There is generally a weak point somewhere in the schemes of men who set right and virtue at naught, and who endeavour to build up wealth and fame upon false pretences. Religious sceptics will direct your attention to instances of undeserved poverty and sufferings borne through a whole lifetime; will show you persons dragging out wretched lives of penury and want, and prove to you that they are good, honest, honourable people. As companion pictures, they will show you men of wealth and station living luxuriously, and rejoicing in the highest state of worldly happiness. And then they ask you what sort of a sermon or essay you can write upon the text, “God is love.” But the sceptic-critic has little or nothing to say about real happiness, and how that is divided amongst the human family. If he had, perhaps he might puzzle a good many by pointing to the colliery districts, the factories, or the nail country, and showing you the hard, bitter life to which thousands of children are born daily. What a blessed thing to some of these people is the future, founded on true Christian faith! But our critic of the ways of Providence does not tell you of the miseries of keeping up appearances which are behind some of those marks of wealth; and he does not tell you how scores of the prosperous ones to whom he points come to grief at last, as they deserve. He fixes them before you in their full career of success, but he does not show you their disappointed hopes, their unfulfilled ambition, their social cuts and wounds, the grievances of their women, the social failures of their sons and daughters; and, what is more, he does not show you the end of the men whom he holds up as prosperous, happy, luxurious, revelling, wealthy villains. Depend upon it, men such as Richard Tallant, who have trampled upon honour and honesty, and above all, upon parental kindness (however mistaken that kindness may have been), are punished in this world below, whatever may be their lot in that which is to come. The weakest point in Richard Tallant’s policy was the want of a course of conciliation towards Shuffleton Gibbs. Fate would, no doubt, have met him with a just retribution in some other way had he escaped the result of this mistake; but it is no part of our business to consider what might have been, we who are considering the facts of Richard Tallant’s career; and as it has not been our purpose to be mysterious in this simple narration, we do not hesitate to tell you that Richard Tallant sealed his destiny when he resealed that letter of his former companion,--the last abandoned representative of a fallen line of gentlemen.