Back upon the old, weatherbeaten circuits we met no such examples of mock spirituality. The men and women there had too little sense and too much virtue to go through such complicated intellectual processes to deceive themselves and others; they took narrow, almost persecuting views of right and wrong. But these teething saints in the town churches had a too broadminded way of speculating upon their very narrow moral margins and too few steadfast convictions of any sort. The women were the worst, as I have already intimated. Many of them were in a fluid state, dissolved by their own minds; others sustained the same relation to their souls that young and playful kittens do to their tails. They were always chasing them and never really finding them. But the most dangerous of them all is the one who refuses to take up her bed and walk spiritually and who wants the preacher to assist her at every step. There is something infernal about a woman who cannot distinguish between her sentimental emotions and a spiritual ambition. This is why, when we hear of a minister who has disgraced himself with some female member of his flock, my sympathies are all with the preacher. I know exactly what has happened. Some sad, Trilby-faced lady who has been "awakened" from a silent, cold, backslidden state by his sermons goes to see him in his church study. (They who build studies for their preachers in the back part of the church surround him with the four walls of moral destruction and invite it for him. The place for a minister's study is in his own home, with his wife passing in and out, if he has female spiritual invalids calling on him.) She is perfectly innocent in that she has not considered her moral responsibility to the preacher she is about to victimize. She is very modest, really and truly modest. He is a little on his guard till he discovers this. First, she tells him that she is "unhappy at home," has a sacrilegious husband most likely. I have never known one who spoke well of her husband. She has been perishing spiritually for years in this "brutal" atmosphere, and she dwells upon it till the preacher's heart is wrung with compassion for what this delicate nature has suffered in the unhallowed surroundings of her home. But now, she goes on, with a sweet light in her eyes, his sermons have aroused in her a desire to overcome such difficulties and to live on a higher plane. Could he give her some advice? He can. He is so full of real, honest, truthful kindness he almost wants to hold her hands while he bestows it. Nothing is further from his mind than evil. The preacher, in particular, must think no evil. This places him within easy reach of the morbid woman, who can do a good deal of evil before she thinks it.