rake have made his
Amanda so?

When Wingfold read the letter of which I have thus given the
substance--it was not until a long time after, in Polwarth's room--he
folded it softly together and said:

"When he wrote that letter, Paul Faber was already becoming not merely a
man to love, but a man to revere." After a pause he added, "But what a
world it would be, filled with contented men, all capable of doing the
things for which they would despise themselves."

It was some time before the minister was able to answer the letter
except by sending Amanda at once to the doctor with a message of kind
regards and thanks. But his inability to reply was quite as much from
the letter's giving him so much to think of first, as from his weakness
and fever. For he saw that to preach, as it was commonly understood, the
doctrine of the forgiveness of sins to such a man, would be useless: he
would rather believe in a God who would punish them, than in One who
would pass them by. To be told he was forgiven, would but rouse in him
contemptuous indignation. "What is that to me?" he would return. "I
remain what I am." Then grew up in the mind of the minister the
following plant of thought: "Things divine can only be shadowed in the
human; what is in man must be understood of God with the divine
difference--not only of degree, but of kind, involved in the fact that
He makes me, I can make nothing, and if I could, should yet be no less a
creature of Him the Creator; therefore, as the heavens are higher than
the earth, so His thoughts are higher than our thoughts, and what we
call His forgiveness may be, must be something altogether transcending
the conception of man--overwhelming to such need as even that of Paul
Faber, whose soul has begun to hunger after righteousness, and whose
hunger must be a hunger that will not easily be satisfied." For a poor
nature will for a time be satisfied with a middling God; but as the
nature grows richer, the ideal of the God desired grows greater. The
true man can be satisfied only with a God of magnificence, never with a
God such as in his childhood and youth had been presented to Faber as
the God of the Bible. That God only whom Christ reveals to the humble
seeker, can ever satisfy human soul.

Then it came into the minister's mind, thinking over Faber's religion
toward his fellows, and his lack toward God, how when the young man
asked Jesus what commandments he must keep up that he might inherit
etern