He had mental exercises, called
himself nought laid hold on redemption, and went on in his course of
instrumentality. And after five years Death again came to widen his
path, by taking away his wife. He did gradually withdraw his capital,
but he did not make the sacrifices requisite to put an end to the
business, which was carried on for thirteen years afterwards before it
finally collapsed. Meanwhile Nicholas Bulstrode had used his hundred
thousand discreetly, and was become provincially, solidly important--a
banker, a Churchman, a public benefactor; also a sleeping partner in
trading concerns, in which his ability was directed to economy in the
raw material, as in the case of the dyes which rotted Mr. Vincy's silk.
And now, when this respectability had lasted undisturbed for nearly
thirty years--when all that preceded it had long lain benumbed in the
consciousness--that past had risen and immersed his thought as if with
the terrible irruption of a new sense overburthening the feeble being.

Meanwhile, in his conversation with Raffles, he had learned something
momentous, something which entered actively into the struggle of his
longings and terrors. There, he thought, lay an opening towards
spiritual, perhaps towards material rescue.

The spiritual kind of rescue was a genuine need with him. There may be
coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the
sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them. He was
simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic
beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his
desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs. If this be
hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all,
to whatever confession we belong, and whether we believe in the future
perfection of our race or in the nearest date fixed for the end of the
world; whether we regard the earth as a putrefying nidus for a saved
remnant, including ourselves, or have a passionate belief in the
solidarity of mankind.

The service he could do to the cause of religion had been through life
the ground he alleged to himself for his choice of action: it had been
the motive which he had poured out in his prayers. Who would use money
and position better than he meant to use them? Who could surpass him
in self-abhorrence and exaltation of God's cause? And to Mr. Bulstrode
God's cause was something distinct from his own rectitude of co