ow he no longer believed himself in the ways of exclusive thought and
practices in which the best men he knew were walking. The only religious
thinkers with whom he had come in contact gave up a large class of human
activities and the majority of human souls to the almost exclusive
dominion of the devil. As far as Toyner knew he was alone in the world
with his new idea. He had none of that vanity and self-confidence which
would have made it easy for him to hold to it. It did not appear to him
reasonable that he could be right and these others wrong. He did not
know that no man can think alone, that by some strange necessity of
thought he could only think what other men were then thinking. He felt
homesick, sick for the support of those faithful ones which he had been
wont to see in imagination with him: their conscious communion with God
was the only good life, the life which he must seek to attain and from
which he feared above all things to fall short; and that being so, it
would have been easier, far easier, to call his new belief folly,
heresy, nay, blasphemy if that were needful, and to repent of it, if he
could have done so. He could not, do what he would; he saw his vision to
be true.

The thing had grown with his growth; he believed that a voice from
heaven had spoken it. Is not this the history of all revelation?

When I say that Toyner could not doubt his new conception of God and of
the human struggle, I mean that he could not in sincerest thought hold
the contrary to be true. I do not mean to say that daily and hourly,
when about his common avocations, his new inspiration did not seem a
mere will-o'-the-wisp of the mind. It took months and years to bring it
into any accustomed relation to every-day matters of thought and act;
and it is this habitual adjustment of our inward belief to our outward
environment that makes any creed _appear_ to be incontrovertible.

Oh the loneliness of it, to have a creed that no companion has! The
sheer sorrow of being compelled by the law of his mind to believe
concerning God what he did not know that any other man believed time and
time again obscured Bart Toyner's vision of the divine.

The power of the miracle wrought at his conversion was gone; he had
been taught that the miraculous power was only to be with him as long as
he yielded implicit obedience, but that implied a clear-cut knowledge of
right from wrong which Toyner did not now possess; many of the old rules
cla