"You have backslid, William. That is what is the matter with you! You listened to the voice of Horace Pendleton till you cannot hear the voice of God. You no longer have the single eye. It has been bunged up, put out!" That was the first and last sermon I ever preached to William. It was a short one, but it brought him forward for prayers, so to speak, and for the next few days we had a terrible time at the parsonage. He was an honest man, and he was not slow to recognize his condition once it was pointed out to him. It is not so bad to lose the "witness of the Spirit," because you can still believe in God, and presently the witness is there again, but when you begin to read books that curtail the divinity of Jesus Christ and make your Heavenly Father just a natural force in the Universe, when you bud and blossom into rationalism, there is a good deal of mischief to pay. I do not say that Pendleton went this far, but the books he read and loaned to William did, and they unconsciously had a profounder effect upon William than they had on Pendleton, because William really had a soul. (I am not saying Pendleton did not have, you understand; I am an agnostic on that subject.) But to have a soul and to be without an immediate Almighty is to experience a frightful tragedy. If a man never recognizes this diviner part of himself, he may live and die in the comfort or discomfort of any other mere creature. But once you realize your own immortality (I make a distinction here between the self-consciousness of immortality and the loud preaching of it that a man may do just from biblical hearsay), you are a lonesome waif in a bad storm. This was William's fix. He was exposed, all at once, to the inclemencies of the Infinitudes. But I ceased to worry once he began to really pray and scourge himself, and I did not interrupt the chastening. Usually, when he insisted upon fasting all day Friday, I provided little intelligent temptations to food at the earliest possible moment. But this time I let him starve to his heart's content. I reckon I am a worldly-minded woman and always shall be, but I know another, higher minded man when I see one, and I have always been careful not to drag William down. Now I was equally determined that Horace Pendleton should not. Once, during the dreadful time, he came out of his study and looked at me vaguely, pleadingly, as if he wanted help.