going."

I do not mean from this that he thought lightly of sin--far from
it. I have seen him give all the physical signs of shrinking and
repulsion, at the mention or sight of it. He loathed it with all the
agonized disgust of a high, pure, fastidious nature. Its phenomena
were without the lurid interest for him which it often possesses even
for the sternest moralist.

This loathing had its physical antitype in his horror of the sight or
description of bodily disease. I have seen him several times go off
into a dead faint at even the bare description of bodily suffering. I
went with him once, at his own request, to a seaman's hospital, where
there was a poor fellow who had fallen from a mast and been terribly
smashed. His legs had both been amputated, and he lay looking
terribly white and emaciated with a cradle over the stumps.

He gave us, with great eagerness, an account of the accident, as
people in the lower classes always will. In the middle, Arthur
stepped suddenly to the door and went out. I was not aware at the
time of this failing of his, and the move was executed with such
deliberate directness that I thought he must have forgotten
something. When I went out to the open air I found Arthur, deadly
pale, sitting on the grassy paving-stones of the little yard. He
insisted, as soon as he was restored, in going in to wish good-bye
to the man, which he accomplished with great difficulty.

But I have already digressed too far, and must return to the main
issue.

I am not aware that he ever attempted any theoretical explanation of
the intrusion of sin and disorder into the world. He certainly
regarded them as emanating practically, in some way that he did not
comprehend, from God.

"I can not for a moment believe that these apparent disorders,
physical suffering, and the deeper diseases of the will are the
manifestation of some inimical power, and not under God's direct
control. I have had so much experience of even the immediate blessing
of suffering, that I am content to take the rest on trust. If I
thought there was some ghastly enemy at work all the time, I should
go mad. The power displayed is so calm, so far-reaching, and so
divine, that I should feel that even if some of us were finally
emancipated from it by the working of some superior power, the
contest would be so long and terrible and the issues so dire, that
the limited human mind could not possibly contemplate it, that hope
would be practical