e was no choice. So while
Juliet slept, she set about cleaning it, and hard work she found it.
Great also was the labor afterward, when, piece by piece, at night or in
the early morning, she carried thither every thing necessary to make
abode in it clean and warm and soft.

The labor of love is its own reward, but Dorothy received much more.
For, in the fresh impulse and freedom born of this service, she soon
found, not only that she thought better and more clearly on the points
that troubled her, but that, thus spending herself, she grew more able
to believe there must be One whose glory is perfect ministration. Also,
her anxious concentration of thought upon the usurping thoughts of
others, with its tendency to diseased action in the logical powers, was
thereby checked, much to her relief. She was not finding an atom of what
is called proof; but when the longing heart finds itself able to hope
that the perfect is the fact, that the truth is alive, that the lovely
is rooted in eternal purpose, it can go on without such proof as belongs
to a lower stratum of things, and can not be had in these. When we rise
into the mountain air, we require no other testimony than that of our
lungs that we are in a healthful atmosphere. We do not find it necessary
to submit it to a quantitative analysis; we are content that we breathe
with joy, that we grow in strength, become lighter-hearted and
better-tempered. Truth is a very different thing from fact; it is the
loving contact of the soul with spiritual fact, vital and potent. It
does its work in the soul independently of all faculty or qualification
there for setting it forth or defending it. Truth in the inward parts is
a power, not an opinion. It were as poor a matter as any held by those
who deny it, if it had not its vitality in itself, if it depended upon
any buttressing of other and lower material.

How should it be otherwise? If God be so near as the very idea of Him
necessitates, what other availing proof of His existence can there be,
than such _awareness_ as must come of the developing relation between
Him and us? The most satisfying of intellectual proofs, if such were to
be had, would be of no value. God would be no nearer to us for them all.
They would bring about no blossoming of the mighty fact. While He was in
our very souls, there would yet lie between Him and us a gulf of misery,
of no-knowledge.

Peace is for those who _do_ the truth, not those who opine it. The