plunged his wife, the woman of the Past, whom he had sworn to
make happy. And it is to be observed that she was not necessarily his
inferior, but, in the world of _heart_, superior to himself. A true and
pure character, feeling its inferiority and anxious to advance, cannot
long remain in the background; it has sufficient stamina to attain the
height of self-abnegating greatness. God sometimes deprives men of the
strength necessary for action, but He never robs them of the faculty of
progress, of spiritual elevation. Head and heart throb with the same
pulsation; the brain thinks not aright without the healthful heart.
Meanness and grovelling are always voluntary, and their essence is to
resist superiority, to struggle against it, to try to degrade it: thus,
all the bitter reactions of the Past against the changes truly needed
for the development of the Future, spring from a primeval root of
baseness.

An admirable picture of an exhausted and dying society is given us in
the person of the precocious but decrepit child, the sole fruit of a sad
marriage. Destined from its birth, to an early grave, its excitable
imagination soon consumes its frail body. Nothing could be more
exquisitely tender, more true to nature, than the portraiture of this
unfortunate but lovely boy.

After the betrayal of our hero by his Ideal, the Guardian Angel again
appears to give him simple but sage counsel:

'Return to thy house, and sin no more!

'Return to thy house, and love thy child!'

But vain this sage advice! As if driven to the desert to be tempted, we
again meet our hero in the midst of storm and tempest, wildly communing
with Nature, trying to read in her changeful phenomena lessons he should
have sought in the depths of his own soul; seeking from her dumb lips
oracles only to be found in his fulfilment of sacred duties; for only
thus is to be solved the perplexing riddle of human destiny. 'Peace to
men of good will!' Roaming through the wilderness, sad and hopeless, and
in his despair about to fall into the gloomy and blighting sin of caring
for no one but himself, the Angel again appears, and again chants to him
the divine lesson that only in self-sacrificing love and lowly duties,
can the true path to the Future be found:

'Love the sick, the hungry, the despairing!

'Love thy neighbor, thy poor neighbor, as thyself, and thou wilt be
redeemed!'

The reiterated warning is again given in vain. The demon of ambition
then app