her father. "Let me understand clearly your
drift."

"I have heard Mr. Wingfold say," returned Dorothy, "that however men may
have been driven to form their ideas of God before Christ came, no man
can, with thorough honesty, take the name of a Christian, whose ideas of
the Father of men are gathered from any other field than the life,
thought, words, deeds, of the only Son of that Father. He says it is not
from the Bible as a book that we are to draw our ideas of God, but from
the living Man into whose presence that book brings us, Who is alive
now, and gives His spirit that they who read about Him may understand
what kind of being He is, and why He did as He did, and know Him, in
some possible measure, as He knows Himself.--I can only repeat the
lesson like a child."

"I suspect," returned the minister, "that I have been greatly astray.
But after this, we will seek our Father together, in our Brother, Jesus
Christ."

It was the initiation of a daily lesson together in the New Testament,
which, while it drew their hearts closer to each other, drew them, with
growing delight, nearer and nearer to the ideal of humanity, Jesus
Christ, in whom shines the glory of its Father.

A man may look another in the face for a hundred years and not know him.
Men _have_ looked Jesus Christ in the face, and not known either Him or
his Father. It was needful that He should appear, to begin the knowing
of Him, but speedily was His visible presence taken away, that it might
not become, as assuredly it would have become, a veil to hide from men
the Father of their spirits. Do you long for the assurance of some
sensible sign? Do you ask why no intellectual proof is to be had? I tell
you that such would but delay, perhaps altogether impair for you, that
better, that best, that only vision, into which at last your world must
blossom--such a contact, namely, with the heart of God Himself, such a
perception of His being, and His absolute oneness with you, the child of
His thought, the individuality softly parted from His spirit, yet living
still and only by His presence and love, as, by its own radiance, will
sweep doubt away forever. Being then in the light and knowing it, the
lack of intellectual proof concerning that which is too high for it,
will trouble you no more than would your inability to silence a
metaphysician who declared that you had no real existence. It is for the
sake of such vision as God would give that you are denied such