“Where did you get your notions of God, father—­those, I mean, that you took with you to the pulpit?”

A year ago even, if he had been asked the same question, he would at once have answered, “From the Word of God;” but now he hesitated, and minutes passed before he began a reply.  For he saw now that it was not from the Bible he had gathered them, whence soever they had come at first.  He pondered and searched—­and found that the real answer eluded him, hiding itself in a time beyond his earliest memory.  It seemed plain, therefore, that the source whence first he began to draw those notions, right or wrong, must be the talk and behavior of the house in which he was born, the words and carriage of his father and mother and their friends.  Next source to that came the sermons he heard on Sundays, and the books given him to read.  The Bible was one of those books, but from the first he read it through the notions with which his mind was already vaguely filled, and with the comments of his superiors around him.  Then followed the books recommended at college, this author and that, and the lectures he heard there upon the attributes of God and the plan of salvation.  The spirit of commerce in the midst of which he had been bred, did not occur to him as one of the sources.

But he had perceived enough.  He opened his mouth and bravely answered her question as well as he could, not giving the Bible as the source from which he had taken any one of the notions of God he had been in the habit of presenting.

“But mind,” he added, “I do not allow that therefore my ideas must be incorrect.  If they be second-hand, they may yet be true.  I do admit that where they have continued only second-hand, they can have been of little value to me.”

“What you allow, then, father,” said Dorothy, “is that you have yourself taken none of your ideas direct from the fountain-head?”

“I am afraid I must confess it, my child—­with this modification, that I have thought many of them over a good deal, and altered some of them not a little to make them fit the molds of truth in my mind.”

“I am so glad, father!” said Dorothy.  “I was positively certain, from what I knew of you—­which is more than any one else in this world, I do believe—­that some of the things you said concerning God never could have risen in your own mind.”

“They might be in the Bible for all that,” said the minister, very anxious to be and speak the right thing.  “A man’s heart is not to be trusted for correct notions of God.”

“Nor yet for correct interpretation of the Bible, I should think,” said Dorothy.

“True, my child,” answered her father with a sigh, “—­except as it be already a Godlike heart.  The Lord says a bramble-bush can not bring forth grapes.”

“The notions you gathered of God from other people, must have come out of their hearts, father?”

“Out of somebody’s heart?”