In the meanwhile, Claude de l'Estang had wrestled with his own nature. He had refrained from showing mortification, or grief, or despair; he had kept the serpent within his own bosom, and fed him upon his own heart: he had abandoned not his pulpit; he had neglected, in no degree, his flock; he had publicly held up as a warning to others the dereliction of her whom he most loved, as one who had gone out from amongst them because she was not of them; he had become sterner, indeed more severe, in his doctrines as well as in his manners, and this first sorrow had a tendency rather to harden than to soften his heart. The next thing, however, which he had to undergo, was the punishment of that harshness. A youth of a gentle but eager disposition, who had been his own loved companion and friend, whom he still esteemed highly for a thousand good and engaging qualities, was betrayed into an error, on the circumstances of which we will not pause. Suffice it to say that it proceeded from strong passion and circumstances of temptation, and that for it he was eager and willing to make atonement. He was one of the congregation of Claude de l'Estang, however, and the minister showed himself the more determined, on account of the friendship that existed between them, not to suffer the fault to pass without the humiliation of public penitence; and he exacted all, to the utmost tittle, that a harsh church, in its extremest laws, could demand, ere it received a sinner back into its bosom again. The young man submitted, feeling deep repentance, and believing his own powers of endurance to be greater than they were. But the effect was awful. From the church door, when he had performed the act demanded of him, fancying that the finger of scorn would be pointed at him for ever, he fled to his own home with reason cast headlong from her throne. Ere two hours were over he had died by his own hand; scrawling with his blood, as it flowed from him, a brief epistle to his former friend to tell him that the act was his. That awful day, and those few lines, not only filled the bosom of the minister with remorse and grief, but it opened his eyes to every thing that had been dark in his own bosom. It showed him that he had made a vanity of dealing with his friend more severely than he would have done with others; that it was for his own reputation's sake that he had thus acted; that there was pride in the severe austerity of his life; that there was something like hypocrisy in the calm exterior with which he had covered over a broken heart. He felt that he had mighty enemies to combat in himself; and, as his heart was originally pure and upright, his energies great, and his power over himself immense, he determined that he would at once commence the war, and never end it till--to use his own words--"he had subdued every strong hold of the evil spirit in his breast, and expelled the enemy of his eternal Master for ever."