We come to the second source of doubt and questioning—an infinitely more subtle and hazardous one. It is the perception that successful ill-doers do not seem to be miserable. You know how we are all taught that bad men have such terribly evil consciences, that harpies are always behind them, that their hearts are gnawed with dread and anxiety, that they cannot sleep at night, that remorse haunts them. Not a bit of it. You go into the world and pick out men who have gained their wealth, who have wrung it out of the heart's blood of their fellow-men—got it by downright dishonesty; their eyes stand out with fatness, they roll about in their carriages, they have splendid houses, and everybody bows down to them and makes much of them; their faces are wreathed with smiles of self-satisfaction; you sit at their tables, and they tell you how successful they have been; they expect you to envy them; they are not humble and miserable. Then the deadly question comes to you, Where, then, is God? Ah, one can quite understand God letting the external world run its own course! One might explain in some way that God allows, to try men, the prizes of wealth and the joys of life to go to men that do not deserve them. As a good man once said to me, "It is plain that God does not think much of money—why, look at the kind of people he gives it to!" That is so; but the one thing you would believe is this, that in that strange inner world of the human heart, the mind, the conscience God could not keep still. If He gives them the external gift, if He sends them the desire of their flesh, He will send leanness into their soul. Why do you not see their faces haggard? Why can you not trace the lines of care? Why does not shame and degradation sit upon the wealthy man's face who gained his wealth by cheating and lying, by dishonour and meanness? Oh, they seem so happy, so contented, so pleased, so proud, so arrogant! Why does their tongue reach up to heaven, in its pride, and haughtiness, and complacency? Well, you would think that that is a deadly enough doubt to be gnawing at a good lad's heart; but there is a still deadlier one. Here you have the deadliest cause of doubt, when a man, pressed hard by the great fact of prosperous ill-doing, staggered by that blow, does not see the inner, ethical, moral vengeance of God stamped on it. He looks round for confirmation to the good men in the Church; he looks at religious Christian society, he falls back on it, to let it support him, to let it help him; and what does he discover when his eyes pierce through and penetrate? In the heart within him he begins to recognise the hearts of others. Everywhere the Church is secretly doubting too; good men are longing for a share in the ill-gotten gain—ay, tampering with their consciences, themselves turning into the same direction, drinking of the waters of the same cup, and then some of them, more reckless or more honest, speaking straight