The emotions have their limitations as well as the thoughts, and McFarlane had endured all that he was capable of sustaining. With a profound sob, in which he uttered the feelings he could not speak, he turned and fled. It was this sob and these footsteps which David heard. Plunging into the depths of the forest as a wounded animal would have done, he cast himself upon the bosom of the earth at the foot of a great tree, to find solitude and consolation. There are wounds in the soul too deep to be healed by the balm which exudes from the visible elements of Nature. There are longings and aspirations which the palpable and audible cannot satisfy. Not what he sees and touches, but what he hopes and trusts, can save man in these dark moments from the final despair and terror of existence. Upon such an hour as this the lumberman had fallen. God had thrust Himself upon his attention. Instead of being compelled to seek a religious experience, he found it impossible to escape it. The religious experiences of men in any such epoch possess a certain general similarity. Sometimes thought, sometimes action and sometimes emotion furnish the all-pervasive element. Whatever this peculiar characteristic may be, its manifestations are always most vivid and violent in ignorant periods, and along the uncultivated frontiers of advancing civilization. In those rude days and regions, the victims (if one might say so) of religion experienced nervous excitations and emotional transports which not infrequently terminated in convulsions. Days and nights, weeks and even months, were often spent by them in struggles which were always painful and often terrible. Andy McFarlane had often enough witnessed and despised these experiences; but through those almost inexorable laws of association and imitation, they were more than likely to reproduce themselves in him. And so indeed they did. Under the influence of these new thoughts that had seized him with such power, he writhed in agony on the ground. A profound "conviction of sin" took possession of his soul and he felt himself to be hopelessly and forever lost. That hell at which he had so often scoffed suddenly opened its jaws beneath his feet, and although he shuddered at the thought of being engulfed in its horrors, he felt that such a doom would be the just desert of a life like his.