He felt homesick, sick for the support of those faithful ones which he had been wont to see in imagination with him: their conscious communion with God was the only good life, the life which he must seek to attain and from which he feared above all things to fall short; and that being so, it would have been easier, far easier, to call his new belief folly, heresy, nay, blasphemy if that were needful, and to repent of it, if he could have done so.

He could not, do what he would; he saw his vision to be true.
The thing had grown with his growth; he believed that a voice from heaven had spoken it.

Is not this the history of all revelation?
When I say that Toyner could not doubt his new conception of God and of the human struggle, I mean that he could not in sincerest thought hold the contrary to be true.

I do not mean to say that daily and hourly, when about his common avocations, his new inspiration did not seem a mere will-o'-the-wisp of the mind.

It took months and years to bring it into any accustomed relation to every-day matters of thought and act; and it is this habitual adjustment of our inward belief to our outward environment that makes any creed _appear_ to be incontrovertible.
Oh the loneliness of it, to have a creed that no companion has! The sheer sorrow of being compelled by the law of his mind to believe concerning God what he did not know that any other man believed time and time again obscured Bart Toyner's vision of the divine.
The power of the miracle wrought at his conversion was gone; he had been taught that the miraculous power was only to be with him as long as he yielded implicit obedience, but that implied a clear-cut knowledge of right from wrong which Toyner did not now possess; many of the old rules clashed with that one large new rule which had come to him--that any way of life was wicked which made it appear that God was in some provinces of life and not in others.