The delight of creation is verily
in secrets, but in secrets as truths on the way. All secrets are
embryo revelations. On the far horizon heaven and earth met as old
friends, who, though never parted, were ever renewing their
friendship. The world, like the angels, was rejoicing--if not over
a sinner that had repented, yet over a man that had passed from a
lower to a higher condition of life--out of its earth into its air:
he was going to live above, and look down on the inferior world!
Ere the shades of evening fell that day around Donal Grant, he was
in the new childhood of a new world.
I do not mean such thoughts had never been present to him before;
but to think a thing is only to look at it in a glass; to know it as
God would have us know it, and as we must know it to live, is to see
it as we see love in a friend's eyes--to have it as the love the
friend sees in ours. To make things real to us, is the end and the
battle-cause of life. We often think we believe what we are only
presenting to our imaginations. The least thing can overthrow that
kind of faith. The imagination is an endless help towards faith,
but it is no more faith than a dream of food will make us strong for
the next day's work. To know God as the beginning and end, the root
and cause, the giver, the enabler, the love and joy and perfect
good, the present one existence in all things and degrees and
conditions, is life; and faith, in its simplest, truest, mightiest
form is--to do his will.
Pages:
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31