'Now it is not nominal; it is real. I have come to know and love my Master. I am His for life and death; and now His commands seem the pleasantest things in the world to me.' 'But you obeyed them always?' 'No, mamma, I did not. I obeyed nothing, in the last resort, but my own supreme will.' 'But, Pitt, you say you have come to know; what time has there been for any such change?' 'Not much time,' he replied; 'and I cannot tell how it is; but it seemed as if, so soon as I had given up the struggle and yielded, scales fell from my eyes. I cannot tell how it was; but all at once I seemed to see the beauty of Christ, which I never saw before; and, mamma, the sight has filled me with joy. Nothing now to my mind is more reasonable than His demands, or more delightful than yielding obedience to them.' 'Demands? what demands?' said Mrs. Dallas. Her son repeated the words with which the twelfth chapter of Romans begins. '"I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service; and be not conformed to this world."' 'But, my dear, that means'-- 'It means all.' 'How all?' 'There is nothing more left to give, when this sacrifice is presented. It covers the whole ground. The sacrifice is a living sacrifice, but it gives all to God as entirely as the offering that imaged it went up in smoke and flame.' 'What sacrifice imaged it?' 'The burnt-sacrifice of old. That always meant consecration.' 'How do you know? You are not a clergyman.' Pitt smiled again, less brightly. 'True, mother, but I have been studying all this for years, in the Bible and in the words of others who _were_ clergymen; and now it is all plain before me. It became so as soon as I was willing to obey it.' 'And what are you going to do?' 'Do? I cannot say yet. I am a soldier but just enlisted, and do not know where my orders will place me or what work they will give me. Only I _have_ enlisted; and that is what I wanted you to know at once. Mother, it is a great honour to be a soldier of Christ.' 'I should think,--if I did not see you and hear your voice,--I should certainly think I heard a Methodist talking. I suppose that is the way they do.' 'Did you ever hear one talk, mother?' 'No, and do not want to hear one, even if it were my own son!' she answered angrily. 'But in all that I have been saying, if they say it too, the Methodists are right, mother. A redeemed sinner is one bought with a price, and thenceforth neither his spirit nor his body can be his own. And his happiness is not to be his own.' Mrs. Dallas was violently moved, yet she had much self-command and habitual dignity of manner, and would not break down now. More pitiful than tears was the haughty gesture of her head as she turned it aside to hide the quivering lips. And more tender than words was the air with which her son presently stooped and took her hand.