It came to him, this denial of Religion, as a profound religious experience. It was Miracle, burning, blinding, transfiguring. Elemental, tremendous. It was a stroke that affected his entire being; suffused him; changed him, spiritually, in every atom. It hurled him from all his old bases and set him in a new relation to the universe. It was not reformation; it was revolution. Luke was another personality: this was the "new birth." He saw the glory of individuality, the divinity of his humanity. In the flash of revelation, he learned to walk and knew that for all his life he had been permitting himself to be carried. Without guessing it, he had been, he now knew, all these years, afraid, and now, with this new inspiration, he faced all things and feared none. Believing, he had been dead, but denying, was alive again; faithful, he had been lost, faithless, he was found, and not by any other help than his own: he had found himself. It was the thing that, in the twinkling of an eye, can make an honest man of a liar, an abstainer of a dipsomaniac, good out of evil. It was the same thing that happens to a penitent at the moment of "conversion," of "receiving grace," of "experiencing religion"; the same force operating with the same power and the same manner, but in an opposite direction. As St. Paul rose from the earth after his vision near Damascus, so Luke staggered from the Forbes motor-car. His hands groped at the air. "Betty!" he gasped; "tell your father I can’t see him. Not now.—I’ll be back later.—Perhaps in a little while.—Later." She put out her arms to him. "What is it, Luke?" she cried. "What’s the matter?" His eyes looked at her, but he did not see her. He turned from her to the street. "I don’t know," he said, "but I think—I think I’m Being Saved." *CHAPTER XVII*