we have
formed a character from which escape seems hopeless. And we realize
that in order to change ourselves, an actual regeneration of the will is
necessary. For awhile, perchance, we despair of this. The effort to get
out of the rut we have made for ourselves seems of no avail. And it
is not, indeed, until we arrive, gradually or otherwise, and through a
proper interpretation of the life of Christ, at the conviction that we
may even never become useful in the divine scheme that we have a sense
of what is called 'the forgiveness of sins.' This conviction, this
grace, this faith to embark on the experiment accomplishes of itself
the revival of the will, the rebirth which we had thought impossible. We
discover our task, high or humble,--our cause. We grow marvellously at
one with God's purpose, and we feel that our will is acting in the same
direction as his. And through our own atonement we see the meaning of
that other Atonement which led Christ to the Cross. We see that our
conviction, our grace, has come through him, and how he died for our
sins."

"It's quite wonderful how logical and simple you make it, how thoroughly
you have gone into it. You have solved it for yourself--and you will
solve it for others many others."

She rose, and he, too, got to his feet with a medley of feelings. The
path along which they walked was already littered with green acorns.
A gray squirrel darted ahead of them, gained a walnut and paused,
quivering, halfway up the trunk, to gaze back at them. And the glance
she presently gave him seemed to partake of the shyness of the wild
thing.

"Thank you for explaining it to me," she said.

"I hope you don't think--" he began.

"Oh, it isn't that!" she cried, with unmistakable reproach. "I
asked you--I made you tell me. It hasn't seemed at all like--the
confessional," she added, and smiled and blushed at the word. "You have
put it so nicely, so naturally, and you have given me so much to think
about. But it all depends--doesn't it?--upon whether one can feel the
underlying truth of which you spoke in the first place; it rests upon
a sense of the prevailing goodness of things. It seems to me cruel that
what is called salvation, the solution of the problem of life, should
depend upon an accidental discovery. We are all turned loose with our
animal passions and instincts, of self-preservation, by an indifferent
Creator, in a wilderness, and left to find our way out as best we can.
You answ