nduct:
it enforced a discrimination of God's enemies, who were to be used
merely as instruments, and whom it would be as well if possible to keep
out of money and consequent influence. Also, profitable investments in
trades where the power of the prince of this world showed its most
active devices, became sanctified by a right application of the profits
in the hands of God's servant.

This implicit reasoning is essentially no more peculiar to evangelical
belief than the use of wide phrases for narrow motives is peculiar to
Englishmen. There is no general doctrine which is not capable of
eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct
fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.

But a man who believes in something else than his own greed, has
necessarily a conscience or standard to which he more or less adapts
himself. Bulstrode's standard had been his serviceableness to God's
cause: "I am sinful and nought--a vessel to be consecrated by use--but
use me!"--had been the mould into which he had constrained his immense
need of being something important and predominating. And now had come
a moment in which that mould seemed in danger of being broken and
utterly cast away.

What if the acts he had reconciled himself to because they made him a
stronger instrument of the divine glory, were to become the pretext of
the scoffer, and a darkening of that glory? If this were to be the
ruling of Providence, he was cast out from the temple as one who had
brought unclean offerings.

He had long poured out utterances of repentance. But today a
repentance had come which was of a bitterer flavor, and a threatening
Providence urged him to a kind of propitiation which was not simply a
doctrinal transaction. The divine tribunal had changed its aspect for
him; self-prostration was no longer enough, and he must bring
restitution in his hand. It was really before his God that Bulstrode
was about to attempt such restitution as seemed possible: a great dread
had seized his susceptible frame, and the scorching approach of shame
wrought in him a new spiritual need. Night and day, while the
resurgent threatening past was making a conscience within him, he was
thinking by what means he could recover peace and trust--by what
sacrifice he could stay the rod. His belief in these moments of dread
was, that if he spontaneously did something right, God would save him
from the consequences of wrong-doing. For religion c