Atheism as the outcome of foul life and vicious desires. In
their shallow heartlessness and shallower thought they cannot even
dimly imagine the anguish of entering the mere penumbra of the Eclipse
of Faith, much less the horror of that great darkness in which the
orphaned soul cries out into the infinite emptiness: "Is it a Devil
that has made the world? Is the echo, 'Children, ye have no Father,'
true? Is all blind chance, is all the clash of unconscious forces, or
are we the sentient toys of an Almighty Power that sports with our
agony, whose peals of awful mockery of laughter ring back answer to the
wailings of our despair?"

How true are the noble words of Mrs. Hamilton King:--

"For some may follow Truth from dawn to dark,
As a child follows by his mother's hand,
Knowing no fear, rejoicing all the way;
And unto some her face is as a Star
Set through an avenue of thorns and fires,
And waving branches black without a leaf;
And still It draws them, though the feet must bleed,
Though garments must be rent, and eyes be scorched:
And if the valley of the shadow of death
Be passed, and to the level road they come,
Still with their faces to the polar star,
It is not with the same looks, the same limbs,
But halt, and maimed, and of infirmity.
And for the rest of the way they have to go
It is not day but night, and oftentimes
A night of clouds wherein the stars are lost."[2]

Aye! but never lost is the Star of Truth to which the face is set, and
while that shines all lesser lights may go. It was the long months of
suffering through which I had been passing, with the seemingly
purposeless torturing of my little one as a climax, that struck the
first stunning blow at my belief in God as a merciful Father of men. I
had been visiting the poor a good deal, and had marked the patient
suffering of their lives; my idolised mother had been defrauded by a
lawyer she had trusted, and was plunged into debt by his non-payment of
the sums that should have passed through his hands to others; my own
bright life had been enshrouded by pain and rendered to me degraded by
an intolerable sense of bondage; and here was my helpless, sinless babe
tortured for weeks and left frail and suffering. The smooth brightness
of my previous life made all the disillusionment more startling, and
the sudden plunge into conditions so new and so unfavourable dazed and
stunned me. My religious past became the worst enemy of