e him now.
The very grasp of his hand was changed. But not yet would Robert leave
him alone.

It will naturally occur to my reader that his goodness was not much yet.
It was not. It may have been greater than we could be sure of, though.
But if any one object that such a conversion, even if it were perfected,
was poor, inasmuch as the man's free will was intromitted with, I
answer: 'The development of the free will was the one object. Hitherto
it was not free.' I ask the man who says so: 'Where would your free will
have been if at some period of your life you could have had everything
you wanted?' If he says it is nobler in a man to do with less help,
I answer, 'Andrew was not noble: was he therefore to be forsaken? The
prodigal was not left without the help of the swine and their husks, at
once to keep him alive and disgust him with the life. Is the less help
a man has from God the better?' According to you, the grandest thing of
all would be for a man sunk in the absolute abysses of sensuality all at
once to resolve to be pure as the empyrean, and be so, without help from
God or man. But is the thing possible? As well might a hyena say: I will
be a man, and become one. That would be to create. Andrew must be kept
from the evil long enough to let him at least see the good, before he
was let alone. But when would we be let alone? For a man to be fit to be
let alone, is for a man not to need God, but to be able to live without
him. Our hearts cry out, 'To have God is to live. We want God. Without
him no life of ours is worth living. We are not then even human, for
that is but the lower form of the divine. We are immortal, eternal: fill
us, O Father, with thyself. Then only all is well.' More: I heartily
believe, though I cannot understand the boundaries of will and
inspiration, that what God will do for us at last is infinitely beyond
any greatness we could gain, even if we could will ourselves from the
lowest we could be, into the highest we can imagine. It is essential
divine life we want; and there is grand truth, however incomplete or
perverted, in the aspiration of the Brahmin. He is wrong, but he wants
something right. If the man had the power in his pollution to will
himself into the right without God, the fact that he was in that
pollution with such power, must damn him there for ever. And if God must
help ere a man can be saved, can the help of man go too far towards the
same end? Let God solve the mystery--for