age not his own;
To shun his once-loved dogs, to bound away
And from their huntsman to become their prey;
And yet consider why the change was wrought;
You'll find it his misfortune, not his fault;
Or, if a fault it was the fault of chance;
For how can guilt proceed from ignorance?"

The story of Circe is the common story of those who have yielded to the
flesh. The companions of Ulysses visited the palace of Circe, were
allured by her charms, and the result is read in these words:

"Before the spacious front, a herd we find
Of beasts, the fiercest of the savage kind.
Our trembling steps with blandishments they meet
And fawn, unlike their species, at our feet."

The strong words of Milton are none too strong:

"Their human countenance
The express resemblance of the gods, is changed
Into some brutish form."

A common subject with artists has been the temptations of the saints.
They have fled from luxury, and what they supposed to be moral peril,
but have found no solitude to which they could go and leave their bodies
behind. In the silences faces have appeared to them full of alluring
entreaty, and more than one anchorite has found to his sorrow that he
carried within himself the cause of his danger.

A singularly vivid painting represents one of the saints in the desert,
and clinging to him, with their arms around his neck, are two figures of
exquisite physical beauty. Their charms are so near and perilous that
the pale and haggard man in desperation has shut his eyes, and in this
extremity, with his one free hand, is frantically clinging to a cross.
The artist has accurately depicted the condition in which the soul finds
itself as it begins its growth;--its chief enemies are those of its own
household.

Happy indeed is it for all that none see at the first the obstacles in
their way. Faint and far shines the splendor of the goal; the hindrances
are reached one by one, and each one, for the moment, seems to be the
last.

But close and persistent as is the animal entail, it is not
unconquerable. Many a Sir Galahad, and many a woman fair and holy as his
pure sister, have lived on this earth of ours. They were not always so;
and their beauty and holiness are but the outshining of spiritual
victory.

Is this environment of evil necessary to the development of the soul? We
may not know; but we do know that it can be conquered, and some time and
somehow will be