THE RANDALL FAMILY 65
routine and respectability and city luxuries, and the minis- try as it was in the primitive church, a life of hardship, self-sacrifice, exile, weary pilgrimage, and perhaps fiery martyrdom at the end.
The effect of this contrast on the boy's vivid imagina- tion and sincere heart was profound. It might have dis- appeared in the light of a sober comparison of the differences between the ancient conditions and the con- ditions of modern times ; it might have been transformed into a purpose to take up the essential work of a modern religious ministry, as purification and elevation and self- consecration of human life through the known and felt influence of the Divine, provided the foundations of belief had remained unshaken. Such transformation has taken place in many a saintly soul, to whom the changed condi- tions of this modern period have seemed to need no less than earlier ages the same essential ministry of religion. But the decay of Christian faith through invalidation of the grounds of it, through explosion of the fundamental reasons for it, renders such a transformation of Christianity impossible ; and this is what happened to Randall in his college days. He ceased to dream of becoming a Chris- tian minister because he ceased to believe in the peculiar tenets of the Christian gospel ; and this momentous change in his convictions was certainly due, at least in part, to the frankly acknowledged influence of Madam Craigie.
This lady's cool and reasoned scepticism, careful of its own conclusions, but careless equally of persuasion and dissuasion, aroused no reaction of personal pride, no resist- ance of a will quick to repel control, in the melancholy and sensitive young man ; on the contrary, it did but reinforce the natural influence of his scientific studies, and help to
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