nd therefore we may comfort ourselves with
the certainty that, whether or not they knew God, God knew them.

And so ends my fairy tale.

But is it not a wonderful tale? More wonderful, if you will think over
it, than any story invented by man. But so it always is. "Truth," wise
men tell us, "is stranger than fiction." Even a child like you will see
that it must be so, if you will but recollect who makes fiction, and who
makes facts.

Man makes fiction: he invents stories, pretty enough, fantastical enough.
But out of what does he make them up? Out of a few things in this great
world which he has seen, and heard, and felt, just as he makes up his
dreams. But who makes truth? Who makes facts? Who, but God?

Then truth is as much larger than fiction, as God is greater than man; as
much larger as the whole universe is larger than the little corner of it
that any man, even the greatest poet or philosopher, can see; and as much
grander, and as much more beautiful, and as much more strange. For one
is the whole, and the other is one, a few tiny scraps of the whole. The
one is the work of God; the other is the work of man. Be sure that no
man can ever fancy anything strange, unexpected, and curious, without
finding if he had eyes to see, a hundred things around his feet more
strange, more unexpected, more curious, actually ready-made already by
God. You are fond of fairy tales, because they are fanciful, and like
your dreams. My dear child, as your eyes open to the true fairy tale
which Madam How can tell you all day long, nursery stories will seem to
you poor and dull. All those feelings in you which your nursery tales
call out,--imagination, wonder, awe, pity, and I trust too, hope and
love--will be called out, I believe, by the Tale of all Tales, the true
"Marchen allen Marchen," so much more fully and strongly and purely, that
you will feel that novels and story-books are scarcely worth your
reading, as long as you can read the great green book, of which every bud
is a letter, and every tree a page.

Wonder if you will. You cannot wonder too much. That you might wonder
all your life long, God put you into this wondrous world, and gave you
that faculty of wonder which he has not given to the brutes; which is at
once the mother of sound science, and a pledge of immortality in a world
more wondrous even than this. But wonder at the right thing, not at the
wrong; at the real miracles and prodigies, not at t