This middle-aged, childlike man, settled near David as his neighbor, was forever a reminder to him of the faith he once had had--the faith of his earliest youth, the faith of his father and mother. Sometimes when the day's work was done and the sober, still twilights came on, this reverent soul, sitting with his family gathered about him near the threshold of his single homeless room,--his oldest boy standing beside his chair, his wife holding in her lap the sleeping babe she had just nursed,--would begin to sing. The son's voice joined the father's; the wife's followed the son's, in their usual hymn:-- "How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, Is laid for your faith in His excellent word." Up in his room, a few hundred yards away, the lad that moment might be trimming his lamp for a little more reading. More than once he waited, listening in the darkness, to the reliant music of the stalwart, stern old poem. How devotedly he too had been used to sing it! That summer through, then, he kept on at the work of trying to settle things before college reopened--things which involved a great duty. Where the new thought of the age attacked dogma, Revelation, Christianity most, there most he read. He was not the only reader. He was one of a multitude which no man could know or number; for many read in secret. Ministers of the Gospel read in secret in their libraries, and locked the books away when their church officers called unexpectedly. On Sunday, mounting their pulpits, they preached impassioned sermons concerning faith--addressed to the doubts, ravaging their own convictions and consciences. Elders and deacons read and kept the matter hid from their pastors. Physicians and lawyers read and spoke not a word to their wives and children. In the church, from highest ecclesiastic and layman, wherever in the professions a religious, scientific, scholarly mind, there was felt the central intellectual commotion of those years--the Battle of the Great Three. And now summer was gone, the students flocking in, the session beginning. David reentered his classes. Inwardly he drew back from this step; yet take any other, throw up the whole matter,--that he could not do. With all his lifelong religious sense he held on to the former realities, even while his grasp was loosening. But this could not endure. University life as a Bible student and candidate for the ministry, every day and many times every day, required of him duties which he could not longer conscientiously discharge; they forced from him expressions regarding his faith which made it only too plain both to himself and to others how much out of place he now was. So the crisis came, as come it must.