"The reverse of it is harder to understand, as you will find if you choose to take the trouble to think it out," replied the missionary. Phil Maylands did take the trouble to think it out. One prominent trait in his character was an intense reverence for truth--any truth, every truth--a strong tendency to distinguish between truth and error in all things that chanced to come under his observation, but especially in those things which his mother had taught him, from earliest infancy, to regard as the most important of all. Many a passer-by did Phil jostle on his way to the Post-Office that day, after his visit to the missionary, for it was the first time that his mind had been turned, earnestly at least, to the subject of God's sovereignty and man's responsibility. "Too deep by far for boys," we hear some reader mutter. And yet that same reader, perchance, teaches her little ones to consider the great fact that God is One in Three! No truth is too deep for boys and girls to consider, if they only approach it in a teachable, reverent spirit, and are brought to it by their teacher in a prayerful spirit. But fear not, reader. We do not mean to inflict on you a dissertation on the mysterious subject referred to. We merely state the fact that Phil Maylands met it at this period of his career, and, instead of shelving it--as perhaps too many do--as a too difficult subject, which might lie over to a more convenient season, tackled it with all the energy of his nature. He went first to his closet and his knees, and then to his Bible. "To the law and to the testimony" used to be Mrs Maylands' watchword in all her battles with Doubt. "To whom shall we go," she was wont to say, "if we go not to the Word of God?" Phil therefore searched the Scripture. Not being a Greek scholar, he sought help of those who were learned--both personally and through books. Thus he got at correct renderings, and by means of dictionaries ascertained the exact meanings of words. By study he got at what some have styled the general spirit of Scripture, and by reading _both_ sides of controverted points he ascertained the thoughts of various minds. In this way he at length became "fully persuaded in his own mind" that God's sovereignty and man's responsibility are facts taught in Scripture, and affirmed by human experience, and that they form a great unsolvable mystery--unsolvable at least by man in his present condition of existence. This not only relieved his mind greatly, by convincing him that, the subject being bottomless, it was useless to try to get to the bottom of it, and wise to accept it "as a little child," but it led him also to consider that in the Bible there are two kinds of mysteries, or deep things--the one kind being solvable, the other unsolvable. He set himself, therefore, diligently to discover and separate the one kind from the other, with keen interest.