Had she said so to the curate, he would have told her that the only way to be absolutely certain of God, is to see Him as He is, and for that we must first become absolutely pure in heart.  For this He is working in us, and perfection and vision will flash together.  Were conviction possible without that purity and that vision, I imagine it would work evil in us, fix in their imperfection our ideas, notions, feelings, concerning God, give us for His glory the warped reflection of our cracked and spotted and rippled glass, and so turn our worship into an idolatry.

Dorothy was a rather little woman, with lightish auburn hair, a large and somewhat heavy forehead, fine gray eyes, small well-fashioned features, a fair complexion on a thin skin, and a mouth that would have been better in shape if it had not so often been informed of trouble.  With this trouble their poverty had nothing to do; that did not weigh upon her a straw.  She was proud to share her father’s lot, and could have lived on as little as any laboring woman with seven children.  She was indeed a trifle happier since her father’s displacement, and would have been happier still had he found it within the barest possibility to decline the annuity allotted him; for, as far back as she could remember, she had been aware of a dislike to his position—­partly from pride it may be, but partly also from a sense of the imperfection of the relation between him and his people—­one in which love must be altogether predominant, else is it hateful—­and chiefly because of a certain sordid element in the community—­a vile way of looking at sacred things through the spectacles of mammon, more evident—­I only say more evident—­in dissenting than in Church of England communities, because of the pressure of expenses upon them.  Perhaps the impossibility of regarding her father’s church with reverence, laid her mind more open to the cause of her trouble—­such doubts, namely, as an active intellect, nourished on some of the best books, and disgusted with the weak fervor of others rated high in her hearing, had been suggesting for years before any words of Faber’s reached her.  The more her devout nature longed to worship, the more she found it impossible to worship that which was presented for her love and adoration.  See believed entirely in her father, but she knew he could not meet her doubts, for many things made it plain that he had never had such himself.  An ordinary mind that has had doubts, and has encountered and overcome them, or verified and found them the porters of the gates of truth, may be profoundly useful to any mind similarly assailed; but no knowledge of books, no amount of logic, no degree of acquaintance with the wisest conclusions of others, can enable a man who has not encountered skepticism in his own mind, to afford any essential help to those caught in the net.  For one thing, such a man will be incapable of conceiving the possibility that the net may be the net of The Fisher of Men.