artly learned it,
were to say 'I don't see anything beautiful in this: I am afraid I
never shall!'--would that be to believe in me?"

"No, surely, sir! for you know best what I am able for."

"Suppose you said, 'I daresay it is all as good as you say, but I don't
care to take so much trouble about it,'--what would that be?"

"Not to believe in you, sir. You would not want me to learn a thing
that was not worth my trouble, or a thing I should not be glad of
knowing when I did know it."

"Suppose you said, 'Sir, I don't doubt what you say, but I am so tired,
I don't mean to do anything more you tell me,'--would you then be
believing in me?"

"No. That might be to believe your word, but it would not be to trust
you. It would be to think my thinks better than your thinks, and that
would be no faith at all."

Davie had at times an oddly childish way of putting things.

"Suppose you were to say nothing, but go away and do nothing of what I
told you--what would that be?"

"Worse and worse; it would be sneaking."

"One question more: what is faith--the big faith I mean--not the little
faith between equals--the big faith we put in one above us?"

"It is to go at once and do the thing he tells us to do."

"If we don't, then we haven't faith in him?"

"No; certainly not."

"But might not that be his fault?"

"Yes--if he was not good--and so I could not trust him. If he said I
was to do one kind of thing, and he did another kind of thing himself,
then of course I could not have faith in him."

"And yet you might feel you must do what he told you!"

"Yes."

"Would that be faith in him?"

"No."

"Would you always do what he told you?"

"Not if he told me to do what it would be wrong to do."

"Now tell me, Davie, what is the biggest faith of all--the faith to put
in the one only altogether good person."

"You mean God, Mr. Grant?"

"Whom else could I mean?"

"You might mean Jesus."

"They are one; they mean always the same thing, do always the same
thing, always agree. There is only one thing they don't do the same
in--they do not love the same person."

"What do you mean, Mr. Grant?" interrupted Arctura.

She had been listening intently: was the cloven foot of Mr. Grant's
heresy now at last about to appear plainly?

"I mean this," answered Donal, with a smile that seemed to Arctura such
a light as she had never seen on human face, "--that God loves Jesus,
not God; and Jesus loves God, not Jesus.