"You touch me on a sore point,"--he said at last, slowly, and in a harsh tone--"My convictions respecting certain religious phases of man's development and progress, are founded on the arduous study of some very unpleasant truths to which humanity generally shuts its eyes, burying its head in the desert-sands of its own delusions. These truths I will not enter upon now. Some other time I will initiate you into a few of my mysteries." The tortured smile passed from his face, leaving it intellectually composed and calm as usual,--and I hastily changed the subject, for I had made up my mind by this time that my brilliant friend had, like many exceptionally gifted persons, a 'craze' on one topic, and that topic a particularly difficult one to discuss as it touched on the superhuman and therefore (to my thinking) the impossible. My own temperament, which had, in the days of my poverty, fluctuated between spiritual striving and material gain, had, with my sudden access to fortune, rapidly hardened into the character of a man of the world worldly, for whom all speculations as to the unseen forces working in and around us, were the merest folly, not worth a moment's waste of thought. I should have laughed to scorn anyone who had then presumed to talk to me about the law of Eternal Justice, which with individuals as well as nations, works, not for a passing 'phase,' but for all time towards good, and not evil,--for no matter how much a man may strive to blind himself to the fact, he has a portion of the Divine within him, which if he wilfully corrupts by his own wickedness, he must be forced to cleanse again and yet again, in the fierce flames of such remorse and such despair as are rightly termed the quenchless fires of Hell! XXII