"If she begins to agonize in prayer," he explained to me, "she will go mad again. So soon as she recovers from the insanity of evil she may pray, but not now." CHAPTER XV SKELETONS IN WILLIAM'S DOCTRINAL CLOSET I have often wondered what a writer of fiction would have made out of such a story. As a matter of fact, the woman is living to-day, highly respected, serenely proud of her two grown daughters; and I believe William simply covered up her sin so deep with his wisdom that she has forgotten it. His Methodist doctrinal closet has more than one skeleton like this in it. "Repentance is not remorse," he used to argue upon rare occasions when I dragged them out. "Mrs. Martin could not make the proper distinction. God understood." I have no doubt his conference would have fired him for fathering very curious heresies, if all his doings with sinners had been published. There was the apostate, for example, whom he tried to save at the expense of one of the doctrines of his church. Just as Baptists believe in "election" and Presbyterians in predestination, the Methodists believe in apostasy--that is, that God will forsake a man and never answer his prayers if the man waits too long before he begins to pray; and that if after he has been converted he leaves the way of righteousness there is always danger that God will abandon him in his sins. A most desperate situation is that of the Methodist apostate, because there is so much elasticity about grace in our church, and it is so easy to fall from it that a modest man is, by the very delicacy and humility of his spirit, apt to fall under the delusion that God has had enough patience with him, that he has "sinned away his day of grace." I recall the day William came home and burned seven of his best sermons on such texts as this: "The soul that sinneth it shall die." It was after he had read the burial service over the body of Philip Hale, who killed himself because he had "lost God and could not find Him." Hale had been a Methodist, brought up in that faith literally by parents who had had him baptized when he was an infant and who had kept the promise made then to bring him up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. They did, and he was converted at an early age before the tide of adolescence set in. It seems that he "sinned away his day of grace" during this dangerous period.