I do not mean from this that he thought lightly of sin—­far from it.  I have seen him give all the physical signs of shrinking and repulsion, at the mention or sight of it.  He loathed it with all the agonized disgust of a high, pure, fastidious nature.  Its phenomena were without the lurid interest for him which it often possesses even for the sternest moralist.

This loathing had its physical antitype in his horror of the sight or description of bodily disease.  I have seen him several times go off into a dead faint at even the bare description of bodily suffering.  I went with him once, at his own request, to a seaman’s hospital, where there was a poor fellow who had fallen from a mast and been terribly smashed.  His legs had both been amputated, and he lay looking terribly white and emaciated with a cradle over the stumps.

He gave us, with great eagerness, an account of the accident, as people in the lower classes always will.  In the middle, Arthur stepped suddenly to the door and went out.  I was not aware at the time of this failing of his, and the move was executed with such deliberate directness that I thought he must have forgotten something.  When I went out to the open air I found Arthur, deadly pale, sitting on the grassy paving-stones of the little yard.  He insisted, as soon as he was restored, in going in to wish good-bye to the man, which he accomplished with great difficulty.

But I have already digressed too far, and must return to the main issue.

I am not aware that he ever attempted any theoretical explanation of the intrusion of sin and disorder into the world.  He certainly regarded them as emanating practically, in some way that he did not comprehend, from God.

“I can not for a moment believe that these apparent disorders, physical suffering, and the deeper diseases of the will are the manifestation of some inimical power, and not under God’s direct control.  I have had so much experience of even the immediate blessing of suffering, that I am content to take the rest on trust.  If I thought there was some ghastly enemy at work all the time, I should go mad.  The power displayed is so calm, so far-reaching, and so divine, that I should feel that even if some of us were finally emancipated from it by the working of some superior power, the contest would be so long and terrible and the issues so dire, that the limited human mind could not possibly contemplate it, that hope would be practically eliminated by despair.”

In the same connection, he wrote a letter to a friend whose wild and wayward life had injured his health, and wrote in the greatest agony of mind: