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have failed, at some time or other, to stand in amazement before it.
We have all known men who were not only wicked, but who bore in their
body the marks of their vice. It was stamped upon the face; it was
evident in the stoop of the frame; it betrayed itself in the shuffle
that should have been a stride. We have known such men, I say, and
heard their pitiful confessions. And the most heartrending thing about
them was their despair. They could believe that the love of God was
vast enough to find room for them; but just look! 'Look at me!' a man
said to me one night, remembering what he once was and surveying the
wreckage that remained, 'look at me!' And truly it was a sight to make
angels weep. 'I can never be the same again,' he said in effect, 'I
can never get over it!' But he did; and there is as much difference
between the man that I saw that night and the man who greets me to-day
as there was between the man whom he remembered and the man he then
surveyed. It is wonderful how the old light returns to the eye, the
old grace to the form, the old buoyancy to the step, and how, with
these, a new softness creeps into the countenance and a new gentleness
into the voice when the things that wound are thrown away and the
healing powers get their chance. It is only then that we really
discover the marvel of getting over things.

Indeed, unless we are on our guard this magical faculty will be our
undoing. The tendency is, as we have seen, to return to our earlier
state, to recover from the change. And the forces that work in that
direction do not pause to ask if the change that has come about is a
change for the better or a change for the worse. They only know that a
cataclysmic change has been effected, and that it is their business to
help us back to our first and natural condition. But there are changes
that sometimes overtake us from which we do not wish to recover; and we
must be on ceaseless vigil against the well-meaning forces that only
live to abolish all signs of alteration. No man ever yet threw on his
old self and entered into new life without being conscious that
millions of invisible toilers were at work to undo the change that had
been effected. They are helping him to get over it, and he must firmly
decline their misdirected offices.

'"Father!" said young Dr. Ralph Dexter to the old doctor in _The
Spinner in the Sun_, "father! it may be because I'm young, but I hold
before me, very stron