t. When the wound in the earth
is closed, and the wave of life has again rushed over it, when things
have returned to their wonted, now desiccated show, then the very Sahara
of desolation opens around them, and for a time existence seems almost
insupportable. With Dorothy it was different. Alive in herself, she was
hungering and thirsting after life, therefore death could not have
dominion over her.

To her surprise she found also--she could not tell how the illumination
had come--she wondered even how it should ever have been absent--that,
since her father's death, many of her difficulties had vanished. Some of
them, remembering there had been such, she could hardly recall
sufficiently to recognize them. She had been lifted into a region above
that wherein moved the questions which had then disturbed her peace.
From a point of clear vision, she saw the things themselves so
different, that those questions were no longer relevant. The things
themselves misconceived, naturally no satisfaction can be got from
meditation upon them, or from answers sought to the questions they
suggest. If it be objected that she had no better ground for believing
than before, I answer that, if a man should be drawing life from the
heart of God, it could matter little though he were unable to give a
satisfactory account of the mode of its derivation. That the man lives
is enough. That another denies the existence of any such life save in
the man's self-fooled imagination, is nothing to the man who lives it.
His business is not to raise the dead, but to live--not to convince the
blind that there is such a faculty as sight, but to make good use of his
eyes. He may not have an answer to any one objection raised by the
adopted children of Science--their adopted mother raises none--to that
which he believes; but there is no more need that should trouble
him, than that a child should doubt his bliss at his mother's breast,
because he can not give the chemical composition of the milk he draws:
that in the thing which is the root of the bliss, is rather beyond
chemistry. Is a man not blessed in his honesty, being unable to reason
of the first grounds of property? If there be truth, that truth must be
itself--must exercise its own blessing nature upon the soul which
receives it in loyal understanding--that is, in obedience. A man may
accept no end of things as facts which are not facts, and his mistakes
will not hurt him. He may be unable to receive m