al life, Jesus did not say a word concerning those of the first
table--not a word, that is, about his duty toward God; He spoke only of
his duty toward man. Then it struck him that our Lord gave him no sketch
or summary or part of a religious system--only told him what he asked,
the practical steps by which he might begin to climb toward eternal
life. One thing he lacked--namely, God Himself, but as to how God would
meet him, Jesus says nothing, but Himself meets him on those steps with
the offer of God. He treats the duties of the second table as a stair to
the first--a stair which, probably by its crumbling away in failure
beneath his feet as he ascended, would lift him to such a vision and
such a horror of final frustration, as would make him stretch forth his
hands, like the sinking Peter, to the living God, the life eternal which
he blindly sought, without whose closest presence he could never do the
simplest duty aright, even of those he had been doing from his youth up.
His measure of success, and his sense of utter failure, would together
lift him _toward_ the One Good.

Thus, looking out upon truth from the cave of his brother's need, and
seeing the direction in which the shadow of his atheism fell, the
minister learned in what direction the clouded light lay, and turning
his gaze thitherward, learned much. It is only the aged who have dropped
thinking that become stupid. Such can learn no more, until first their
young nurse Death has taken off their clothes, and put the old babies to
bed. Of such was not Walter Drake. Certain of his formerly petted
doctrines he now threw away as worse than rubbish; others he dropped
with indifference; of some it was as if the angels picked his pockets
without his knowing it, or ever missing them; and still he found,
whatever so-called doctrine he parted with, that the one glowing truth
which had lain at the heart of it, buried, mired, obscured, not only
remained with him, but shone out fresh, restored to itself by the loss
of the clay-lump of worldly figures and phrases, in which the human
intellect had inclosed it. His faith was elevated, and so confirmed.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

THE BORDER-LAND.

Mr. Drew, the draper, was, of all his friends, the one who most
frequently visited his old pastor. He had been the first, although a
deacon of the church, in part to forsake his ministry, and join the
worship of, as he honestly believed, a less scriptural community,
because in