The admirable little treatise of Bishop McIlvaine, on the “Evidences of Christianity,” cleared away some of his difficulties.  A sermon of Bishop Kavanaugh, preached at his request, was a help to him. (That wonderful discourse is spoken of elsewhere in this volume.)

A friend of his lay dying at Redwood City.  This friend, like himself; was a skeptic, and his doubts darkened his way as he neared the border of the undiscovered country.  McCoy went to see him.  The sick man, in the freedom of long friendship, opened his mind to him.  The arguments of the good Bishop were yet fresh in McCoy’s mind, and the echoes of his mighty appeals were still sounding in his heart.  Seated by the dying man, he forgot his own misgivings, and with intense earnestness pointed the struggling soul to the Saviour of sinners.

“I did not intend it, but I was impelled by a feeling I could not resist.  I was surprised and strangely thrilled at my own words as I unfolded to my friend the proofs of the truth of Christianity, culminating in the incarnation, death, and resurrection, of Jesus Christ.  He seemed to have grasped the truths as presented, a great calm came over him, and he died a believer.  No incident of my life has given me a purer pleasure than this; but it was a strange thing!  Nobody could have had access to him as I had—­I, a doubter and a stumbler all my life; it looks like the hand of God!”

His voice was low, and his eyes were wet as he finished the narration.

Yes, the hand of God was in it—­it is in every good thing that takes place on earth.  By the bedside of a dying friend, the undercurrent of faith in his warily and noble heart swept away for the time the obstructions that were in his thought, and bore him to the feet of the blessed, pitying Christ, who never breaks a bruised reed.  I think he had more light, and felt stronger ever after.

Death twice entered his home-circle—­once to convey a budding flower from the earth-home to the skies, and again like a lightning-stroke laying young manhood low in a moment.  The instinct within him, stronger than doubt, turned his thought in those dark hours toward God.  The ashes of the earthly hopes that had perished in the fire of fierce calamity, and the tears of a grief unspeakable, fertilized and watered the seed of faith which was surely in his heart.  The hot furnace-fire did not harden this finely-tempered soul.  But still he walked in darkness, doubting, doubting, doubting all he most wished to believe.  It was the infirmity of his constitution, and the result of his surroundings.  He went into large business enterprises with mingled success and disappointment.  He went into politics, and though he bore himself nobly and gallantly, it need not be said that that vortex does not usually draw those who are within its whirl heavenward.  He won some of the prizes that were fought for in that arena where the noblest are in danger of being soiled, and where the baser metal sinks surely to the bottom by the inevitable force of moral gravitation.