ot straight back and forth like a bobbin in a
weaver's shuttle, their moral conduct was aggravated. A church organ
was ridiculed as a sort of musical Behemoth--as a dark chamber of
howling, roaring Belial.

These controversies overflowed from the congregation to the Bible
College. The lad in his room at the dormitory one Sunday afternoon
heard a debate on whether a tuning fork is a violation of the word of
God. The debaters turned to him excited and angry:--

"What do you think?" they asked.

"I don't think it is worth talking about," he replied quietly.

They soon became reconciled to each other; they never forgave him.

Meantime as for his Biblical studies, they enlarged enormously his
knowledge of the Bible; but they added enormously to the questions that
may be asked about the Bible--questions he had never thought of before.
And in adding to the questions that may be asked, they multiplied those
that cannot be answered. The lad began to ask these questions, began to
get no answers. The ground of his interest in the great Book shifted.
Out on the farm alone with it for two years, reading it never with a
critical but always with a worshipping mind, it had been to him simply
the summons to a great and good life, earthly and immortal. As he sat
in the lecture rooms, studying it book by book, paragraph by paragraph,
writing chalk notes about it on the blackboard, hearing the students
recite it as they recited arithmetic or rhetoric, a little homesickness
overcame him for the hours when he had read it at the end of a furrow
in the fields, or by his candle the last thing at night before he
kneeled to say his prayers, or of Sunday afternoons off by himself in
the sacred leafy woods. The mysterious untouched Christ-feeling was in
him so strong, that he shrank from these critical analyses as he would
from dissecting the body of the crucified Redeemer.

A significant occurrence took place one afternoon some seven months
after he had entered the University.

On that day, recitations over, the lad left the college alone and with
a most thoughtful air crossed the campus and took his course into the
city. Reaching a great central street, he turned to the left and
proceeded until he stood opposite a large brick church. Passing along
the outside of this, he descended a few steps, traversed an alley,
knocked timidly at a door, and by a voice within was bidden to enter.
He did so, and stood in his pastor's study. He had told hi