"It has given him this," exclaimed Clifton, advancing towards Dr. Burge, and seeming for a few moments to resume his old personality,--"it has given him the knowledge of a life to come! You think it, preach it, believe it,--but you do not _know_ it. A susceptibility to impressions from the inmost characters of men has been mine through life. It has been given me to perceive what facts and feelings most deeply adhered in the mental consciousness. And I tell you, Burge, ministers both of your communion and of mine repeat the old words of sublimest assurance, sway congregations with descriptions bright or lurid of future worlds, yet behind all this glowing speech and blatant confidence there has lurked,--oh, will you deny it?--there has lurked a grovelling doubt of man's immortality." "I will not deny it," said Dr. Burge, with slow solemnity. "Sinners that we are, how can we ask that faith be at no moment confused by the thousand cries of infidelity which our profession requires us to answer? Let my soul be chilled by transient shades of skepticism, rather than dote in a blind and puerile credulity! If I am not at all times equally penetrated by the great fact of man's conscious immortality, it is because of my undesert. A way to _know_ of the doctrine has been revealed: it is by doing the will of the Father: who of us has fulfilled the condition? But I can meet you on lower ground, and declare, that, according to our human observation, it is not well for man to _know_ the destiny of his being in all its details until the trials and victories of life have taught him to turn such knowledge to elevating use. It is the deplorable sinfulness of our nature which seeks to obtain without deserving, to possess the end and despise the appointed means." Some reply would doubtless have been made to these pertinent considerations, had not the confused tramp of a committee been heard at the door. The professors of the "New Dispensation" had come to conduct the Reverend Charles Clifton to their platform. The distinguished convert shuddered, as if affected by some incorporeal presence, and suffered himself to be led away. "I can do nothing more," murmured Dr. Burge; "and why should I stay to hear diluted rhetoric, or inflated commonplace, from lips which, however unworthily, once proclaimed the simplicity of the gospel?" "Because it is not well to prejudge what may offer some possible variety in this credence," I ventured to suggest. "You are right; we will stay."