an uncommonly effective one. He gets inside the weakness of our mortal
nature, and tells us that we have come down to the truth at last. It's all
nonsense, of course, but it's infernally ingenious nonsense. He brings all
the failures of the world before your mind and heart, the thought of all
the people who have fallen by the roadside and can't get up, and, worse
still, all the people who have lost hope and pride, and don't want to be
different. He points out how brief our time is, and how little we know what
lies beyond. He shows us how the strong and unscrupulous and cruel people
succeed and have a good time, and how many well-meaning, sensitive, muddled
people come to hopeless grief. Oh, he has a score of instances, a quiver
full of poisonous shafts." He was silent for a minute, and then he said,
"Old boy, we won't heed him, you and I. We'll say, 'Yes, my dear Apollyon,
all that is undoubtedly true. You do a lot of mischief, but your time is
short. You wound us and disable us--you can even kill us; but it's a poor
policy at best. You defeat yourself, because we slip away and you can't
follow us. And when we are refreshed and renewed, we will come back, and go
on with the battle.' That's what well say, like old Sir Andrew Barton:

"'I'll but lie down and bleed awhile,
And then I'll rise and fight again.'

You must never mind being defeated, old man. You must never say that your
sins have done for you! I don't care what a man has done, I don't care how
cruel, wicked, sensual, evil he has been, if in the bottom of his heart he
can say, 'I belong to God, after all!' That's the last and worst assault of
the devil, when he comes and whispers to you that you have cut yourself off
from God. You can't do that, whatever you feel. I have been thinking to-day
of all the mistakes I have made, how I have drifted along, how I have
enjoyed myself, when I might have been helping other people; what a lazy,
greedy, ugly business it has all been, how little I have ever _made_
myself do anything. But I don't care. I go straight to God and I say,
'Father, I have sinned against Heaven and before Thee, and am no more
worthy to be called Thy son.' But I am His son, for all that, and I know it
and He knows it; and Apollyon may straddle across the way as much as he
likes, but he can't stop me. If he does stop me, he only sends me straight
home."

I saw the tears stand in Father Payne's eyes, and I said hurriedly and
eagerly, "Why, Father,