lling forces of the will. Mr. Grey stood over him--the whole man
dilating, expanding, under a tyrannous stress of feeling.

'It is hard, it is bitter,' he said slowly, with a wonderful manly
tenderness. 'I know it, I have gone through it. So has many and many a
poor soul that you and I have known! But there need be no sting in the
wound unless we ourselves envenom it. I know--oh! I know very well--the
man of the world scoffs, but to him who has once been a Christian of the
old sort, the parting with the Christian mythology is the rending
asunder of bones and marrow. It means parting with half the confidence,
half the joy, of life! But take heart,' and the tone grew still more
solemn, still more penetrating. 'It is the education of God! Do not
imagine it will put you farther from Him! He is in criticism, in
science, in doubt, so long as the doubt is a pure and honest doubt, as
yours is. He is in all life, in all thought. The thought of man, as it
has shaped itself in institutions, in philosophies, in science, in
patient critical work, or in the life of charity, is the one continuous
revelation of God! Look for Him in it all; see how, little by little,
the Divine indwelling force, using as its tools--but _merely_ as its
tools!--man's physical appetites and conditions, has built up conscience
and the moral life; think how every faculty of the mind has been trained
in turn to take its part in the great work of faith upon the visible
world! Love and imagination built up religion,--shall reason destroy it!
No!--reason is God's like the rest! Trust it,--trust him. The leading
strings of the past are dropping from you; they are dropping from the
world, not wantonly, or by chance, but in the providence of God. Learn
the lesson of your own pain,--learn to seek God, not in any single event
of past history, _but in your own soul_,--in the constant verifications
of experience, in the life of Christian love. Spiritually you have gone
through the last wrench; I promise it you! You being what you are,
nothing can cut this ground from under your feet. Whatever may have been
the forms of human belief, _faith_, the faith which saves, has always
been rooted here! All things change,--creeds and philosophies and
outward systems,--but God remains!

'"Life, that in me has rest,
As I, undying Life, have power in Thee!"'

The lines dropped with low vibrating force from lips unaccustomed indeed
to such an outburst. The speaker stood a