for ever--will live as long as God lives!"'

'Then why don't you free your slaves?' asked Miss Ophelia, with a
woman's practical and incisive logic.

'I'm not equal to that!' Saint Clare replied; and he confessed that,
through having proved recreant to the ideals that had once so clearly
presented themselves, he was not the man that he might have been.

'I'm not equal to that!' said Augustine Saint Clare.

But Michael Trevanion _was_ equal to that--and to a great deal more. He
saw the value of his son's soul, and he was willing to be shut out of
heaven for ever and ever if only Robert could be eternally saved! 'My
witness is above,' says Samuel Rutherford, in his _Second Letter to his
Parishioners_, 'my witness is above that your heaven would be two
heavens to me, and the salvation of you all as two salvations to me. I
would agree to a suspension and a postponement of my heaven for many
hundreds of years if ye could so be assured of a lodging in the Father's
house.' Michael Trevanion's behavior--mistaken as it was--proved that he
was willing to make an even greater sacrifice if, by so doing, he could
compass the salvation of his son.

IV

It is at this point that Michael Trevanion falls into line with the
great masters. Since the apostolic days we have had two conspicuously
successful evangelists--John Wesley and Mr. Spurgeon. The secret of
their success is so obvious that he who runs may read. I turn to my
edition of John Wesley's _Journal_, and at the end I find a tribute like
this: 'The great purpose of his life was doing good. For this he
relinquished all honor and preferment; to this he dedicated all his
powers of body and mind; at all times and in all places, in season and
out of season, by gentleness, by terror, by argument, by persuasion, by
reason, by interest, by every motive and every inducement, he strove,
with unwearied assiduity, to turn men from the error of their ways and
awaken them to virtue and religion. To the bed of sickness or the couch
of prosperity; to the prison or the hospital; to the house of mourning
or the house of feasting, wherever there was a friend to serve or a soul
to save, he readily repaired. He thought no office too humiliating, no
condescension too low, no undertaking too arduous, to reclaim the
meanest of God's offspring. _The souls of all men were equally precious
in his sight and the value of an immortal creature beyond all
estimation._'

In relation to Mr. Spurgeon, w