Gerald Raymount went walking through the pine woods on his hills, but there was now little satisfaction to be found in his land. He had taken honesty as a matter of course in his family. Were they not his children? Yet he had never known anything of what was going on in the mind of his son. He had never asked himself if his boy loved the truth. And now he was astonished to find his boy no better than the common sort of human animal!

But often an act of open disgrace is the quickest road toward repentance. There is little hope of the repentance and redemption of some until they have committed one or another of the many wrong things of which they are daily, through a course of unrestrained selfishness, becoming more and more capable.

Few seem to understand that the true end is not to keep their children from doing what is wrong, though that is on the way to it, but to render them incapable of doing wrong. While one is capable of doing wrong, he is no nearer right than if that wrong were done—not so near as if the wrong were done and repented of. Some minds are never roused to the true nature of their selfishness until having done some patent wrong, the eyes of the collective human conscience are fixed upon them. Doubtless in the disapproving crowd are many just as capable of the wrong as they, but the deeper nature in them, God’s and not yet theirs shouts its disapproval, and the culprit feels it.

Happy is he if then at last he begins to turn from the evil itself, and thus repent! This Cornelius had not begun to do yet, but his illness, while perhaps it delayed the time when the thought of repentance should present itself, made it more likely the thought would be entertained when it did present itself.

The father came back from his lonely walk in no better frame of mind—just as determined that his son should no more be treated as a son. He could not refuse him shelter in his house for a time, but it should be on sufferance and from no right of sonship!

The heart of the mother, however, was longing after her boy, like a human hen whose chick has run from under her wing and come to grief. He had sinned, he had suffered, and was in disgrace. The very things that made his father feel he could not speak to him again worked in the deeper nature of the mother in the opposite fashion. Was he unlovely?—she must love him the more! Was he selfish and repellent?—she must get the nearer to him! Everything was reason to her for love and more love. She would clasp him so close that evil should not touch him! Satan himself could not get at him with her whole mother-being folded round him! Now that sickness and shame had cast down his proud spirit, love would have room to enter and minister! The good of all evil is to make a way for love, which is essential good. Therefore evil exists, and will exist, until love destroys and casts it out.