lled his faith? Was he not cherishing, talking flat
unbelief?--as much as telling God he did _not_ trust in Him? Where was
the faithlessness of which his faithlessness complained? A phantom of
its own! Yea, let God be true and every man a liar! Had the hour come,
and not the money? A fine faith it was that depended on the very
presence of the help!--that required for its existence that the supply
should come before the need!--a fine faith in truth, which still would
follow in the rear of sight!--But why then did God leave him thus
without faith? Why did not God make him able to trust? He had prayed
quite as much for faith as for money. His conscience replied, "That is
your part--the thing you will not do. If God put faith into your heart
without your stirring up your heart to believe, the faith would be God's
and not yours. It is true all is God's; he made this you call _me_, and
made it able to believe, and gave you Himself to believe in; and if
after that He were to make you believe without you doing your utmost
part, He would be making you down again into a sort of holy dog, not
making you grow a man like Christ Jesus His Son"--"But I have tried hard
to trust in Him," said the little self.--"Yes, and then fainted and
ceased," said the great self, the conscience.

Thus it went on in the poor man's soul. Ever and anon he said to
himself, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him," and ever and anon
his heart sickened afresh, and he said to himself, "I shall go down to
the grave with shame, and my memorial will be debts unpaid, for the
Lord hath forsaken me." All the night he had lain wrestling with fear
and doubt: fear was hard upon him, but doubt was much harder. "If I
could but trust," he said, "I could endure any thing."

In the splendor of the dawn, he fell into a troubled sleep, and a more
troubled dream, which woke him again to misery. Outside his chamber, the
world was rich in light, in song, in warmth, in odor, in growth, in
color, in space; inside, all was to him gloomy, groanful, cold, musty,
ungenial, dingy, confined; yet there was he more at ease, shrunk from
the light, and in the glorious morning that shone through the chinks of
his shutters, saw but an alien common day, not the coach of his Father,
come to carry him yet another stage toward his home. He was in want of
nothing at the moment. There were no holes in the well-polished shoes
that seemed to keep ghostly guard outside his chamber-door. The clo