The gates ajar. By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

The Gates Ajar. 17
limit to the mercy of God. It is very unsafe
for the young to think that they can rely on a
death-bed repentance, but our God is a covenant-keeping God, and Royal's mother was a
pious woman. If you cannot say with certainty that he is numbered among the redeemed,
you are justified, perhaps, in hoping so."
I turned sharply on him, but words died on
my lips. How could I tell the man of that
short, dear letter that came to me in December, -that Roy's was no death-bed repentance,
but the quiet, natural growth of a life that had
always been the life of the pure in heart; of
his manly beliefs and unselfish motives; of
that dawning sense of friendship with Christ
of which he used to speak so modestly, dreading lest he should not be honest with himself?
" Perhaps I ought not to call myself a Christian," he wrote, I learned the words by
heart, "and I shall make no profession to
be such, till I am sure of it, but my life has
not seemed to me for a long time to be my
own.'Bought with a price' just expresses it.
I can point to no time at which I was conscious by any revolution of feeling of'experiencing a change of heart,' but it seems to
me that a man's heart might be changed for
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