There he would heal his wounds, and spend the rest of his days in peace.

"He caught a slip or two" in descending, but soon began to find the valley of humiliation that wholesome place which all true pilgrims have ever declared it.
Comparative retirement, some sense of lost labor, some suspicion of the worth of the ends for which he had spent his strength, a waking desire after the God in whom he had vaguely believed all the time he was letting the dust of paltry accident inflame his eyes, blistering and deadening his touch with the efflorescent crusts and agaric tumors upon the dry bones of theology, gilding the vane of his chapel instead of cleansing its porch and its floor--these all favored the birth in his mind of the question, whether he had ever entered in at the straight gate himself, or had not merely been standing by its side calling to others to enter in.

Was it even as well as this with him?
Had he not been more intent on gathering a wretched flock within the rough, wool-stealing, wind-sifting, beggarly hurdles of his church, than on housing true men and women safe in the fold of the true Shepherd?
Feeding troughs for the sheep there might be many in the fields, and they might or might not be presided over by servants of the true Shepherd, but the fold they were not! He grew humble before the Master, and the Master began to lord it lovingly over him.

He sought His presence, and found Him; began to think less of books and rabbis, yea even, for the time, of Paul and Apollos and Cephas, and to pore and ponder over the living tale of the New Covenant; began to feel that the Lord meant what He said, and that His apostles also meant what He said; forgot Calvin a good deal, outgrew the influences of Jonathan Edwards, and began to understand Jesus Christ.
Few sights can be lovelier than that of a man who, having rushed up the staircase of fame in his youth--what matter whether the fame of a paltry world, or a paltry sect of that world!--comes slowly, gently, graciously down in his old age, content to lose that which he never had, and careful only to be honest at last.

It had not been so with Walter Drake.
He had to come down first to begin to get the good of it, but once down, it was not long ere he began to go up a very different stair indeed.