ut as one cannot touch pitch
without being defiled, so a man must yield in time to the influences in
the midst of which he has voluntarily placed himself. So it came to
pass that, as the years went on, Allan Ruthven was greatly changed.

It need not have been so. It doubtless was far otherwise with some who,
in his pride and ignorance, he had called earth-worms and worshippers of
gold; for though, in the first bitterness of his isolation, he was slow
to discover it, there were in the midst of the turmoil and strife of
that new city warm hearts and happy homes, and the blessed influence of
the Christian faith and the Christian life. There were those over whom
the gains-getting demon of the place had no power, because of a talisman
they held, the "constraining love of Christ," in them. Those walked
through the fire unscathed, and, in the midst of much that is defiling,
kept their garments clean. But Ruthven was not one of them. He had the
name of the talisman on his lips, but he had not its living power in his
heart. He was a Christian only in name; and so, when the influence of
early associations began to grow weak, and he began to forget, as men
will for a time, his mother's teachings "in the house, and by the way,"
at the "lying down and the rising up," no wonder that the questionable
maxims heard daily from the lips of the worldly-wise should come to have
weight with him at last.

Not that in those days he was, in any sense, a lover of gold for its own
sake. He never sank so low as that. But in the eagerness with which he
devoted himself to business, he left himself no time for the performance
of other and higher duties, or for the cultivation of those principles
and affections which can alone prevent the earnest business-man from
degenerating into a character so despicable. If he was not swept away
by the strong current of temptation, it was because of no wisdom or
strength or foresight of his. Another ten years of such a life would
have made him, as it has made many another, a man outwardly worthy of
esteem, but inwardly selfish, sordid, worldly--all that in his youth he
had most despised.

This may seem a hard judgment, but it is the judgement he passed on
himself, when there came a pause in his busy life, and he looked back
over those years and felt that he did not hold the world loosely--that
he could not open his hand and let it go. He had been pleasing himself
all along with the thought that he wa