e side, forehead knit, asking questions. Believe me, it were
better to be followed by three deadly diseases than by him. He is never
silenced--without mercy. Though the drops of blood stand out on your
heart he will put his question. Softly he comes up (we are only a wee
bit child); "Is it good of God to make hell? Was it kind of Him to let
no one be forgiven unless Jesus Christ died?"

Then he goes off, and leaves us writhing. Presently he comes back.

"Do you love Him?"--waits a little. "Do you love Him? You will be lost
if you don't."

We say we try to.

"But do you?" Then he goes off.

It is nothing to him if we go quite mad with fear at our own wickedness.
He asks on, the questioning devil; he cares nothing what he says. We
long to tell some one, that they may share our pain. We do not yet know
that the cup of affliction is made with such a narrow mouth that only
one lip can drink at a time, and that each man's cup is made to match
his lip.

One day we try to tell some one. Then a grave head is shaken solemnly
at us. We are wicked, very wicked, they say we ought not to have such
thoughts. God is good, very good. We are wicked, very wicked. That is
the comfort we get. Wicked! Oh, Lord! do we not know it? Is it not the
sense of our own exceeding wickedness that is drying up our young heart,
filling it with sand, making all life a dust-bin for us?

Wicked? We know it! Too vile to live, too vile to die, too vile to creep
over this, God's earth, and move among His believing men. Hell is the
one place for him who hates his master, and there we do not want to go.
This is the comfort we get from the old.

And once again we try to seek for comfort. This time great eyes look at
us wondering, and lovely little lips say:

"If it makes you so unhappy to think of these things, why do you not
think of something else, and forget?"

Forget! We turn away and shrink into ourself. Forget, and think of other
things! Oh, God! do they not understand that the material world is but
a film, through every pore of which God's awful spirit world is shining
through on us? We keep as far from others as we can.

One night, a rare clear moonlight night, we kneel in the window; every
one else is asleep, but we kneel reading by the moonlight. It is a
chapter in the prophets, telling how the chosen people of God shall
be carried on the Gentiles' shoulders. Surely the devil might leave
us alone; there is not much to handle for him there.