Her father had believed as they did;
she clung to his memory; perhaps she believed as he did; she could not
tell. There was time yet wherein to make up her mind. She had certainly
believed so once, she said to herself, and she might so believe again.
She would have been at first highly offended, but the next moment a
little pleased at being told that in reality she had never believed one
whit more than Faber, that she was at present indeed incapable of
believing. Probably she would have replied, "Then wherein am I to
blame?" But although a woman who sits with her child in her arms in the
midst of her burning house, half asleep, and half stifled and dazed with
the fierce smoke, may not be to blame, certainly the moment she is able
to excuse herself she is bound to make for the door. So long as men do
not feel that they are in a bad condition and in danger of worse, the
message of deliverance will sound to them as a threat. Yea, the offer of
absolute well-being upon the only possible conditions of the well-being
itself, must, if heard at all, rouse in them a discomfort whose cause
they attribute to the message, not to themselves; and immediately they
will endeavor to justify themselves in disregarding it. There are those
doing all they can to strengthen themselves in unbelief, who, if the
Lord were to appear plainly before their eyes, would tell Him they could
not help it, for He had not until then given them ground enough for
faith, and when He left them, would go on just as before, except that
they would speculate and pride themselves on the vision. If men say, "We
want no such deliverance," then the Maker of them must either destroy
them as vile things for whose existence He is to Himself accountable, or
compel them to change. If they say, "We choose to be destroyed," He, as
their Maker, has a choice in the matter too. Is He not free to say, "You
can not even slay yourselves, and I choose that you shall know the
death of living without Me; you shall learn to choose to live indeed. I
choose that you shall know what _I know_ to be good"? And however much
any individual consciousness may rebel, surely the individual
consciousness which called that other into being, and is the Father of
that being, fit to be such because of Himself He is such, has a right to
object that by rebellion His creature should destroy the very power by
which it rebels, and from a being capable of a divine freedom by
partaking of the divine nature, s