‘Father, I cannot believe all that.’ Mr. Eversley asked him what it was that he could not believe. Gerald could not tell him all; but he tried to say that, if Christ were only man, so much nearer to us than if removed by the great gulf of so-called Deity, and yet were so good, so gracious, so altogether lovely, then His example of goodness and purity would be a much more effectual help to the struggling, suffering children of men. Mr. Eversley did not attempt to reason with him. His own soul was too deeply agonised for reasoning. But he proposed that they should kneel down together in prayer; and there, in the stillness of the night by the flickering embers, he prayed that God would, in His mercy, illumine the gloom of his dear boy’s spirit, and that for him, as for so many another plucked ‘as a brand from the burning,’ the end of all doubts and strivings might be peace. Then he kissed him, and Gerald went to bed. But it was yet two hours before Mr. Eversley himself retired. To him the failure of faith in the Son of God was not an intellectual error nor a moral calamity; it was a sin against the Holy Ghost. What (he argued) had been the guilt of the Jews of old, but that, when the Lord Jesus ‘came unto His own,’ they received Him not? Whether the rejection of His divine light were due to worldliness or to moral obliquity, or, as he feared in Gerald’s case, to pride of intellect, did not in his eyes constitute the vital difference. The soul of every man either received Him as the Saviour or it did not. It did not, therefore, enter Mr. Eversley’s thoughts to try to meet his son’s difficulties by argument. He held that the remedy for unbelief lay not in arguments of probability, but in the prostration of the human intellect before the Unseen; and what was needed, where unbelief rose like a noxious vapour, was not a conviction of the reason, but a purification of the heart. Accordingly Mr. Eversley, when he was left alone, sank upon his knees and for an hour and more poured out his soul to God, imploring that, though He had justly punished him for his shortcomings by the alienation of his son who had been the joy of his life, yet He would not suffer that dear son to perish eternally, but would open his eyes to see in Jesus the one Saviour and Redeemer of the world. Then he took out his diary--it was always his last act before going to bed--and wrote in it these words: ‘Most painful interview with Gerald, who is sinking in the slough of unbelief. O God, help my dear boy. Bring him back to Thy Light and Thy Truth. And oh! forgive me if sin of mine have led to his fall. We lived but one life once. It is not so now. Forgive me, forgive me if the fault be mine, for Thy Son’s sake.’