 Epilogue of Father and Son. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Eugene Smith. Father and Son by Edmund Goss Epilogue. This narrative, however, must not be allowed to close with the son in the foreground of the piece. If it has a value, that value consists in what light it may contrive to throw upon the unique and noble figure of the father. With the advance of years, the characteristics of this figure became more severely outlined, more rigorously confined within settled limits. In relation to the son who presently departed at a very immature age for the new life in London, the attitude of the father continued to be one of extreme solicitude, deepening by degrees into disappointment and disenchantment. He abated no job or tittle of his demands upon human frailty. He kept the spiritual cord drawn tight. The biblical bearing reign was incessantly busy jerking into position the head of the dejected neophyte. That young soul, removed from the father's personal inspection, began to blossom forth, crudely and irregularly enough, into new provinces of thought, through fresh layers of experience. Through the painful mentor at home in the West, the center of anxiety was still the meek and docile heart dedicated to the Lord's service, which must, at all hazards and with all defiance of the rules of life, be kept unspotted from the world. The torment of a postal inquisition began directly I was settled in my London lodgings. To my father, with his ample leisure, his palpitating apprehension, his ready pen, the flow of correspondence offered no trouble at all. It was a grave but gratifying occupation. To me, the almost daily letter of exhortation, with its string of questions about conduct, its series of warnings, proved to be a burden which could hardly be borne, particularly because it involved a reply as punctual and if possible, as full as itself. At the age of seventeen, the metaphysics of the soul are shadowy, and it is a dreadful thing to be forced to define the exact outline of what is so undulating and so shapeless. To my father, there seemed no reason why I should hesitate to give answers a full metallic ring to his hard and off-prepeded questions. But to me, this correspondence was torture. When I feebly expostulated, when I begged to be left a little to myself, these appeals of mine automatically stimulated and indeed blew up into fierce flames the ardor of my father's alarm. The letter, the all too confidently expected letter, would lie on the table as I descended to breakfast. It would commonly be, of course, my only letter, unless tempered by a cozy and chatty note from my dear and comfortable stepmother, dealing with such perfectly tranquilizing subjects as the harvest of roses in the garden or the state of health of various neighbors. But the other, the solitary letter, in its threatening whiteness, with its exquisitely penned address, there it would lie, awaiting me, destroying the taste of the bacon, reducing the flavor of the tea to insipidity. I might fatuously dally with it. I might pretend not to observe it, but there it lay. Before the morning's exercise began, I knew that it had to be read, and what was worse, that it had to be answered. Useless the effort to conceal from myself what it contained, like all its precursors, like all its followers, it would insist with every variety of appeal on a reiterated declaration that I still fully intended, as in the days of my earliest childhood, to be on the Lord's side in everything. In my replies, I would sometimes answer precisely as I was desired to answer. Sometimes I would evade the queries and write about other things. Sometimes I would turn upon the tormentor and urge that my tender youth might be let alone. It little mattered what form of weakness I put forth by way of baffling my father's direct, firm, unflinching strength. To an appeal against the bondage of a correspondence of such unbroken solemnity, I would receive, with what a paralyzing promptitude, such a reply as this. Let me say that the solemnity you complain of has only been the expression of tender anxiousness of a father's heart, that his only child, just turned out upon the world, and very far out of his sight and hearing, should be walking in God's way. Recollect that it is not now, as it was when you were in school, when we had personal communication with you at intervals of five days, we now know absolutely nothing of you, saying from your letters, and if they do not indicate your spiritual prosperity, the deepest solicitudes of our hearts have nothing to feed on. But I will try henceforth to trust you and lay aside my fears, for you are worthy of my confidence. And your own God and your father's God will hold you with his right hand. Over such letters as these, I am not ashamed to say that I sometimes wept. The old paper I have just been copying shows traces of tears shed upon it more than 40 years ago, tears commingled of despair at my own feebleness, distraction at my want of will, pity for my father's manifest and pathetic distress. He would try henceforth to trust me, he said. Alas, the effort would be in vain. After a day or two, after a hollow attempt to write of other things, the important that subject would recur, there would intrude again the inevitable questions about the atonement and the means of grace, the old anxious fears lest I was yielding my intimacy to agreeable companions who were not one with me in Christ, fresh, passionate, and treaties to be assured in every letter that I was walking in the clear light of God's presence. It seems to me now profoundly strange, although I knew too little of the world to remark it at the time, that these incessant exhortations dealt not with conduct, but with faith. Earlier in this narrative, I have noted how disdainfully, with what an austere pride, my father refused to entertain the subject of personal shortcomings in my behavior. There were enough of them to blame heaven knows, but he was too lofty-minded a gentleman to dwell upon them, and though by nature deeply suspicious of the possibility of frequent moral lapses, even in the very elect, he refused to stoop to anything like espionage. I owe him a great debt of gratitude for his beautiful faith in me in this respect, and now that I was alone in London at this tender time of life, exposed, as they say, to all sorts of dangers, as defenseless as a fledgling that has been turned out of its nest. Yet my father did not, in his uplifted Quartz Autism, allow himself to fancy me guilty of any moral misbehavior, but concentrated his fears entirely upon my faith. Let me know more of your inner light. Does the candle of the Lord shine on your soul? This would be the ceaseless inquiry. Or again, do you get any spiritual companionship with young men? You passed over last Sunday without even a word. Yet this day is the most interesting to me in your whole week. Do you find the ministry of the word pleasant and above all profitable? Does it bring your soul into exercise before God? The coming of Christ draw off nigh. Watch, therefore, and pray always that you may be counted worthy to stand before the Son of Man. If I quote such passages as this from my father's letters to me, it is not that I seek entertainment and a contrast between his earnestness and the casualistical inattention and provoked distractiveness of a young man to whom the real world now offered its irritating and stimulating scenes of animal and intellectual life, but to call out sympathy and perhaps wonder at the spectacle of so blind a Roman firmness as my father's spiritual attitude displayed. His aspirations were individual and metaphysical, but the present hour so complete is the revolution which has overturned the puritanism of which he was perhaps the latest surviving type, that all classes of religious persons combined in placing philanthropic activity, the objective attitude, in the foreground. It is extraordinary how far-reaching the change has been, so that nowadays a religion which does not combine with its subjective faith, a strenuous labor for the good of others, is hardly held to possess any religious principle worth proclaiming. This propaganda of beneficence, this constant attention to the moral and physical improvement of persons who have been neglected, is quite recent as a leading feature of religion, though indeed it seems to have formed some part of the Savior's original design. It was unknown to the great preachers of the 17th century, whether Catholic or Protestant, and it offered but a shadowy attraction to my father, who was the last of their disciples. When Basouet desired his hearers to listen to the He started a new thing in the world of theology. We may search the famous rule and exercises of holy living from cover to cover and not learn that Jeremy Taylor would have thought that any activity of the district visitor or the salvation lassie came within the category of saintliness. My father then, like an old divine, concentrated on thoughts upon the intellectual part of faith. In his obsession about me, he believed that if my brain could be kept unaffected by any of the seductive errors of the age, that my heart centered in the enduring love of God, all would be well with me in perpetuity. He was still convinced that by intensely directing my thoughts, he could compel them to flow in a certain channel, since he had not begun to learn the lesson so mournful for saintly men of his complexion, that virtue would not be virtue could it be given by one fellow creature to another. He had recognized with reluctance that holiness was not hereditary, but he continued to hope that it might be compulsive. I was still a child of many prayers, and it was not to be conceded that these prayers could remain unanswered. The great panacea was now, as always, the study of the Bible, and this my father never ceased to urge upon me. He presented to me a copy of Dean Alfred's edition of the Greek New Testament in four great volumes, and these he had had so magnificently bound in full Morocco that the work shown on my poor shelf of six penny poets, like a duchess among dairymaids, he extracted from me a written promise that I would translate and meditate upon a portion of the Greek text every morning before I started for business. This promise I presently fail to keep, my good intentions being undermined by an invisible ennui. I concealed the dereliction from him in the sense that I was deceiving my father, ate into my conscience, like a canker. But the dilemma was now before me that I must either deceive my father in such things or paralyze my own character. My growing distaste for the holy scriptures began to occupy my thoughts and to surprise as much as it scandalized me. My desire was to continue to delight in those sacred pages, of which I still had an instinctive veneration. Yet I could not but observe the difference between the zeal with which I snatched at a volume of Carlisle or Ruskin, since these magicians were now first revealing themselves to me, and the increasing langer with which I took up Alfred for my daily passage. Of course, although I did not know it and believed my reluctance to be sinful, the real reason why I now found the Bible so difficult to read was my familiarity with its contents. He's had the colorless triteness of a story retold a hundred times. I longed for something new, something that would gratify curiosity and excite surprise. Whether the facts and doctrines contained in the Bible were true or false was not the question that appealed to me. It was rather that they had been presented to me so often. It had sunken into me so far that, as someone has said, they lay bedridden in the dormitory of the soul, and made no impression of any kind upon me. It often amazed me, and I'm still unable to understand the fact that my father, through his long life or until nearly the close of it, continued to take an eager pleasure in the text of the Bible. As I think I have already said, before he reached middle life, he had committed practically the whole of it to memory, and if started anywhere, even in a minor profit, he could go on without a break as long as ever he was inclined for that exercise. He therefore, at no time, could have been assailed by the satiety of which I have spoken, and that it came so soon to me I must take simply as an indication of difference of temperament. It was not possible, even through the dark glass of correspondence, to deceive his eagle eye in this matter, and his suspicions accordingly took another turn. He conceived me to have become, or to be becoming, a victim of the infidelity of the age. In this new difficulty, he appealed to forms of modern literature by the side of which the least-attracted pages of Leviticus or Deuteronomy struck me as even thrilling. In particular, he urged upon me a work, then just published, called The Continuity of Scripture by William Page Wood, afterwards Lord Chancellor Hatherly. I do not know why he supposed that the luck abrasions of an exemplary lawyer, delivered in the style that was like the trickling of sawdust, would succeed in rousing emotions which the glorious rhetoric of the Orient had failed to awaken. But Page Wood had been a Sunday school teacher for thirty years, and my father was always unduly impressed by the acumen of pious barristers. As time went on, and I grew older and more independent in mind, my father's anxiety about what he called the pitfalls and snares which surround on every hand the thoughtless, giddy youth of London became extremely painful to himself. By harping in private upon these pitfalls, which brought to my imagination a funny, rough woodcut in an old edition of Bunyan, where a devil was seen capering over a sort of box, let neatly into the ground, he worked himself up into a frame of mind which was not a little irritating to his hapless correspondent, who was now snared indeed, lined by the pin like a bird by the feet, and could not by any means escape. To a peck or a flutter from the bird, the implacable fowler would reply, You charge me with being suspicious, and I fear I cannot deny the charge, but I can appeal to your own sensitive and thoughtful mind for a considerable allowance, my deep and tender love for you, your youth and inexperience, the examples of other young men, your distance from parental counsel, our absolute and painful ignorance of all the details of your daily life, except what you yourself tell us, try to throw yourself into the standing of a parrot, and say if my suspiciousness is unreasonable, I rejoicingly acknowledge that from all I see, you are pursuing a virtuous, steady, worthy course, one good thing my suspiciousness does, ever and anon, it brings out from you assurances, which greatly refresh and comfort me, that again, it carries me ever to God's throne of grace on your behalf, Holy Job suspected that his sons might have sinned, and cursed God in their heart, was not his suspicion much like mine, rounded on the same reasons, and productive of the same results, for it drove him to God in intercession. I have induced the example of this patriarch before, and he will endure being looked at again. In fact, Holy Job continued to be frequently looked at, and for this patriarch I came to experience a hatred which was as venomous as it was undeserved. But what youth of 18 would willingly be compared with the sons of Job? And indeed, from my part, I felt much more like that justly exasperated character, Elohu the Muzite, of the Kindred of Ram. As time went on, the peculiar strain of inquisition was relaxed, and I endured fewer and fewer of the torments of religious correspondence. Nothing abides in one tense projection, and my father, resolute as he was, had other preoccupations. His orchids, his microscope, his physiological researches, his interpretations of prophecy, filled up the hours of his active and strenuous life. And out of his sight, I became not indeed out of his mind, but no longer ceaselessly in the painful foreground of it. Yet, although the reiteration of his anxiety might weary him a little, as it had wearyed me well night of rones of despair, there was not the slightest change in his real attitude towards the subject or towards me. I've already had occasion to say that he had nothing of the mystic or the visionary about him, at certain times, and on certain points, he greatly desired that signs and wonders, such as had astonished and encouraged the infancy of the Christian Church, might again be about safe to it, but he did not pretend to see such miracles himself, nor give the slightest credence to others who asserted that they did. He often congratulated himself on the fact that, although his mind dwelt so constantly on spiritual matters, it was never betrayed into any suspension of the rational functions. Cross examination by letters slackened, but on occasion of my brief and usually summer visits to Devonshire, I suffered acutely from my father's dialectical appetites. He was surrounded by peasants, on whom the teeth of his arguments could find no purchase. To him, in that intellectual abderra, even an unwilling youth from London offered opportunities of pleasant contest, he would declare himself ready, nay eager, for argument. With his mental sleeves turned up, he would adopt a fighting attitude and challenge me to a round on any portion of the scheme of grace. His alacrity was dreadful to me, his well-aimed blows fell on what was rather a bladder or a pillow than a vivid antagonist. He was indeed most unfairly handicapped. I was naked, he in a suit of chain armor, for he had adopted a method which I thought it must still think exceedingly unfair. He assumed that he had private knowledge of the divine will, and he would meet my temporizing arguments by severations, so sure as my God liveth, or by appeals to a higher authority. But what does my Lord tell me in Paul's letter to the Philippians? It was the prerogative of his faith to know, and of his character to overpower objection. Between these two millstones, I was rapidly ground to powder. These discussions, as they were rather ironically called, invariably ended for me in disaster. I was driven out of my papier-mache fastnesses, my canvas walls rocked at the first peel from my father's clarion, and the foe pursued me across the plains of Jericho, until I lay down ignominiously and covered my face. I seemed to be pushed with horns of iron, such as those which Zedekiah, the son of Chinanna, prepared for the encouragement of Ahab. When I acknowledged defeat and cried for quarter, my father would become radiant, and I still seemed to hear the sound of his full voice, so thrilling, so warm, so painful to my overstrained nerves, bursting forth at a sort of benediction at the end of each of these one-sided contensions, with, I bow my knees unto the father of our Lord Jesus Christ, that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his spirit and the inner man, that Christ might dwell in your heart by faith, that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge that you might be filled with the fullness of God. Thus solemn and thus ceremonious was my father apt to become, without a moment's warning, on plain and domestic occasions, abruptly brimming over with emotion like a basin which an unseen flow of water has filled and overfilled. I earnestly desire that no trace of that absurd self-pity, which is apt to take recollections of this nature, should give falsity to mine. My father, let me say once more, had other interests than those of his religion. In particular, at this time, he took to painting in watercolors in the open air, and he resumed the assiduous study of botany. He was no fanatical model maniac. Nevertheless, there was, in everything he did and said, the central purpose present. He acknowledged it plainly. With me, he confessed, every question assumes a divine standpoint, and is not adequately answered if the judgment seat of Christ is not kept in sight. This was maintained whether the subject under discussion was poetry, society, or the Prussian war with Austria, or the stamen of a wildflower. Once, at least, he was conscious himself of the fatiguing effect on my temper of this insistency for raising his great brown eyes with a flash of laughter in them. He closed the Bible suddenly, after a very lengthy disquisition, and quoted his Virgil to startling effect. The insistency of his religious conversation was probably the less incomprehensible to me on account of the evangelical training to which I had been so systematically subjected. It was, however, nonetheless intolerably irksome, and would have been exasperating, I believe, even to a nature in which a powerful and genuine piety was inherent. To my own, in which a feeble and imitative faith was expiring, it was deeply vexatious. It led, alas, to a great deal of bowing in the house of reman, to much hypocritical ingenuity in drawing my father's attention away, if possible, as the terrible subject was seen to be looming and approaching. In this my stepmother would aid in a bet, sometimes producing incongruous themes likely to attract my father aside with a skill worthy of a parlor conjurer and much to my admiration. If, however, she was not unwilling to come, in this way, to the support of my feebleness, there was no open collusion between us. She always described my father, when she was alone with me, admiringly, as one whose trumpet gave no uncertain sound. There was not a tinge of infidelity upon her candid mind. But she was human, and I think that now and then she was extremely bored. My father was entirely devoid of the prudence which turns away its eyes and passes as rapidly as possible in the opposite direction, the peculiar kind of drama in which every sort of social discomfort is welcomed, rather than that the character should be happy when guilty of acting a lie, was not invented in those days, and there can hardly be imagined a figure more remote from my father than Ibsen. Yet when I came, at a far later date, to read the Wild Duck, memories of the embarrassing household of my infancy helped me to realize Gregor's verlin with his determination to pull the veil of illusion away from every compromise that makes life marable. I was docile, I was plausible, I was anything but combative. If my father could have persuaded himself to let me alone, if he could merely have been willing to leave my subterfuges and my explanations unanalyzed, all would have been well. But he refused to see any difference in temperament between a lad of 20 and a sage of 60. He had no vital sympathy for youth, which in itself had no charm for him. He had no compassion for the weaknesses of immaturity, and his one and only anxiety was to be at the end of his spiritual journey safe with me in the house where there are many mansions. The incidents of human life upon the road to glory were less than nothing to him. My father was very fond of defining what was his own attitude at this time, and he was never tired of urging the same ambition upon me. He regarded himself as the faithful steward of a master who might return at any moment, and who would require to find everything ready for his convenience. That master was God, with whom my father seriously believed himself to be in relations much more confidential than those about safe to ordinary pious persons. He weighed in, with anxious hope, the coming of the Lord, an event which he still frequently believed to be imminent. He would calculate, by reference to prophecies in the Old and New Testament, the exact date of this event. The date would pass without the expected advent, and he would be more than disappointed. He would be incensed. Then he would understand that he must have made some slight error in calculation, and the pleasures of anticipation would recommence. Me in all this, he used as a kind of inferior co-agitor, much as a responsible and upper servant might use a foot boy. I also must be watching. It was not important that I should be seriously engaged in any affairs of my own. I must be ready for the master's coming, and my father's incessant cross-examination was made in the spirit of a responsible servant who fidgets, lest some humble but essential piece of household work has been neglected. My holidays, however, and all my personal relations with my father, were poisoned by this insistency. I was never at my ease in his company. I never knew when I might not be subjected to a series of searching questions which I should not be allowed to evade. Meanwhile, on every other stage of experience, I was gaining the reliance upon self and the respect for the opinion of others which come naturally to a young man of sober habits who earns his own living and lives his own life. For this kind of independence, my father had no respect or consideration when questions of religion were introduced, although he handsomely conceded it on other points. And now first there occurred to me the reflection which in years to come, I was to repeat over and over with an ever-sadder emphasis. What a charming companion, what a delightful parent, what a courteous and engaging friend my father would have been, and would preeminently have been to me if it had not been for this stringent piety which ruined it all. Let me speak plainly. After my long experience, after my patience and forbearance, I have surely the right to protest against the untruth, would that I could apply to it any other word, that evangelical religion, or any religion in a violent form, is a wholesome or valuable or desirable adjunct to human life. It divides heart from heart. It sets up a vain, kind miracle ideal in the barren pursuit of which all the tender, indulgent affections, all the genial play of life, all the explicit pleasures and soft resignations of the body, all that enlarges and calms the soul, are exchanged for what is harsh and void and negative. It encourages a stern and ignorant spirit of condemnation. It throws altogether out of gear the healthy movement of the conscience. It invents virtues which are sterile and cruel. It invents sins which are no sins at all, but which darken the heaven of innocent joy with futile clouds of remorse. There is something horrible, if we will bring ourselves to face it, in the fanaticism that can do nothing with this pathetic and fugitive existence of ours, but treat it as if it were the uncomfortable anti-chamber to a palace which no one has explored and of the plan of which we know absolutely nothing. My father, in his true, believed that he was intimately equated with the form and furniture of this habitation, and he wished me to think of nothing else but of the advantages of an eternal residence in it. Then came a moment when my self-sufficiency revolted against the police inspection to which my views were incessantly subjected. There was a morning, in the hot house at home, among the gorgeous wax and orchids which reminded my father of the tropics in his youth, when my forbearance or my timidity gave way. The innervated air, soaked with the intoxicating perfumes of all those voluptuous flowers, may have been partly responsible for my outburst. My father, and what's more, put me to the customary interrogatory. Was I walking closely with God? Was my sense of the efficacy of the atonement clear and sound? Had the holy scriptures still their full authority with me? My replies on this occasion were violent and hysterical. I had no clear recollection what it was that I said. I desire not to recall the whimpering sentences in which I begged to be let alone, in which I demanded the right to think for myself, in which I repudiated the idea that my father was responsible to God for my secret thoughts and my most intimate convictions. He made no answer. I broke from the odorous furnace of the conservatory and buried my face in the coal grass upon the lawn. My visit to Devonshire, already near its close, was hurried to an end. I had scarcely arrived in London before the following letter, furiously dispatched in the track of the fugitive, buried itself like an arrow in my heart. When your sainted mother died, she not only tenderly committed you to God, but left you also as a solemn charge to me to bring you up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, that responsibility I have sought constantly to keep before me. I can truly aver that it has been ever before me in my choice of a housekeeper, in my choice of a school, in my ordering of your holidays, in my choice of a second wife, in my choice of an occupation for you, in my choice of a residence for you, and in multitudes of lesser things I have sought to act for you, not in the light of this present world, but with a view to eternity. Before your childhood was passed, there seemed God's manifest blessing on our care, for you seemed truly converted to him. You confessed in solemn baptism that you had died and had been raised with Christ, and you were received with joy to the bosom of the church of God as one alive from the dead. All this filled my heart with thankfulness and joy whenever I thought of you. How could it do otherwise? And when I left you in London on that dreary winter evening, my heart full of sorrowing love found its refuge and its resource in this thought, that you were one of the lambs of Christ's flock sealed with the Holy Spirit as his, renewed in heart to holiness in the image of God. For a while, all appeared to go on fairly well, we yearned indeed to discover more of heart and your allusions to religious matters, but your expression towards us were filial and affectionate. Your conduct, so far as we could see, was moral and becoming. You mingled with the people of God, smoke of occasional delight and profit in his ordinances, and employed your talents and service to him. But of late, especially during the past year, there has become manifest a rapid progress towards evil. I must beg you here to pause and again to look to God for grace to weigh what I am about to say, or else wrath will arise. When you came to us in the summer, the heavy blow fell full upon me, and I discovered how very far you had departed from God. It was not that you had yielded to the strong tide of youthful blood that had fallen a victim to fleshly lusts. In that case, however sad, your enlightened conscious would have spoken loudly, and you would have found your way back to the blood which cleanseth us all from sin, to humble confession and self-abasement, to forgiveness, and to re-communion with God. It was not this. It was worse. It was that horrid, insidious infidelity which had already worked in your mind and heart with terrible energy. Far worse, I say, because this was sapping the very foundations of faith on which all true godliness, all real religion, must rest. Nothing seemed left to which I could appeal. We had, I found, no common ground. The Holy Scriptures had no longer any authority. You had taught yourself to evade their inspiration. Any particular oracle of God which pressed you, you could easily explain away. Even the very character of God, you waited your balance of fallen reason and fashioned it accordingly. You were thus sailing down the rapid tide of time towards eternity without a single authoritative guide, having cast your chart overboard, except what you might fashion and forge on your own anvil, except what you might guess, in fact. Do not think I am speaking in passion and using unwarrantable strength of words. If the written word is not absolutely authoritative, what do we know of God? What more than we can infer, that is, guess, as the thoughtful heathens guessed, Plato, Socrates, Cicero, from dim and mute surrounding phenomena. What do we know of eternity, of our relations to God, especially of the relations of a sinner to God? What of reconciliation? What of the capital question? How can a God of perfect spotless rectitude deal with me, a corrupt sinner, who have trampled on those of his laws which were even written on my conscience? This dreadful conduct of yours, I had intended after much prayer to pass by in entire silence. But your apparently sincere inquiries after the cause of my sorrow have led me to go to the root of the matter, and I could not stop short of the development contained in this letter. It is with pain, not in anger, that I send it, hoping that you may be induced to review the whole course of which this is only a stage before God. If this grace were granted to you, oh how joyfully should I bury all the past, and again have sweet and tender fellowship with my beloved son as of old. The reader who has done me the favor to follow this record of the clash of two temperaments will not fail to perceive the crowning importance of the letter from which I have just made a long quotation. It sums up, with the closest logic, the whole history of the situation, and I may leave it to form the epigraph of this little book. All that I need further say is to point out that when such defiance is offered to the intelligence of a thoughtful and honest young man with the normal impulses of his 21 years, there are but two alternatives. Either he must cease to think for himself, or his individualism must be instantly confirmed, and the necessity of religious independence must be emphasized. No compromise in his scene was offered, no proposal of a truce would have been acceptable. It was a case of everything or nothing, and thus desperately challenged the young man's conscience through off, once for all, a yoke of his dedication, and as respectful as he could, without parade or remonstrance. He took a human being's privilege to fashion his inner life for himself. End of epilogue. End of Father and Son by Edmund Goss.