fraid, you see, afraid for my wife and all of them.
Anyhow, take my word for it. Courage is security. There is no other
kind."

{250}

"Then--Ruth and I--"

"Ruth is the core of my heart!" said Lannithorne thickly. "I would
rather die than have her suffer more than she must. But she must
take her chances like the rest. It is the law of things. If you know
yourself fit for her, and feel reasonably sure you can take care of
her, you have a right to trust the future. Myself, I believe there
is some One to trust it to."

The speaker of this hard-won wisdom, after this appeal to the eternal,
utters his last tremulous word as from a father's loving heart, and
then the interview must end. The author concludes:

Finding his way out of the prison yard a few minutes later, Oliver
looked, unseeing, at the high walls that soared against the blue
spring sky. He could not realise them, there was such a sense of
light, air, space, in his spirit.

Apparently, he was just where he had been an hour before, with all
his battles still to fight, but really he knew they were already
won, for his weapon had been forged and put in his hand. He left his
boyhood behind him as he passed that stern threshold, for the last
hour had made a man of him, and a prisoner had given him the
master-key that opens every door.

VI

Now this, I insist, is insight. It is no "soft" doctrine. It is far
beyond the sort of pragmatism that accepts the test of momentary
results. As far as it goes, it is religious insight. It is insight,
moreover, into the nature of certain ills which cannot, yes, which in
principle, and even by omnipotence, {251} could not, be simply removed
from existence without abolishing the conditions which are logically
necessary to the very highest good that we know. Life in the spirit
simply presupposes the conditions that these ills exemplify.

What sorrow is deeper than the full recognition of one's own now
irrevocable deed, if one has, hereupon, fully to confess that this
deed is, from one's own present point of view, a crime? Yet how could
such ills be simply removed from existence if any range of individual
expression, of freedom, of power to choose is to be left open at all?
How can one possess spiritual effectiveness--the privilege that youth
most ardently demands--without assuming the risk involved in taking
personal responsibility for some aspects of the