! the father's cruelty, the irritable self-love, the
incapacity to recognise any form of life but his own, it was of
God,--not a high manifestation: the bat is lower than the bird, and yet
it is of God. Bart saw now the one great opportunity of life! He saw
that the whole of the universe goes to develop character, and the one
chief heavenly food set within reach of the growing character for its
nourishment is the opportunity to embrace malice with love, to gather it
in the arms of patience, convert its shame into glory by willing
endurance.

Had he, Bart Toyner, then really been given the power in that beginning
of life to put out his hand and take this fruit which would have given
him such great strength and stature, or had he only had strength just
for what he had done and nothing more?

The answer seemed to come to him from all that he had read of the growth
of things. He looked into the forests, into the life of the creatures
that now lived in them; he saw the fish in the rivers and the birds in
the air, everywhere now roots were feeling under the dark ground for
just the food that was needed, and the birds flew open-mouthed, and the
fishes darted here and there, and the squirrels hoarded their nuts.
Everywhere in the past the growth of ages had been bringing together
these creatures and their food by slowly developing in them new powers
to assimilate new foods. What then of those that pined and dwindled when
the organism was not quite strong enough and the old food was taken
away? Ah, well! they fell--fell as the sparrows fall, not one of them
without God. And what of man rising through ages from beast to
sainthood, rising from the mere dominion of physical law which works out
its own obedience into the moral region, where a perpetual choice is
ordained of God, and the consequences of each choice ordained? Was not
the lower choice often inevitable? Who could tell when or where except
God Himself? And the higher choice the only food by which character can
grow! So men must often fall. Fall to what end? To pass into that
boundless gulf of distant light into which everything is passing,
passing straight by the assimilation of its proper food, circuitously by
weakness and failure, but still coming, growing, reaching out into
infinite light, for all is of God, and God is Love.

All Toyner's thought and sense seemed to lose hold again of everything
but that first realisation of the surrounding glory and joy and
streng