“Yes” said I, “he was one of my father’s creditors and I have often heard my mother speak of his generosity to her little ones, and I am glad that I have the privilege of helping him.  I immediately went to the bank had a note cashed and I am very glad if I have been of any special service to you.”

“You certainly have been, and I feel that a heavy load had been lifted from my heart.”

Years ago Paul Clifford sowed the seeds of kindness and they were yielding him a harvest of satisfaction.

Chapter IX

Belle Gordon

Belle Gordon was a Christian; she had learned or tried to realize what is meant by the apostle Paul when he said, “Ye are bought with a price.”  To her those words meant the obligation she was under to her heavenly Father, for the goodness and mercy that had surrounded her life, for the patience that had borne with her errors and sins, and above all for the gift of his dear Son, the ever blessed Christ.  Faith to her was not a rich traditional inheritance, a set of formulated opinions, received without investigation, and adopted without reflection.  She could not believe because others did, and however plausible or popular a thing might be she was too conscientious to say she believed it if she did not, and when she became serious on the subject of religion it was like entering into a wilderness of doubt and distress.  She had been taught to look upon God, more as the great and dreadful God, than as the tender loving Father of his human children, and so strong was the power of association, that she found it hard to believe that God is good, and yet until she could believe this there seemed to be no resting place for her soul; but in course of time the shadows were lifted from her life.  Faith took the place of doubting, and in the precious promises of the Bible she felt that her soul had found a safe and sure anchorage.  If others believed because they had never doubted, she believed because she had doubted and her doubts had been dispelled by the rays of heaven, and believing, she had entered into rest.  Feeling that she was bought with a price, she realized that she was not her own, but the captive of Divine Love, and that her talents were not given her to hide beneath a bushel or to use for merely selfish enjoyments.  That her time was not her own to be frittered away by the demands of fashion or to be spent in unavailing regrets.  Every reform which had for its object the lessening of human misery, or the increase of human happiness, found in her an earnest ally.  On the subject of temperance she was terribly in earnest.  Every fiber of her heart responded to its onward movement.  There was no hut or den where human beings congregated that she felt was too vile or too repulsive to enter, if by so doing she could help lift some fallen soul out of the depths of sin and degradation.  While some doubted the soundness of her religious opinions,