feast, who would anoint His feet; and the full tears stood in
her eyes, and she fancied she was that sinful child, and that He did not
repel her.

O what a new world of thought she had entered! it occupied her mind from
its very novelty. Everything looked dull and dim by the side of it; her
brother had ever been dinning into her ears that maxim of the heathen,
"Enjoy the present, trust nothing to the future." She indeed could not
enjoy the present with that relish which he wished, and she had not any
trust in the future either; but this volume spoke a different doctrine.
There she learned the very opposite to what Aristo taught--viz., that the
present must be sacrificed for the future; that what is seen must give way
to what is believed. Nay, more, she drank in the teaching which at first
seemed so paradoxical, that even present happiness and present greatness
lie in relinquishing what at first sight seems to promise them; that the
way to true pleasure is, not through self-indulgence, but through
mortification; that the way to power is weakness, the way to success
failure, the way to wisdom foolishness, the way to glory dishonour. She
saw that there was a higher beauty than that which the order and harmony
of the natural world revealed, and a deeper peace and calm than that which
the exercise, whether of the intellect or of the purest human affection,
can supply. She now began to understand that strange, unearthly composure,
which had struck her in Chione, Agellius, and Caecilius; she understood
that they were detached from the world, not because they had not the
possession, nor the natural love of its gifts, but because they possessed
a higher blessing already, which they loved above everything else. Thus,
by degrees, Callista came to walk by a new philosophy; and had ideas, and
principles, and a sense of relations and aims, and a susceptibility of
arguments, to which before she was an utter stranger. Life and death,
action and suffering, fortunes and abilities, all had now a new meaning
and application. As the skies speak differently to the philosopher and the
peasant, as a book of poems to the imaginative and to the cold and narrow
intellect, so now she saw her being, her history, her present condition,
her future, in a new light, which no one else could share with her. But
the ruling sovereign thought of the whole was He, who exemplified all this
wonderful philosophy in Himself.