The holidays came, and Juliet took advantage of them to escape from what had begun to be a bondage to her—­the daily intercourse with people who disapproved of the man she loved.  In her thoughts even she took no intellectual position against them with regard to what she called doctrine, and Faber superstition.  Her father had believed as they did; she clung to his memory; perhaps she believed as he did; she could not tell.  There was time yet wherein to make up her mind.  She had certainly believed so once, she said to herself, and she might so believe again.  She would have been at first highly offended, but the next moment a little pleased at being told that in reality she had never believed one whit more than Faber, that she was at present indeed incapable of believing.  Probably she would have replied, “Then wherein am I to blame?” But although a woman who sits with her child in her arms in the midst of her burning house, half asleep, and half stifled and dazed with the fierce smoke, may not be to blame, certainly the moment she is able to excuse herself she is bound to make for the door.  So long as men do not feel that they are in a bad condition and in danger of worse, the message of deliverance will sound to them as a threat.  Yea, the offer of absolute well-being upon the only possible conditions of the well-being itself, must, if heard at all, rouse in them a discomfort whose cause they attribute to the message, not to themselves; and immediately they will endeavor to justify themselves in disregarding it.  There are those doing all they can to strengthen themselves in unbelief, who, if the Lord were to appear plainly before their eyes, would tell Him they could not help it, for He had not until then given them ground enough for faith, and when He left them, would go on just as before, except that they would speculate and pride themselves on the vision.  If men say, “We want no such deliverance,” then the Maker of them must either destroy them as vile things for whose existence He is to Himself accountable, or compel them to change.  If they say, “We choose to be destroyed,” He, as their Maker, has a choice in the matter too.  Is He not free to say, “You can not even slay yourselves, and I choose that you shall know the death of living without Me; you shall learn to choose to live indeed.  I choose that you shall know what I know to be good”?  And however much any individual consciousness may rebel, surely the individual consciousness which called that other into being, and is the Father of that being, fit to be such because of Himself He is such, has a right to object that by rebellion His creature should destroy the very power by which it rebels, and from a being capable of a divine freedom by partaking of the divine nature, should make of itself the merest slave incapable of will of any sort!  Is it a wrong to compel His creature to soar aloft into the ether of its origin, and find its deepest, its only true self?  It is God’s knowing choice of life against man’s ignorant choice of death.