couragement to plunge heartily
into his studies, for in such absorption lay diversion from dangerous
channels of thought. Slowly, too, he yielded to their careful
insistence that he must suffer many things to be so for the nonce,
even as Jesus did, lest a too radical resistance now should delay the
final glorious consummation.

Was the boy actuated too strongly by the determination that his
widowed mother's hopes should never be blasted by any assertion of
his own will? Was he passively permitting himself to be warped and
twisted into a minion of an institution alien to his soul in bigoted
adherence to his morbid sense of integrity? Was he for the present
countenancing a lie, rather than permit the bursting of a bomb
which would rend the family and bring his beloved mother in sorrow to
the grave? Or was he biding his time, an undeveloped David, who
would some day sally forth like the lion of the tribe of Juda, to
match his moral courage against the blustering son of Anak? Time
only would tell. The formative period of his character was not yet
ended, and the data for prognostication were too complex and
conflicting. We can only be sure that his consuming desire to know
had been carefully fostered in the seminary, but in such a manner as
unwittingly to add to his confusion of thought and to increase his
fear of throwing himself unreservedly upon his own convictions. That
he grew to perceive the childishness of churchly dogma, we know.
That he appreciated the Church's insane license of affirmation, its
impudent affirmations of God's thoughts and desires, its coarse
assumptions of knowledge of the inner workings of the mind of
Omnipotence, we likewise know. But, on the other hand, we know
that he feared to break with the accepted faith. The claims of
Protestantism, though lacking the pomp and pageantry of Catholicism
to give them attractiveness, offered him an interpretation of Christ's
mission that was little better than the teachings he was receiving.
And so his hesitant and vacillating nature, which hurled him into the
lists to-day as the resolute foe of dogma and superstition, and
to-morrow would leave him weak and doubting at the feet of the
enemy, kept him wavering, silent and unhappy, on the thin edge of
resolution throughout the greater part of his course. His lack of
force, or the holding of his force in check by his filial honesty and
his uncertainty of conviction, kept him in the seminary for eight
years, durin