The first horror, the first resistance, had gone out of Colin’s mind; but he lay asking himself inevitable questions, facing the great problem for which he could find no solution, which no man has been able to explain. Had the thoughts of his mind been put into words, the chances are that to most people who have never themselves come to such a trial Colin would have seemed a blasphemer or an infidel. But he was neither the one nor the other, and was indeed incapable by nature either of scepticism or of profanity. The youth had been born of a sternly-believing race, which recognised in all God’s doings an eternal right, beyond justice and beyond reason, a right to deal with them and theirs as he might please; but Colin himself was of the present age, and was fully possessed by all those cravings after understanding and explanation which belong to the time. Without any doubt of God, he was arrested by the wonderful mystery of Providence, and stood questioning, in the face of the unanswering silence, “Why?” The good God, the God of the Gospels, the Father of our Lord, was the Divine Ruler whom Colin recognised in his heart; but the young man longed and struggled to find reasonableness, coherence, any recognisable, comprehensible cause, for the baffling arrangements and disarrangements, the mysterious inequalities and injustices of life. He wanted to trace the thread of reason which God kept in His own hand; he wanted to make out why the Father who loved all should dispense so unequally, so differently, His gifts to one and another. This awful question kept him silent for days and nights; he could not make anything of it. Social inequalities, which speculatists fret at, had not much disturbed Colin. It had not yet occurred to him that wealth or poverty made much difference; but why the life of one should be broken off incomplete and that of another go on--why the purposes of one should end in nothing, why his hopes should be crushed and his powers made useless, while another flourished and prospered, confounded him, in the inexperience of his youth. And neither heaven nor earth gave him any answer. The Bible itself seemed to append moral causes, which were wanting in his case, to the perennial inequalities of existence. It spoke of the wicked great in power, nourishing like the green bay-tree, and of the righteous oppressed and suffering for righteousness’ sake; which was, in its way, a comprehensible statement of the matter. But the facts did not agree in Colin’s case. Harry Frankland could not, by any exertion of dislike, be made to represent the wicked, nor was Colin, in his own thinking, better than his neighbour. They were two sons of one Father, to whom that Father was behaving with the most woeful, the most extraordinary partiality; and nothing in heaven or earth was of half so much importance as to prove the proceedings of the Father of all to be everlastingly just and of sublime reason. What did it mean? This was