d from him again.

"I have no means of seeing and questioning you. I can only send this
letter to Allan to be forwarded, if he knows, or can discover, your
present address. Placed in this position toward you, I am bound to
assume all that _can_ be assumed in your favor. I will take it for
granted that something has happened to you or to Allan which to your
mind has not only confirmed the fatalist conviction in which your father
died, but has added a new and terrible meaning to the warning which he
sent you in his death-bed letter.

"On this common ground I meet you. On this common ground I appeal to
your higher nature and your better sense.

"Preserve your present conviction that the events which have happened
(be they what they may) are not to be reconciled with ordinary mortal
coincidences and ordinary mortal laws; and view your own position by the
best and clearest light that your superstition can throw on it. What are
you? You are a helpless instrument in the hands of Fate. You are doomed,
beyond all human capacity of resistance, to bring misery and destruction
blindfold on a man to whom you have harmlessly and gratefully united
yourself in the bonds of a brother's love. All that is morally firmest
in your will and morally purest in your aspirations avails nothing
against the hereditary impulsion of you toward evil, caused by a crime
which your father committed before you were born. In what does that
belief end? It ends in the darkness in which you are now lost; in the
self-contradictions in which you are now bewildered; in the stubborn
despair by which a man profanes his own soul, and lowers himself to the
level of the brutes that perish.

"Look up, my poor suffering brother--look up, my hardly tried, my
well-loved friend, higher than this! Meet the doubts that now assail you
from the blessed vantage-ground of Christian courage and Christian hope;
and your heart will turn again to Allan, and your mind will be at
peace. Happen what may, God is all-merciful, God is all-wise: natural or
supernatural, it happens through Him. The mystery of Evil that perplexes
our feeble minds, the sorrow and the suffering that torture us in this
little life, leave the one great truth unshaken that the destiny of man
is in the hands of his Creator, and that God's blessed Son died to make
us worthier of it. Nothing that is done in unquestioning submission to
the wisdom of the Almighty is done wrong. No evil exists out of which,
in ob