This spirit of thoroughness and critical honesty was needed during the second year, for we were constructing a personal faith: a task more serious than the mere acquisition of historic facts or encyclopædic knowledge. But the teachers were patient, kindly, and watched us let conservative and traditional habits of mind go, not in any spirit of intolerance. There were many times, that year, when I found myself almost duplicating Burner’s misery, by sitting in my room and wondering, after I had let go my traditional habits of thought about God and the Bible, what I should do without faith. But as one conception went, another, larger conception came, and I found a nobler faith than I ever had before. The self-distrust and miserable vacancy of doubt, were, as I had blunderingly told Burner, mere phases towards a positive faith. One winter morning, after a night of mental struggle, during which I suffered fully as much as I had ever suffered from any physical hardship, I went out on the campus to walk about in the crisp air. The students had just gone into the chapel for morning prayers. I stopped under the windows and heard the drone of the parlor organ. Then, on the quietness of the morning, the manly melody came to my ears: a hymn resonant with a man’s faith, and bringing peace to my doubts. “Oh, Love That Will Not Let Me Go,” they were singing, a monkish, monastic tinge to it, coming from male throats,--only the tenor was too boyish for a monk, too thrillingly rampant in its ambitious soaring after God over the high notes. But it soothed me and I went in the strength of that hymn for many days. _Chapter XXVII. The Wonderful Summer on the Pleasure Island_ My next opportunity of earning money for my education came in a call to preach on Sundays in a little church sixty miles from the Seminary at a fashionable summer resort. The compensation to be ten dollars a week: compensation for three days’ absence from the Seminary, one hundred and twenty miles of travel and expenses, and the nervous exertion of preaching twice and teaching a Sunday-school class, not excluding pastoral work whenever opportunity should offer!