Since then a couple of years had passed, to both of them precious ones. It is true they had seen little of each, other in the meanwhile; when he had walked with her under the stars from the dancing saloon, he was bent on realizing what pleasure, if any, is to be found in a life of gaiety and dissipation. He had fought his doubts and gathered strength; duty, not pleasure, was to be his aim. The utter dreary formalism of the old-fashioned Evangelical drove many a bold lad into dissipation. Youth fancies that sort of thing attractive, and especially does it come with a tenfold power to all who have lived in a strict home, and amongst strait-laced people. The game is hardly worth the candle. Solomon found it to be so in his time, when he tried the experiment on the most expensive scale, but youth does not care much for Solomon, and has over-weening confidence in self. But Wentworth had seen in the rottenness of the surface gaiety, in the bitterness of its Dead Sea apples, in the hideousness of that laughter which is as the crackling of thorns under a pot, that it was not in that round of drunken revelry that happiness was to be found, or that man was to be elevated to his true sphere. The longer he lived in it the more intolerable it seemed. In his despair he became a cynic and a pessimist. With what bitterness did he write against society and the world! It was all out of joint, he said, as writers of his class ever will, forgetting that it was he who was out of joint. But one day there came to him a change; he thought in his wretchedness—for a man of pleasure is always wretched—of the prodigal son. The parable seemed to have a new meaning for him—to open his eyes to the fact that God is a God of love, full of pity for the sinner, ready to save to the utmost, and that in the person of Jesus Christ we have a revelation and a realization of Divine love and power. The call, ‘Come unto Me, all ye that are weary and heavy-laden,’ sounded to his ear like that of a brother. Old Bunyan writes how when Christian escaped out of the Slough of Despond there came to him a man named Help, who drew him out. It was the great God Himself to whom Wentworth owed his escape. As the scales left his eyes, he saw in the heaven above, not an angry Jehovah, but a God of love—a Father, not a Judge. So it was with the great American preacher Ward Beecher, who, though studying for the ministry, was for awhile in doubt, in difficulty and despair. ‘I think,’ he writes, ‘when I stand in Zion and before God, the brightest thing I shall look back upon will be that blessed morning in May when it pleased God to reveal to my wondering soul that it was His nature to love a man in his sins for the sake of helping him out of them. He did not do it out of compliment to Christ, to a law or plan of salvation, but from the fulness of His great heart. That He was not made angry by sin, but sorry; that He was not furious with wrath toward the