happiness. He had found the secret.

The truth had come to him--to him first of all men, and it was his to
tell. The joy of it--that he should find out what righteousness
was-