It would be much more becoming in men of their age and position to spend the evening of their lives in trying to win souls out of this spiritual Slough of Despond, London, than to devote the few remaining hours of their time on earth to hastening into the toils of perdition those who already hesitated on the path. There they were, 'bent, wigged, and lame;' fathers of grown-up men; grandfathers of lusty blameless boys. Why could not they let well enough alone? What was the world to gain by all this progress, all this science? Was man any happier, any purer, any nobler, now, than when piety was undistracted by invention, unassailed by research? Here were these old men, with one foot in the grave, one side of them pushed through the mist of life into the full light of eternity, and yet they would not be warned. If the men had been younger he should not have felt so horrified. But these men had no longer the excuse of ardent blood or impetuous youth on their side. They were not likely to renounce their present convictions while they lived. And what an awful thing it was to think of these men knowingly and deliberately setting their face towards death, with the certainty in their minds that they had devoted much of the life God had given them to pulling props from under the faith God had bestowed on man, a faith miraculously handed from the skies, writ by the absolute finger of God Himself, and sealed upon this earth with the sacred Blood of Calvary. Horrible! Unnatural! Prodigious ingratitude! By this time Mr Wilfrid Parkinson had commenced his address to the assembly. Nevill listened intently, but Osborne felt too depressed and horrified to give attention. He was stunned and dazed. He had heard and read of such places before, but he had never, until now, been brought face to face, into intimate contact with science in the aggressive form. He was not, in most matters, superstitious, yet he could not help shrinking from those walls, against which reposed ghastly relics of bygone days, handed down by careless time to be the cause of spiritual misery and spiritual death among men to-day. He shrank from those old men, beneath whose blanched hair the calm and deliberate brain denied all things incapable of substantiation by facts and things. He shrank into his inner nature, and there cast down his spirit and prayed, prayed fervently, fiercely thanking God his Maker and His Son that he had been born in the faith of Christ. He did not pray for grace to keep that faith. He felt no doubt of his own strength. No question of his own strength existed in his mind. His attitude was simply one of terrible thankfulness. His whole soul was rendering homage to the Great Being who had given him his faith and kept him in that faith--a faith which had never seemed so priceless, so essential, as when contrasted with the barren creed which science sought to make out of dusty bones and senseless rocks.