“Oh! that such a righteous man should have died the death of the sinner,” exclaimed Helon, in the bitterness of his grief, as he stood beside the stream of the Jabbok. “Doth Jehovah then punish the righteous as the sinner? O Elisama, Elisama, where shall I find light?” “He has fulfilled his destiny,” said Selumiel. “Who may escape what fate has ordained for him?” CHAPTER IV. THE WATER OF JEALOUSY. Let him beware who thinks that he has attained the highest pinnacle of temporal prosperity! The ball is in ceaseless vibration, and the moment in which it reaches its greatest elevation is that in which its descent must necessarily begin. The death of Elisama had so disturbed the mind of Helon that Selumiel’s wisdom and Sulamith’s affection could only for a moment yield him consolation. Calamity had come like a flash of lightning, and revealed to him the obscure recesses of his own character; but with what a convulsive shock had this illumination entered, and how painful the contemplation of the objects which it disclosed. The fabric of self-righteousness, which for some months he had built up with so much care, was overthrown; the vision which he had cherished was gone; what would he not have given to have been able to arrest its flight? The perverted state of his feelings showed itself most of all in his fury against Myron. If his conscience ever remonstrated, he persuaded himself that it was not Myron as an individual, but heathenism that he abhorred. All those passages in the psalms and the prophets in which Jehovah is implored to pour out his wrath upon the heathen, and is declared to bring their counsels to nought, became his favourite theme of meditation. By an incredible delusion he applied to his own personal injury the denunciations of Jehovah’s wrath against apostasy from himself. Even the love of Sulamith, who anxiously marked the state of his mind, hardly availed to pacify and soften him.