misguided man, who as a spiritual leader of this church had shown himself so utterly lacking in spiritual discernment. This was quite in keeping with John Hampstead's mood.
"Our very first emotion," the minister began, "must be one of sympathy for this well-meaning brother of ours who has been the unfortunate victim of a series of mistakes in which his has been by no means the greatest. While he sits before us overcome with humiliation and remorse, Elder Burbeck will pardon me if I speak for a moment as if he were not here. I wish to urge upon you all that no one—least of all myself—should reproach him for the thing which he has done. I have never doubted that he was acting in all good conscience. The succession of events, once it had begun to march, has been so remarkable that now, looking back, we must each and all of us feel how puny are men and women to resist the winds of circumstance which blow upon them.
"To me, granting the beginning of this strange series of events for which I am at least in part to blame, it seems now that all the rest has been inevitable. I think we should reproach no one. Certainly I shall not. Instead, I am thinking that it is a time for great rejoicing. That mother who has so many times shown us the better way, has shown it to-night. Looking up to her son whose act of moral courage, witnessing to the new character that he has been building, has made possible the happy climax of this tragic hour—looking up to him she has said: 'I never had so much to live for as now.' That should be the feeling of each one of us.
"The events of to-night must have been graven deeply into all our hearts. None of us can ever be quite the same. Each must start afresh, with our lives enriched by the lesson and by the experiences of this hour.
"It has brought to me the keenest suffering, the bit-
