VI. Cast Down, But Not Destroyed - Page 2

friend. "If he has special standards of morality, and does not live up to them, the matter is between himself and his own conscience. We, on the outside, are not his judges."

It so happened that I met Brantley a short time afterwards. The circumstances were favorable, and our interview unreserved. He had sold his house, and a large part of the handsome furniture it contained, and was living in a humbler dwelling. I referred to his changed condition, and spoke of it with regret.

"There is no gratuitous evil," he remarked. "I have long been satisfied on that head. If we lose on one hand, we gain on another. And my experience in life leads me to this conclusion, that the loss is generally in lower things, and the gain in higher."

I looked into his face, yet bearing the marks of recent trial and suffering, and saw in it the morning dawn.

"Has it been so with you?" I asked.

"Yes; and it has always been so," he answered, without hesitation. "It is painful to be under the surgeon's knife," he added. "We shrink back, shivering, at the sight of his instruments. The flesh is agonized. But when all is over, and the greedy tumor, or wasting cancer, that was threatening life, is gone, we rejoice and are glad."

He sighed, and looked sober for a little while, as thought went back, and memory gave too vivid a realization of what had been, and then resumed:

"I can see now, that what seemed to me, and is still regarded by others as a great misfortune, was the best thing that could have taken place. I have lost, but I have gained; and the gain is greater than the loss. It has always been so. Out of every trouble or disaster that has befallen me in life, I have come with a deep conviction that my feet stumbled because they were turning into paths that would lead my soul astray. However much I may love myself and the world, however much I may seek my own, below all and above all is the conviction that time is fleeting, and life here but as a span, that if I compass the whole world, and lose my own soul, I have made a fearful exchange. There are a great many things regarded by business men as allowable. They are so common in trade, that scarcely one man in a score questions their morality; so common, that I have often found myself drifting into their practice, and abandoning for a time the higher principles in whose guidance there alone is safety. Misfortune seems to have dogged my steps; but in this pause of my life--in this state of calmness--I can see that misfortune is my good; for, not until my feet were turning into ways that lead to death, did I stumble and fall."

"Are you not too hard in self-judgment?" I said.

"No," he answered. "The case stands just here. You know, I presume, the immediate cause of my recent failure in business."

"A sudden