less them! and if not exactly human, are, I think, something more
than _humanish_. Niger gave his soul with his legs to his master's mood
that morning. He was used to hard gallops with him across country, but
this was different; this was plainly a frolic, the first he had had
since he came into his service; and a frolic it should be!

A deeper, loftier, lovelier morning was dawning in Faber's world unseen.
One dread burden was lifted from his being; his fierce pride, his
unmanly cruelty, his spotless selfishness, had not hunted a woman soul
quite into the moldy jaws of the grave; she was given back to him, to
tend, and heal, and love as he had never yet dreamed of loving! Endless
was the dawn that was breaking in him; unutterably sweet the joy. Life
was now to be lived--not endured. How he would nurse the lily he had
bruised and broken! From her own remorse he would shield her. He would
be to her a summer land--a refuge from the wind, a covert from the
tempest. He would be to her like that Saviour for whom, in her wandering
fancy, she had taken him: never more in vaguest thought would he turn
from her. If, in any evil mood, a thought unkind should dare glance back
at her past, he would clasp her the closer to his heart, the more to be
shielded that the shield itself was so poor. Once he laughed aloud as he
rode, to find himself actually wondering whether the story of the
resurrection _could_ be true; for what had the restoration of his Juliet
in common with the out-worn superstition? In any overwhelming joy, he
concluded, the heart leans to lovely marvel.

But there is as much of the reasonable as of to us the marvelous in that
which alone has ever made credible proffer toward the filling of the
gulf whence issue all the groans of humanity. Let Him be tested by the
only test that can, on the supposition of His asserted nature, be
applied to Him--that of obedience to the words He has spoken--words that
commend themselves to every honest nature. Proof of other sort, if it
could be granted, would, leaving our natures where they were, only sink
us in condemnation.

Why should I pursue the story further? and if not here, where better
should I stop? The true story has no end--no end. But endlessly dreary
would the story be, were there no Life living by its own will, no
perfect Will, one with an almighty heart, no Love in whom we live and
move and have our being. Offer me an eternity in all things else after
my own imaginati