room habitable for her.  It was dreadful to think of her being there alone at night, but her trouble was too great to leave much room for fear—­and anyhow there was no choice.  So while Juliet slept, she set about cleaning it, and hard work she found it.  Great also was the labor afterward, when, piece by piece, at night or in the early morning, she carried thither every thing necessary to make abode in it clean and warm and soft.

The labor of love is its own reward, but Dorothy received much more.  For, in the fresh impulse and freedom born of this service, she soon found, not only that she thought better and more clearly on the points that troubled her, but that, thus spending herself, she grew more able to believe there must be One whose glory is perfect ministration.  Also, her anxious concentration of thought upon the usurping thoughts of others, with its tendency to diseased action in the logical powers, was thereby checked, much to her relief.  She was not finding an atom of what is called proof; but when the longing heart finds itself able to hope that the perfect is the fact, that the truth is alive, that the lovely is rooted in eternal purpose, it can go on without such proof as belongs to a lower stratum of things, and can not be had in these.  When we rise into the mountain air, we require no other testimony than that of our lungs that we are in a healthful atmosphere.  We do not find it necessary to submit it to a quantitative analysis; we are content that we breathe with joy, that we grow in strength, become lighter-hearted and better-tempered.  Truth is a very different thing from fact; it is the loving contact of the soul with spiritual fact, vital and potent.  It does its work in the soul independently of all faculty or qualification there for setting it forth or defending it.  Truth in the inward parts is a power, not an opinion.  It were as poor a matter as any held by those who deny it, if it had not its vitality in itself, if it depended upon any buttressing of other and lower material.

How should it be otherwise?  If God be so near as the very idea of Him necessitates, what other availing proof of His existence can there be, than such awareness as must come of the developing relation between Him and us?  The most satisfying of intellectual proofs, if such were to be had, would be of no value.  God would be no nearer to us for them all.  They would bring about no blossoming of the mighty fact.  While He was in our very souls, there would yet lie between Him and us a gulf of misery, of no-knowledge.

Peace is for those who do the truth, not those who opine it.  The true man troubled by intellectual doubt, is so troubled unto further health and growth.  Let him be alive and hopeful, above all obedient, and he will be able to wait for the deeper content which must follow with completer insight.  Men may say such a man but deceives himself, that there is nothing of the kind he pleases himself with imagining; but this is at least worth reflecting upon—­that while the man who aspires fears he may be deceiving himself, it is the man who does not aspire who asserts that he is.  One day the former may be sure, and the latter may cease to deny, and begin to doubt.