ion as part of the training of medical students. Granted
these young men must see and do a great deal we do not ourselves like
even to think of, but they should adopt some other profession unless they
are prepared for this; they may even get inoculated with poison from a
dead body and lose their lives, but they must stand their chance. So if
we aspire to be priests in deed as well as name, we must familiarise
ourselves with the minutest and most repulsive details of all kinds of
sin, so that we may recognise it in all its stages. Some of us must
doubtlessly perish spiritually in such investigations. We cannot help
it; all science must have its martyrs, and none of these will deserve
better of humanity than those who have fallen in the pursuit of spiritual
pathology."

Ernest grew more and more interested, but in the meekness of his soul
said nothing.

"I do not desire this martyrdom for myself," continued the other, "on the
contrary I will avoid it to the very utmost of my power, but if it be
God's will that I should fall while studying what I believe most
calculated to advance his glory--then, I say, not my will, oh Lord, but
thine be done."

This was too much even for Ernest. "I heard of an Irish-woman once," he
said, with a smile, "who said she was a martyr to the drink."

"And so she was," rejoined Pryer with warmth; and he went on to show that
this good woman was an experimentalist whose experiment, though
disastrous in its effects upon herself, was pregnant with instruction to
other people. She was thus a true martyr or witness to the frightful
consequences of intemperance, to the saving, doubtless, of many who but
for her martyrdom would have taken to drinking. She was one of a forlorn
hope whose failure to take a certain position went to the proving it to
be impregnable and therefore to the abandonment of all attempt to take
it. This was almost as great a gain to mankind as the actual taking of
the position would have been.

"Besides," he added more hurriedly, "the limits of vice and virtue are
wretchedly ill-defined. Half the vices which the world condemns most
loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than
total abstinence."

Ernest asked timidly for an instance.

"No, no," said Pryer, "I will give you no instance, but I will give you a
formula that shall embrace all instances. It is this, that no practice
is entirely vicious which has not been extinguished among the c