For awhile he endeavored to turn himself away from convictions that
were grounding themselves deeper and deeper every moment,--to shut
his eyes in wilful blindness, and refuse to see in the purer light
which had fallen around him. But this effort only brought his mind
into severer conflict, and consciously removed him to an almost
fatal distance from the paths leading upward to the mountains of
peace.

"This is the way, walk ye in it." A clear voice rose above the noise
of strife in his soul, and his soul grew calm and listened. He no
longer wrought at the fruitless task of rejecting the higher truths
which were illustrating his mind, but let them flow in, and by
virtue thereof examined the state of his inner life. Now it was that
his eyes were in a degree opened, so that he could apprehend the
profounder meanings of Scripture. The parables were flooded with new
light. He understood, as he had never understood before, why the
guest, unclothed with a wedding garment, was cast out from the
feast; and why the door was shut upon the virgins who had no oil in
their lamps. He had always regarded these parables as involving a
hidden meaning--as intended to convey spiritual instruction under
literal forms--but, now, they spoke in a language that applied
itself to his inward state, and warned him that without a marriage
garment, woven in the loom of interior life, where motives rule, he
could never be the King's guest; warned him that without the light
of divine truth in his understanding, and the oil of love to God and
the neighbor in his heart, the door of the kingdom would be shut
against him. Ritual observances were, to these, but outward forms,
dry husks, except when truly representative of that worship in the
soul which subordinates natural affections to what is spiritual and