A Knight of the Nineteenth Century

The power of truth can scarcely be overestimated, and the mind that earnestly seeks it becomes noble in its noble quest. If this can be said of truth in the abstract, and in its humbler manifestations, how omnipotent truth becomes in its grandest culmination and embodied in a being capable of inspiring our profoundest fear and deepest love. One may accept of religious forms and philosophies, and be little changed thereby. One may be perfectly saturated with ecclesiasticism, and still continue a small-natured man. But the man that accepts of Jesus Christ as a personal and living teacher, as did the fishermen of Galilee, that man begins to grow large and noble, brave and patient.

Egbert Haldane has been sketched as an ordinary youth. There are thousands like him who have been warped and marred by early influences, but more seriously injured by a personal and wilful yielding to whatever form of evil proved attractive. The majority are not so unwary or so unfortunate as he was; but multitudes, for whom society has comparatively little criticism, are more vitiated at heart, more cold-blooded and deliberate in their evil. One may form a base character, but maintain an outward respectability; but let him not be very complacent over the decorous and conventional veneer which masks him from the world. If one imagines that he can corrupt his own soul and make it the abiding-place of foul thoughts, mean impulses, and shrivelling selfishness, and yet go forward very far in God's universe without meeting overwhelming disaster, he will find himself thoroughly mistaken.

The sin of another man finds him out in swift sequence upon its committal, and such had been Haldane's experience. He had been taught promptly the nature of the harvest which evil produces inevitably.

The terrible consequences of sin prevent and deter from it in many instances, but they have no very great reformatory power it would seem. Multitudes to-day are in extremis from destroying vices, and recognize the fact; but so far from reacting upward into virtue, even after vice (save in the intent of the heart) has ceased to be possible, there seems to be a moral inertia which nothing moves, or a reckless and increasing impetus downward.

It would appear that, in order to save the sinful, a strong, and yet gentle and loving, hand must be laid upon them. The stern grasp of justice, the grip of pain, law--human and divine--with its severe penalties, and conscience re-echoing its thunders, all lead too often to despondency, recklessness, and despair. It would be difficult to imagine a worse hell than vice often digs for its votaries, even in this world; and in spite of all human philosophies, and human wishes to the contrary, it remains a fact that the guilty soul trembles at a worse hereafter, and yet no sufferings, no fears, no fate can so appall as to turn the soul from its infatuation with that which is destroying it. More potent than commands, threats, and their dire fulfilment, is love, which wins and entreats back to virtue the man whom even Omnipotence could not drive back.