When Toyner was well he came home again. His mind was still animated with the conception of God as suffering in the human struggle, but as absolute Lord of that struggle, and the consequent belief that nothing but obedience to the lower motive can be called evil. The new view of truth his vision had given him had become too really a part of his mind to be overthrown. It was no doubt a growth from the long years of desultory browsing upon popular science and the one year that had been so entirely devoted to the story of the gospel and to prayer. He could not doubt his new creed; but no sooner had he left the hospital walls than that burden came upon him of which the In Toyner's former religious experience he had been much upheld by the knowledge that he was walking in step with a vast army of Christians. Now he no longer believed himself in the ways of exclusive thought and practices in which the best men he knew were walking. The only religious thinkers with whom he had come in contact gave up a large class of human activities and the majority of human souls to the almost exclusive dominion of the devil. As far as Toyner knew he was alone in the world with his new idea. He had none of that vanity and self-confidence which would have made it easy for him to hold to it. It did not appear to him reasonable that he could be right and these others wrong. He did not The thing had grown with his growth; he believed that a voice from heaven had spoken it. Is not this the history of all revelation? When I say that Toyner could not doubt his new Oh the loneliness of it, to have a creed that no companion has! The sheer sorrow of being compelled by the law of his mind to believe concerning God what he did not know that any other man believed time and time again obscured Bart Toyner's vision of the divine. The power of the miracle wrought at his conversion Without a firm grip on this supernatural upholding power Toyner was a man with a diseased craving for intoxicants. He fled from them as a man flies from deadly infection; but with all the help that total abstinence and the absence of temptation can give he failed in the battle. A few weeks after he had returned to Fentown he was brought into his mother's house one morning dead drunk. The mother, whose heart had revived within her a little during the last year, now sank again into her previous dejection. Her friends said to her that they had always known how it would be in the case of so sudden a reformation. When Toyner woke up his humiliation was terrible; he bore it as he had borne all the rest of his pain and shame, silently enough. No one but Ann Markham even guessed the agony that he endured, Again Toyner set his feet sternly in the way of sobriety. Ah! how he prayed, beseeching that God, who had revealed Himself to be greater and nobler than had before been known, would not because of that show Himself to be less powerful towards those that fear Him. It is the prayer of faith, not the prayer of agonised entreaty, that takes hold of strength. Toyner failed again and again. There was a vast difference now between this and his former life of failure, for now he never despaired, but took up the struggle each time just where he had laid it down, and moreover the intervals of sobriety were long, and the fits of drunkenness short and few; but there were not many One day a visitor came hurrying down the street to Toyner's home. The stranger had the face of a saint, and the hasty feet of those who are conscious that they bear tidings of great joy. It was Toyner's friend, the preacher. Bart had often written to him, and he to his convert. Of late the letters had been fraught with pain to both, but this was the first time that the preacher had found himself able to come a long journey since he had heard of Toyner's fall. He came, his heart big with the prayer of faith that what he had done once he might be permitted to do again—lead this man once more into the humble path of a time-honoured When this life is passed away, shall we see that our prayers for others have been answered most lavishly by the very contradiction of what we have desired? The visit was well timed. Bart Toyner's father lay dying; and in spite of that, or rather in consequence of nights of watching and the necessary handling of stimulants, Bart sat in his own room, only just returned to soberness after a drunken night. With face buried in his hands, and a heart that was breaking with sorrow, Bart was sitting alone; and then the preacher came in. The preacher sat beside him, and put his arm around him. The preacher was a man whose embrace no man could shrink from, for the physical part of him was as nothing compared with the love and strength of its animating soul. "Our Lord sends a message to you: 'All things are possible to him that believeth.'" The preacher spoke with quiet strength. "You know, dear brother, that this word of His is certainly true." "Yes, yes, I know it. By the hour in which I first saw you I know it; but I cannot take hold of it again in the same way. My faith wavers." "Your faith wavers?" The preacher spoke questioningly. "My brother, faith in itself is nothing; it is only the hand that takes; it is the Saviour in whom we believe who has the power. You have turned away from Him. It is not that your faith wavers, but that you are walking straight forward on the road of infidelity, and on that path you will never find a God to help, but only a devil to devour." Toyner shivered even within the clasp of the encircling arm. "I had tried to tell you in "In what way?" The preacher's voice was full of sympathy; but here, and for the first time, Bart felt it was an unconscious trick. Sympathy was assumed to help him to speak. The preacher could conceive of no divine object of love that was not limited to the pattern he had learned to dwell upon. "I am not good at words," Toyner spoke humbly. "I took a long time to write to you; I said it better than I could now, that God is far more because He is a faithful Creator, responsible for us always, whatever we do, to bring us to good. Now I do not need to keep dividing things and people and thoughts into His and not-His. That was what it came to before. You may say it didn't, but it did. And all we know about Jesus—don't you see." (Bart "God cannot sin!" cried the preacher, with the warmth of holy indignation. Toyner became calm with a momentary contempt of the other's lack of understanding. "That goes without saying, or He would not be God." "But that is what you have said in your letters." There was silence in the room. The misery of his loneliness took hold of Toyner till it almost felt like despair. Who was he, unlearned, very sinful, even now shaken with the palsy of recent excess "The father tempted the prodigal," he said, "when he gave him the substance to waste with sinners. Did the father sin? The time had come when nothing but temptation—yes, and sin too—could save. Most things, sir, that you hold about God I can hold too. There are bad men, powerful and seducing men, in the world; there may easily be unseen devils. There is hell on earth, and I don't doubt but that there's the awfulest, longest depth of the same kind of hell beyond. There's heaven on earth, and all the love and pain of love we have tell us there's heaven beyond, un The young preacher had withdrawn his encircling arm. He sat looking very stern and sad. "When you begin to doubt God's word, you will soon doubt that He is, and that He is the rewarder of them that seek Him." "Sir, it seems to me that it's doubting the incarnate Word to believe what you do, because the main plain drift of all He was and did is contradicted by some few things The preacher meditated. It had already been given to him to pray with great persistency and faith for this back-slider, and he had come sure of bringing with him adequate help; but now his hope was less. In a moment he threw himself upon his knees and prayed aloud: "Heavenly Father, open the heart of Thine erring child to see that it was the craft and subtlety of the devil that devised for him a temptation he could not resist,—none other but the devil could have been so subtle; and show him that this same "Stop!" (huskily). "I have not let go of His faith. His faith was in the Father of sinners." Then the preacher strove in words to show him the greatness of his error, and why he could not hold to it and live in the victory which faith gives. It was no narrow or weak view that the preacher took of the universe and God's scheme for its salvation; for he too lived at a time when men were learning more of the love of God, and he too had spoken with God. The hard outline of his creed had grown luminous, fringed with the divine light from beyond, as the bars of prison windows grow dazzling and fade when the prisoner looks at the sun. "I take in all that you say, sir; but you see I can't help feeling sure that it's true that God is living with us as much and as true when we're in the worst sort of sin, and the greater sin that it brings—for the punishment of sin is more and more sin—and being sure, I know that everything else that is true will come to fit in with it, though I may not be able rightly to put it in now, and what won't come to fit in with it can't be true." The preacher perceived that the evil which he had set himself to slay was giantlike in strength. He chose him smooth stones for his sling. The preacher paused, hoping to hear some encouraging word in correspondence to the gesture, but none came. Then he spoke of Moses and of Joshua, for he was following the tale of God's rejection of sinful nations. Toyner answered now. His eye was clearer, his hand steadier. "I have read there's many that say that God could not have told His people to slay whole nations, men, The preacher was surprised to see the transformation that was going on in the man before him. That wonderful law which gives to some centre of energy in the brain the control of bodily strength, if but the right relationship between mind and body can be established, was again working, although in a lesser degree than formerly, to restore this man before his eyes. Bart, who had appeared shrunken, trembling, and watery-eyed, was pulling himself together with some strength that he had got from somewhere, and was standing up again ready to play a man's part. The preacher did not understand why. There seemed to him to have been nothing but failure in the interview. He made one more effort; he put "Think of it," he said; "you make wrong but an inferior kind of right. You take away the reason for the one great Sacrifice, and in this you are slighting Him who suffered for you." Then he made, with all the force and eloquence he could, the personal appeal of the Christ whom he felt to be slighted. "You have spoken of the sufferings of lost and wretched men," he went on; "think of His sufferings! You have spoken of your loneliness; think of His loneliness!" Then suddenly Bart Toyner made a gesture as a slave might who casts off the chains of bondage. The appeal to "You came to help me; you have prayed for me; you have helped me; you have been given something to say. Listen: you have told me of Abraham; he was called to go out alone, quite alone. Now you have spoken to me of Another who was alone." Toyner was incoherent. "That was why He bore it, that we might know that it was Toyner looked at the preacher, love and reverence in his eyes. "You saved me once," he said; "you have saved me again." But the preacher went home very sorrowful, for he did not believe that Bart Toyner was saved. |