athized with the honesty of this confession, and in the same way
I sympathize with those Officers of the Salvation Army who, in racing
slang, cannot 'stay the course.'

Let us consider the lot of these men. Any who have entered on even a
secular crusade, something that takes them off the beaten, official
paths, that leads them through the thorns and wildernesses of a new,
untravelled country, towards some distant goal seen dimly, or not seen
at all except in dreams, will know what such an undertaking means. It
means snakes in the grass; it means savages, or in other words veiled
and poisonous hatreds and bitter foes, or, still worse, treacherous
friends. The crusader may get through, in which case no one will thank
him except, perhaps, after he is dead. Or he may fail and perish, in
which case every one will mock at him. Or he may retreat discouraged
and return to the official road, in which case his friends will remark
that they are glad to see that his insanity was only of the
intermittent order, and that at length he has learned his place in the
world and to whom he ought to touch his cap.

Well, these are official roads to Heaven as well as to the House of
Lords and other mundane goals, a fact which the Salvation Army Officer
and others of his kind have probably found out. On the official road,
if he has interest and ability--the first is to be preferred--he might
have become anything, and with ordinary fortune would certainly have
become something.

But on the path that he has chosen what is there for him to gain? An
inheritance of dim glory beyond the stars, obscured doubtless from
time to time, if he is like other men, by sudden and sickening
eclipses of his faith. And meanwhile the daily round, the insolent
gibe, and the bitter ingratitude of men that leaves him grieving. Also
not enough money to pay for a cab when it is wet, and considerable
uncertainty as to the future of his children, and even as to his own
old age. Few comforts for him, not even those of a glass of wine to
stimulate him, or of tobacco to soothe his nerves, for these are
forbidden to him by the rules of his Order. Unless he can reach the
very top of his particular tree also, which it is most unlikely that
he will, no public recognition even of his faithful, strenuous work,
and who is there that at heart does not long for public recognition?
In short, nothing that is desirable to man save the consciousness of a
virtue which, after all, he m