“Just so,” answered Dorothy.

“Go on, my child,” said her father.  “Let me understand clearly your drift.”

“I have heard Mr. Wingfold say,” returned Dorothy, “that however men may have been driven to form their ideas of God before Christ came, no man can, with thorough honesty, take the name of a Christian, whose ideas of the Father of men are gathered from any other field than the life, thought, words, deeds, of the only Son of that Father.  He says it is not from the Bible as a book that we are to draw our ideas of God, but from the living Man into whose presence that book brings us, Who is alive now, and gives His spirit that they who read about Him may understand what kind of being He is, and why He did as He did, and know Him, in some possible measure, as He knows Himself.—­I can only repeat the lesson like a child.”

“I suspect,” returned the minister, “that I have been greatly astray.  But after this, we will seek our Father together, in our Brother, Jesus Christ.”

It was the initiation of a daily lesson together in the New Testament, which, while it drew their hearts closer to each other, drew them, with growing delight, nearer and nearer to the ideal of humanity, Jesus Christ, in whom shines the glory of its Father.

A man may look another in the face for a hundred years and not know him.  Men have looked Jesus Christ in the face, and not known either Him or his Father.  It was needful that He should appear, to begin the knowing of Him, but speedily was His visible presence taken away, that it might not become, as assuredly it would have become, a veil to hide from men the Father of their spirits.  Do you long for the assurance of some sensible sign?  Do you ask why no intellectual proof is to be had?  I tell you that such would but delay, perhaps altogether impair for you, that better, that best, that only vision, into which at last your world must blossom—­such a contact, namely, with the heart of God Himself, such a perception of His being, and His absolute oneness with you, the child of His thought, the individuality softly parted from His spirit, yet living still and only by His presence and love, as, by its own radiance, will sweep doubt away forever.  Being then in the light and knowing it, the lack of intellectual proof concerning that which is too high for it, will trouble you no more than would your inability to silence a metaphysician who declared that you had no real existence.  It is for the sake of such vision as God would give that you are denied such vision as you would have.  The Father of our spirits is not content that we should know Him as we now know each other.  There is a better, closer, nearer than any human way of knowing, and to that He is guiding us across all the swamps of our unteachableness, the seas of our faithlessness, the desert of our ignorance.  It is so very hard that we should have to wait for that which we can not yet receive?  Shall we complain