so secretly, so seldom; if it is the true life that beats so
urgently into our souls, why are we often so careful and disquieted, why
do we fare such long spaces without the heavenly vision, why do we see,
or seem to see, so many of our fellows to whom such things come rarely
or not at all? I cannot answer that; yet I feel that the life is there;
and I can but fall back upon the gentle words of the old saint, who
wrote: "I know not how it is, but the more the realities of heaven are
clothed with obscurity, the more they delight and attract; and nothing
so much heightens longing as such tender refusal."

XVIII. THE LOVE OF GOD

How strange it is that what is often the latest reward of the toiler
after holiness, the extreme solace of the outwearied saint, should be
too often made the first irksome article of a childish creed! To tell
a child that it is a duty to love God better than father or mother,
sisters and brothers, better than play, or stories, or food, or toys,
what a monstrous thing is that! It is one of the things that make
religion into a dreary and darkling shadow, that haunts the path of the
innocent. The child's love is all for tangible, audible, and visible
things. Love for him means kind words and smiling looks, ready comfort
and lavished kisses; the child does not even love things for being
beautiful, but for being what they ARE--curious, characteristic,
interesting. He loves the odd frowsy smell of the shut-up attic, the
bright ugly ornaments of the chimney-piece, the dirt of the street. He
has no sense of critical taste. Besides, words mean so little to him, or
even bear quaint, fantastic associations, which no one can divine, and
which he himself is unable to express; he has no notion of an abstract,
essential, spiritual thing, apart from what is actual to his senses. And
then into this little concrete mind, so full of small definite images,
so faltering and frail, is thrust this vast, remote notion--that he is
bound to love something hidden and terrible, something that looks at
him from the blank sky when he is alone among the garden beds, something
which haunts empty rooms and the dark brake of the woodland. Moreover,
a child, with its preternatural sensitiveness to pain, its bewildered
terror of punishment, learns, side by side with this, that the God Whom
he is to love thus tenderly is the God Who lays about Him so fiercely
in the Old Testament, slaying the innocent with the guilty, mercile