les us to conquer sin.'

'But,' said Janet, 'I can feel no trust in God. He seems always to have
left me to myself. I have sometimes prayed to Him to help me, and yet
everything has been just the same as before. If you felt like me, how did
you come to have hope and trust?'

'Do not believe that God has left you to yourself. How can you tell but
that the hardest trials you have known have been only the road by which
He was leading you to that complete sense of your own sin and
helplessness, without which you would never have renounced all other
hopes, and trusted in His love alone? I know, dear Mrs. Dempster, I know
it is hard to bear. I would not speak lightly of your sorrows. I feel
that the mystery of our life is great, and at one time it seemed as dark
to me as it does to you.' Mr. Tryan hesitated again. He saw that the
first thing Janet needed was to be assured of sympathy. She must be made
to feel that her anguish was not strange to him; that he entered into the
only half-expressed secrets of her spiritual weakness, before any other
message of consolation could find its way to her heart. The tale of the
Divine Pity was never yet believed from lips that were not felt to be
moved by human pity. And Janet's anguish was not strange to Mr. Tryan. He
had never been in the presence of a sorrow and a self-despair that had
sent so strong a thrill through all the recesses of his saddest
experience; and it is because sympathy is but a living again through our
own past in a new form, that confession often prompts a response of
confession. Mr. Tryan felt this prompting, and his judgement, too, told
him that in obeying it he would be taking the best means of administering
comfort to Janet. Yet he hesitated; as we tremble to let in the daylight
on a chamber of relics which we have never visited except in curtained
silence. But the first impulse triumphed, and he went on. 'I had lived
all my life at a distance from God. My youth was spent in thoughtless
self-indulgence, and all my hopes were of a vain worldly kind. I had no
thought of entering the Church; I looked forward to a political career,
for my father was private secretary to a man high in the Whig Ministry,
and had been promised strong interest in my behalf. At college I lived in
intimacy with the gayest men, even adopting follies and vices for which I
had no taste, out of mere pliancy and the love of standing well with my
companions. You see, I was more guilty even then