ves but others. Although we struggle, yet by
habit, by self-indulgence, by lack of a sustained purpose, we have formed
a character from which escape seems hopeless. And we realize that in
order to change ourselves, an actual regeneration of the will is
necessary. For awhile, perchance, we despair of this. The effort to get
out of the rut we have made for ourselves seems of no avail. And it is
not, indeed, until we arrive, gradually or otherwise, and through a
proper interpretation of the life of Christ, at the conviction that we
may even never become useful in the divine scheme that we have a sense of
what is called 'the forgiveness of sins.' This conviction, this grace,
this faith to embark on the experiment accomplishes of itself the revival
of the will, the rebirth which we had thought impossible. We discover
our task, high or humble,--our cause. We grow marvellously at one with
God's purpose, and we feel that our will is acting in the same direction
as his. And through our own atonement we see the meaning of that other
Atonement which led Christ to the Cross. We see that our conviction, our
grace, has come through him, and how he died for our sins."

"It's quite wonderful how logical and simple you make it, how thoroughly
you have gone into it. You have solved it for yourself--and you will
solve it for others many others."

She rose, and he, too, got to his feet with a medley of feelings.
The path along which they walked was already littered with green acorns.
A gray squirrel darted ahead of them, gained a walnut and paused,
quivering, halfway up the trunk, to gaze back at them. And the glance
she presently gave him seemed to partake of the shyness of the wild
thing.

"Thank you for explaining it to me," she said.

"I hope you don't think--" he began.

"Oh, it isn't that!" she cried, with unmistakable reproach. "I asked you
--I made you tell me. It hasn't seemed at all like--the confessional,"
she added, and smiled and blushed at the word. "You have put it so
nicely, so naturally, and you have given me so much to think about. But
it all depends--doesn't it?--upon whether one can feel the underlying
truth of which you spoke in the first place; it rests upon a sense of the
prevailing goodness of things. It seems to me cruel that what is called
salvation, the solution of the problem of life, should depend upon an
accidental discovery. We are all turned loose with our animal passions
and instincts, of self-preserva