“That is not exactly what you mean, for that would be never to know any thing more.  But the highest you have in view is immeasurably below what Christianity has always demanded of its followers.”

“But has never got from them, and never will.  Look at the wars, the hatreds, to which your gospel has given rise!  Look at Calvin and poor Servetus!  Look at the strifes and divisions of our own day!  Look at the religious newspapers!”

“All granted.  It is a chaos, the motions of whose organization must be strife.  The spirit of life is at war with the spasmatical body of death.  If Christianity be not still in the process of development, it is the saddest of all failures.”

“The fact is, Wingfold, your prophet would have been King of the race if He had not believed in a God.”

“I dare not speak the answer that rises to my lips,” said Wingfold.  “But there is more truth in what you say than you think, and more of essential lie also.  My answer is, that the faith of Jesus in His God and Father is, even now, saving me, setting me free from my one horror, selfishness; making my life an unspeakable boon to me, letting me know its roots in the eternal and perfect; giving me such love to my fellow, that I trust at last to love him as Christ has loved me.  But I do not expect you to understand me.  He in whom I believe said that a man must be born again to enter into the kingdom of Heaven.”

The doctor laughed.

“You then are one of the double-born, Wingfold?” he said.

“I believe, I think, I hope so,” replied the curate, very gravely.

“And you, Mr. Bevis?”

“I don’t know.  I wish.  I doubt,” answered the rector, with equal solemnity.

“Oh, never fear!” said Faber, with a quiet smile, and rising, left the clergymen together.

But what a morning it was that came up after the storm!  All night the lightning had been flashing itself into peace, and gliding further and further away.  Bellowing and growling the thunder had crept with it; but long after it could no more be heard, the lightning kept gleaming up, as if from a sea of flame behind the horizon.  The sun brought a glorious day, and looked larger and mightier than before.  To Helen, as she gazed eastward from her window, he seemed ascending his lofty pulpit to preach the story of the day named after him—­the story of the Sun-day; the rising again in splendor of the darkened and buried Sun of the universe, with whom all the worlds and all their hearts and suns arose.  A light steam was floating up from the grass, and the raindrops were sparkling everywhere.  The day had arisen from the bosom of the night; peace and graciousness from the bosom of the storm; she herself from the grave of her sleep, over which had lain the turf of the darkness; and all was fresh life and new hope.  And through it all, reviving afresh with every sign of Nature’s universal law of birth, was the consciousness that her life, her own self,