His gust of emotion had left him; a not unfamiliar feeling of exaltation had taken its place. It is often so with the extreme Puritan type; control relaxed for however brief a moment sends their slow blood whirling, and leaves them light-headed as those who breathe thin air. From boyhood Simpson had been practised in control, until repression had become a prime tenet of his faith. The cheerful and generally innocent excursions of other men assumed in his mind the proportions of crime, of sin against the stern disciplining of the soul which he conceived to be the goal of life. Probably he had never in all his days been so shocked as once when a young pagan had scorned certain views of his, saying; "There's more education--soul education, if you will have it--in five minutes of sheer joy than in a century of sorrow." It was an appalling statement, that--more appalling because he had tried to contradict it and had been unable to do so. He himself had been too eager to find his work in life--his pre-ordained work--ever to discover the deep truths that light-heartedness only can reveal; even when he heard his call to foreign missions--to Hayti, in particular--he felt no such felicity as a man should feel who has climbed to his place in the scheme of things. His was rather the sombre fury of the Covenanters--an intense conviction that his way was the only way of grace--a conviction that transcended reason and took flight into the realm of overmastering emotion--the only overmastering emotion, by the way, that he had ever experienced. His choice, therefore, was in itself a loss of control and a dangerous one, for nothing is more perilous to sanity than the certainty that most other people in the world are wrong. Such conviction leads to a Jesuitical contempt of means; in cases where the Puritan shell has grown to be impregnable from the outside it sets up an internal ferment which sometimes bursts shell and man and all into disastrous fragments. Until old age kills them, the passions and emotions never die in man; suppress them how we will, we can never ignore them; they rise again to mock us when we think we are done with them forever. And the man of Simpson's type suffers from them most of all, for he dams against them all normal channels of expression.