“Yes, he is, too,—­I know he is,” said Lizzy, impetuously.  “The very way he takes up my children and hugs them and kisses them shows that he longs for a home and children of his own.”

“I think not,” replied Mercy.  “It is all part of the perpetual overflow of his benevolence.  He can’t pass by a living creature, if it is only a dog, without a desire to give it a moment’s happiness.  Of happiness for himself he never thinks, because he is on a plane above happiness,—­a plane of perpetual joy.”  Mercy hesitated, paused, and then went on, “I don’t mean to be irreverent, but I could never think of his needing personal ministrations to his own happiness, any more than I could think of God’s needing them.  I think he is on a plane as absolutely above such needs as God is.  Not so high above, but as absolutely.”

“How are you so sure God is above it?” said Lizzy, timidly.  “I can’t conceive of God’s being happy if nobody loved him.”

Mercy was startled by these words from Lizzy, who rarely questioned and never philosophized.  She opened her lips to reply with a hasty reiteration of her first sentiment, but the words died even before they were spoken, arrested by her sudden consciousness of the possibility of a grand truth underlying Lizzy’s instinct.  If that were so, did it not lie out far beyond every fact in life, include and control them all, as the great truth of gravitation outlies and embraces the physical universe?  Did God so need as well as so love the world, that he gave his only begotten Son for it?  Is this what it meant to be “one with God”?  Then, if the great, illimitable heart of God thus yearns for the love of his creatures, the greater the heart of a human being, the more must he yearn for a fulness of love, a completion of the cycle of bonds and joys for which he was made.  From these simple words of a loving woman’s heart had flashed a great light into Mercy’s comprehension of God.  She was silent for some moments; then she said solemnly,—­

“That was a great thought you had then, Lizzy.  I never saw it in that light before.  I shall never forget it.  Perhaps you are right about the Parson, too.  I wonder if there is any thing he does long for?  If there is, I would die to give it to him,—­I know that.”

It was very near Lizzy’s lips to say, “If you would live to give it to him, it would be more to the purpose, perhaps;” but she wisely forbore and they parted in silence, Mercy absorbed in thinking of this new view of God’s relation to man, and Lizzy hoping that Mercy was thinking of Parson Dorrance’s need of a greater happiness than he possessed.