Lady Arctura wanted no persuasion to go
with him in some of his visits; and the intercourse she thus gained
with humanity in its simpler forms, of which she had not had enough
for the health of her own nature, was of high service to her.
Perhaps nothing helps so much to believe in the Father, as the
active practical love of the brother. If he who loveth not his
brother whom he hath seen, can ill love God whom he hath not seen,
then he who loves his brother must surely find it the easier to love
God! Arctura found that to visit the widow and the fatherless in
their afflictions; to look on and know them as her kind; to enter
into their sorrows, and share the elevating influence of grief
genuine and simple, the same in every human soul, was to draw near
to God. She met him in his children. For to honour, love, and be
just to our neighbour, is religion; and he who does these things
will soon find that he cannot live without the higher part of
religion, the love of God. If that do not follow, the other will
sooner or later die away, leaving the man the worse for having had
it. She found her way to God easier through the crowd of her
fellows; while their troubles took her off her own, set them at a
little distance from her, and so put it in her power to understand
them better.
One day after the fishing boats had gone out, rose a terrible storm.
Some of them made for the harbour again--such as it was; others kept
out to sea; Stephen Kennedy's boat came ashore bottom upward.
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