"Do you know," he added
presently, his eyes straying about the room, "I feel almost as if I
were trying to understand a human creature. A house is so like a
human mind, which gradually disentangles and explains itself as you
go on to know it! It is no accidental resemblance, for, as an
unavoidable necessity, every house must be like those that built
it."
"But in a very old house," said Arctura, "so many hands of so many
generations have been employed in the building, and so many fancied
as well as real necessities have been at work, that it must be a
conflict of many natures."
"But where the house continues in the same family, the builders have
more or less transmitted their nature, as well as their house, to
those who come after them."
"Do you think then," said Arctura, almost with a shudder, "that I
inherit a nature like the house left me--that the house is an
outside to me--fits my very self as the shell fits the snail?"
"The relation of outer and inner is there, but there is given with
it an infinite power to modify. Everyone is born nearer to God than
to any ancestor, and it rests with him to cultivate either the
godness or the selfness in him, his original or his mere ancestral
nature. The fight between the natural and the spiritual man is the
history of the world. The man who sets his faults inherited, makes
atonement for the sins of those who went before him; he is baptized
for the dead, not with water but with fire.
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