wever, he began to feel doubts, and,
becoming convinced that he could never again accept the doctrines in
which he had been educated, he told his father that he must give up all
thought of taking Orders.

Now, unfortunately, Mr. Raeburn was the very last man to understand
or sympathize with any phase of life through which he had not himself
passed. He had never been troubled with religious doubts; skepticism
seemed to him monstrous and unnatural. He met the confession, which
his son had made in pain and diffidence, with a most deplorable want of
tact. In answer to the perplexing questions which were put to him, he
merely replied testily that Luke had been overworking himself, and that
he had no business to trouble his head with matters which were beyond
him, and would fain have dismissed the whole affair at once.

"But," urged the son, "how is it possible for me to turn my back on
these matters when I am preparing to teach them?"

"Nonsense," replied the father, angrily. "Have not I taught all my life,
preached twice a Sunday these thirty years without perplexing myself
with your questionings? Be off to your shooting, and your golf, and let
me have no more of this morbid fuss."

No more was said; but Luke Raeburn, with his doubts and questions shut
thus into himself, drifted rapidly from skepticism to the most positive
form of unbelief. When he next came home for the long vacation, his
father was at length awakened to the fact that the son, upon whom all
his ambition was set, was hopelessly lost to the Church; and with this
consciousness a most bitter sense of disappointment rose in his heart.
His pride, the only side of fatherhood which he possessed, was deeply
wounded, and his dreams of honorable distinction were laid low. His
wrath was great. Luke found the home made almost unbearable to him. His
college career was of course at an end, for his father would not hear
of providing him with the necessary funds now that he had actually
confessed his atheism. He was hardly allowed to speak to his sisters,
every request for money to start him in some profession met with a sharp
refusal, and matters were becoming so desperate that he would probably
have left the place of his own accord before long, had not Mr. Raeburn
himself put an end to a state of things which had grown insufferable.

With some lurking hope, perhaps, of convincing his son, he resolved
upon trying a course of argument. To do him justice he really tried