At one time the idea of being in such company would have been shocking to Wentworth. There are thousands who, however, thus do fall away. But they do so little by little. No one suddenly becomes base, said the Latin moralist, and he is right. A real friend or two might have saved Wentworth many a bitter hour. But at that time the thing was impracticable. The line of demarcation between the Church and the world was too strictly drawn. In the parable of the Great Teacher, the tares and the wheat grew side by side. In its superior wisdom, the Church undertook to pull up and get rid of the tares, but in doing so a good deal of mischief was done. There was no halting between two opinions. You were either converted or not. A man was either the child of God or of the devil. The Church held up an impossible and an unlovely Christianity, into the belief of which men and women were terrified.. To produce that effect there was no end of excitement, and then, when the excitement was over, in too many cases came the inevitable relapse. One result of this was that the victim had to look elsewhere for the excitement which had become part and parcel of his being—to the flowing bowl, to what is called jolly companionship, to the siren voice of worldly pleasure—and the novice falls too easily a prey. Abelard is a more common character than Simeon Stylites. The songs of Circe are pleasant to listen to, and there are roses and raptures for the sinner as well as the saint, and the roses and raptures are now—not in a world to come. The world has a great fascination for a lad brought up in a pious home, to whom it has been represented as a waste howling wilderness, peopled with devils fearful to gaze on. When he steps into it, and finds how unfairly it has been drawn to him by the Church, the chance is that he runs to the other extreme. We have hardly yet emancipated ourselves from the morbid and monkish theology of the Romish Church. There come to the writer sad recollections of a dismal theology to which he was expected to give his assent. Never did men then talk of man being made in the image of his Maker—of his being vicegerent of the earth, only a little lower than the angels, covered with glory and honour. All was devilish man could say or do. In vain was education, or science, or art. The cleverer, the more useful, the more decent you were, the more mischievous, the further from God.