Aderhold had heard priest and preacher, after pulpit cries of human worthlessness, of the insignificance of the soul, of universal and hopeless guilt, of the inflamed mind of God, of the hell which, in the course of nature, awaited every child of Adam, of the predestination of some, indeed, through grace of another, to an unearned glory, of the eternal, insufferable loss and anguish of those multitudes and multitudes and multitudes, who either had never known or heard of that remedy, or who, the Devil at their ear, had made bold to doubt its utter efficacy—he had heard and seen such men, at death-beds, in the presence of solemn and temperate Death, turn from what they preached to Reason and Love. He had heard them try to smooth away the deep and dark trenches in the bewildered brain which they themselves had done their best to dig. He thought their conversion the saddest miracle—sad, for it did not last. Death passed for that time from their view, back they went to preach to listening throngs who must die, Inherited Guilt, Inherited, fiendish punishment, an Inherited, fearful God, an Inherited curse upon enquiry, and the humbling, indeed, of an Inherited vicarious atonement.... He wondered that they never foresaw their own death-bed. He thought that they never truly, bone and marrow, believed what they said, but that the reverberating voices of the ages behind them stunned, went through them, produced an automatic voice and action. To resist that insistence, to breast the roaring stream of the past—he acknowledged that it was difficult, difficult! Three or four times in these years he had chanced to find himself together with Master Clement at some death-bed. Once he had seen him soften—a child dying and crying out in terror of the Judgement Day. “You were baptized—you were baptized—” repeated the minister to him over and over again. “I baptized you myself. You are safe—you are safe, my dear child! The Lord Christ will help you—the Lord Christ will help you—” But the child had died in terror. To-day there was no softening in the aspect of Master Clement. This old man before him was a wretched miser hoarding gold, a solitary who in this dark old house as probably as not practised alchemy, lusting to turn lead and iron into gold, and as probably as not practised it by unlawful and demoniacal aid. Rarely was he seen in church—too feeble to come, he said; too unwilling, thought Master Clement. He did not give of his substance, he was bitter and misliked, he asked no prayers—Master Clement had many counts against him, and was fain to believe that they tallied with God’s counts. He girded himself and came forth to wrestle with and throw this soul, and by the hair of its head to drag it from the edge of the bottomless pit. He wrestled for the better part of an hour.