I want to understand, I find
myself listening for what my father would say. Yes, I think I know what
he would say to that: 'Yes; but not till you are fit for it; and then
the difficulty would be to keep out of it. For all that is fit must
come to pass in the land of fitnesses--that is, the land where all is
just as it ought to be.'--That's how I could fancy I heard my father
answer you."

"With that answer I am well content," said Joseph.--"But you don't want
to die, do you, Mary?"

"No; I want to live. And I've got such a blessed plenty of life while
waiting for more, that I am quite content to wait. But I do wonder that
some people I know, should cling to what they call life as they do. It
is not that they are comfortable, for they are constantly complaining
of their sufferings; neither is it from submission to the will of God,
for to hear them talk you must think they imagine themselves hardly
dealt with; they profess to believe the Gospel, and that it is their
only consolation; and yet they speak of death as the one paramount
evil. In the utmost weariness, they yet seem incapable of understanding
the apostle's desire to depart and be with Christ, or of imagining that
to be with him can be at all so good as remaining where they are. One
is driven to ask whether they can be Christians any further than
anxiety to secure whatever the profession may be worth to them will
make them such."

"Don't you think, though," said Joseph, "that some people have a trick
of putting on their clothes wrong side out, and so making themselves
appear less respectable than they are? There was my sister Ann: she
used to go on scolding at people for not believing, all the time she
said they could not believe till God made them--if she had said
_except_ God made them, I should have been with her there!--and then
talking about God so, that I don't see how, even if they could, any one
would have believed in such a monster as she made of him; and then, if
you objected to believe in such a God, she would tell you it was all
from the depravity of your own heart you could not believe in him; and
yet this sister Ann of mine, I know, once went for months without
enough to eat--without more than just kept body and soul together, that
she might feed the children of a neighbor, of whom she knew next to
nothing, when their father lay ill of a fever, and could not provide
for them. And she didn't look for any thanks neither, except it was
from that s