door--not so softly as he
intended, for he was agitated; a loud curse at the noise came after
him. He went down the stair not only with a sense of failure, but with
an exhaustion such as he had never before felt.

There are men of natures so inactive that they cannot even enjoy the
sight of activity around them: men with schemes and desires are in
their presence intrusive. Their existence is a sleepy lake, which would
not be troubled even with the wind of far-off labour. Such lord Morven
was not by nature; up to manhood he had led even a stormy life. But
when his passions began to yield, his self-indulgence began to take the
form of laziness; and it was not many years before he lay with never a
struggle in the chains of the evil power which had now reduced him to
moral poltroonery. The tyranny of this last wickedness grew worse after
the death of his wife. The one object of his life, if life it could be
called, was only and ever to make it a life of his own, not the life
which God had meant it to be, and had made possible to him. On first
acquaintance with the moral phenomenon, it had seemed to Donal an
inhuman and strangely exceptional one; but reflecting, he came
presently to see that it was only a more pronounced form of the
universal human disease--a disease so deep-seated that he who has it
worst, least knows or can believe that he has any disease, attributing
all his discomfort to the condition of things outside him; whereas his
refusal to accept them as they are, is one most prominent symptom of
the disease. Whether by stimulants or narcotics, whether by company or
ambition, whether by grasping or study, whether by self-indulgence, by
art, by books, by religion, by love, by benevolence, we endeavour after
another life than that which God means for us--a life of truth, namely,
of obedience, humility, and self-forgetfulness, we walk equally in a
vain show. For God alone is, and without him we are not. This is not
the mere clang of a tinkling metaphysical cymbal; he that endeavours to
live apart from God must at length find--not merely that he has been
walking in a vain show, but that he has been himself but the phantom of
a dream. But for the life of the living God, making him be, and keeping
him being, he must fade even out of the limbo of vanities!

He more and more seldom went out of the house, more and more seldom
left his apartment. At times he would read a great deal, then for days
would not open a book, but