olded to my friend the proofs of the truth of Christianity,
culminating in the incarnation, death, and resurrection, of Jesus
Christ. He seemed to have grasped the truths as presented, a great calm
came over him, and he died a believer. No incident of my life has given
me a purer pleasure than this; but it was a strange thing! Nobody could
have had access to him as I had--I, a doubter and a stumbler all my
life; it looks like the hand of God!"

His voice was low, and his eyes were wet as he finished the narration.

Yes, the hand of God was in it--it is in every good thing that takes
place on earth. By the bedside of a dying friend, the undercurrent of
faith in his warily and noble heart swept away for the time the
obstructions that were in his thought, and bore him to the feet of the
blessed, pitying Christ, who never breaks a bruised reed. I think he had
more light, and felt stronger ever after.

Death twice entered his home-circle--once to convey a budding flower
from the earth-home to the skies, and again like a lightning-stroke
laying young manhood low in a moment. The instinct within him, stronger
than doubt, turned his thought in those dark hours toward God. The ashes
of the earthly hopes that had perished in the fire of fierce calamity,
and the tears of a grief unspeakable, fertilized and watered the seed of
faith which was surely in his heart. The hot furnace-fire did not harden
this finely-tempered soul. But still he walked in darkness, doubting,
doubting, doubting all he most wished to believe. It was the infirmity
of his constitution, and the result of his surroundings. He went into
large business enterprises with mingled success and disappointment. He
went into politics, and though he bore himself nobly and gallantly, it
need not be said that that vortex does not usually draw those who are
within its whirl heavenward. He won some of the prizes that were fought
for in that arena where the noblest are in danger of being soiled, and
where the baser metal sinks surely to the bottom by the inevitable force
of moral gravitation.

From time to time we were thrown together, and I was glad to know that
the Great Question was still in his thought, and the hunger for truth
was still in his heart. Ill health sometimes made him irritable and
morbid, but the drift of his inner nature was unchanged. His mind was
enveloped in mists, and sometimes tempests of despair raged within him;
but his heart still thirsted for the