consciousness that her
life, her own self, was rising from the dead, was being new-born also.
She had not far to look back to the time when all was dull and dead in
her being: when the earthquake came, and the storm, and the fire; and
after them the still small voice, breathing rebuke, and hope, and
strength. Her whole world was now radiant with expectation. It was
through her husband the change had come to her, but he was not the rock
on which she built. For his sake she could go to hell--yea, cease to
exist; but there was One whom she loved more than him--the one One whose
love was the self-willed cause of all love, who from that love had sent
forth her husband and herself to love one another; whose heart was the
nest of their birth, the cradle of their growth, the rest of their
being. Yea, more than her husband she loved Him, her elder Brother, by
whom the Father had done it all, the Man who lived and died and rose
again so many hundred years ago. In Him, the perfect One, she hoped for
a perfect love to her husband, a perfect nature in herself. She knew how
Faber would have mocked at such a love, the very existence of whose
object she could not prove, how mocked at the notion that His life even
now was influencing hers. She knew how he would say it was merely love
and marriage that had wrought the change; but while she recognized them
as forces altogether divine, she knew that not only was the Son of Man
behind them, but that it was her obedience to Him and her confidence in
Him that had wrought the red heart of the change in her. She knew that
she would rather break with her husband altogether, than to do one
action contrary to the known mind and will of that Man. Faber would call
her faith a mighty, perhaps a lovely illusion: her life was an active
waiting for the revelation of its object in splendor before the
universe. The world seemed to her a grand march of resurrections--out of
every sorrow springing the joy at its heart, without which it could not
have been a sorrow; out of the troubles, and evils, and sufferings, and
cruelties that clouded its history, ever arising the human race, the
sons of God, redeemed in Him who had been made subject to death that He
might conquer Death for them and for his Father--a succession of mighty
facts, whose meanings only God can evolve, only the obedient heart
behold.

On such a morning, so full of resurrection, Helen was only a little
troubled not to be one of her husband's