dreariness, to believe that the one lesson of life is meant to be a hopeless patience, a dull acquiescence in deeply-rooted evil.  It is bewildering to see a world so out of joint, and to feel that the one force that has worked wonders is the discontent with things as they are.  And even so the lesson is a hard one, because it has been the lot of so few of the great conquerors of humanity ever to see the hour of their triumph, which comes long after and late, when they have breathed out their ardent spirit in agony and despair.

But, after all, however much we may philosophise about sin or attempt to analyse its essence, there is some dark secret there, of which from time to time we are grievously conscious.  Who does not know the sense of failure to overcome, of lapsing from a hope or a purpose, the burden of the thought of some cowardice or unkindness which we cannot undo and which we need not have committed?  No resolute determinism can ever avail us against the stern verdict of that inner tribunal of the soul, which decides, too, by some instinct that we cannot divine, to sting and torture us with the memory of deeds, the momentousness and importance of which we should utterly fail to explain to others.  There are things in my own past, which would be met with laughter and ridicule if I attempted to describe them, that still make me blush to recollect with a sense of guilt and shame, and seem indelibly branded upon the mind.  There are things, too, of which I do not feel ashamed, which, if I were to describe them to others, would be received with a sort of incredulous consternation, to think that I could have performed them.  That is the strange part of the inner conscience, that it seems so wholly independent of tradition or convention.

And it is from this sense of a burden, borne without hope of redemption, that we would all of us give our most prized possessions to be free; it is this which has cast such an awful power into the hands of the unscrupulous people who have claimed to be able to atone for, to loose, to set free the ailing soul.  Face to face with the terror of darkness, there is hardly anything of which mankind will not repent; and I have sometimes thought that the darkest and heaviest temptation in the whole world is the temptation to yield to a craven fear, when the sincere conscience does not condemn.

XXI

I listened the other day, at a public function, to an eloquent panegyric, pronounced by a man of great ability and sympathetic cultivation, on the Greek spirit.  I fell for the moment entirely under the spell of his lofty rhetoric, his persuasive and illuminating argument.  I wish I could reproduce what he said; but it was like a strain of beautiful music, and my mind was so much delighted by his rich eloquence, his subtle transitions, his deft modulations, that I had neither time nor opportunity to commit what he said to memory.  One thing he said which